Class IPi 
 
 BookJ:i\ACes 
 
 Copyright N"_13 \ 3 
 
 CJOEOUGHI 0£H)Sm 
 
Cobb^s Bi I /-of- Fare 
 
Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 
 
 By 
 
 Irvin S, Cobb 
 
 Author of 
 
 ^^The Escape of Mr, Trimm,^' ^^Back Home,'*'* 
 
 ''Cobb' s Anatomy,'*'' etc. 
 
 Illustrated by 
 Peter Newell and James Preston 
 
 New York 
 George H. L>oran Company 
 
Copyright, 1911-1912. 
 By Thk Curtis Publishing Company 
 
 Copyright, 1913, 
 By Gkorgk H. Doran Company 
 
 , (0 i-v'- 
 
 ^1 6 
 
Cobb''s Bill-of-Fare 
 
 To 
 
 R. H. Davis 
 
 (Not Richard Harding— 
 The Other One) 
 
Cobb'^s Bill-of-Fare 
 
 AS FOLLOWS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. VlTTLES 13 
 
 II. Music 47 
 
 III. Art .81 
 
 IV. Sport 113 
 
Cobb^s Bill-of-Fare 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 PAGE 
 ''I now greatly desire to eat some regular food." 15 L/ 
 
 ''Those who in the goodness of their hearts may 
 undertake a search for the sucking pig." 35 !/ 
 
 "Where do you find the percentage of dyspeptics 
 running highest ?" 41 \X 
 
 "She tries to tear all its front teeth out with her 
 bare hands." 5i v/' 
 
 "Ro-hocked in the cra-hadle of the da-heep, 
 I la-hay me down in pe-heace to sa-leep!" 57 i^ 
 
 "Shem undoubtedly sang it when the animals were 
 hungry." 61 ^ 
 
 "And I enjoy it more than words can tell!". ... 67^ 
 
 "We looked in vain for the kind of pictures that 
 mother used to make and father used to buy." 83 ^^ 
 
 "The inscrutable smile of a saleslady would make 
 Mona Lisa seem a mere amateur." 93 ^-^ 
 
 "A person who for reasons best known to the po- 
 lice has not been locked up." 97 ^ 
 
Cobb'^s Bill-of-Fare 
 
 ILL USTRA T IONS— Continued 
 
 PAGE 
 
 ''Collision between two heavenly bodies or prema- 
 ture explosion of a custard pie." 103 
 
 ^'Everything you catch is second-hand." iig 
 
 *'He could beat me climbing, but at panting I had 
 him licked to a whisper." 125 v 
 
 **She was not much larger than a soapdish." 137 • 
 
 ''Think of being laid face downward firmly across 
 a sinewy knee and beaten forty-love with one of 
 those hard catgut rackets!" I43 
 
Cobb^s Bill-of-Fare 
 
 FITTLES 
 
CobFs Bill-of-Fare 
 
 Vittles 
 
 UPON a certain gladsome occasion a 
 certain man went into a certain res- 
 taurant in a certain large city, being 
 imbued with the idea that he desired a cer- 
 tain kind of food. Expense was with him no 
 object. The coming of the holidays had 
 turned his thoughts backward to the care- 
 free days of boyhood and he longed for the 
 holidaying provender of his youth with a 
 longing that was as wide as a river and as 
 deep as a well. 
 
 ^^Me, I have tried it all/' he said to him- 
 self. ^^I have been down the line on this 
 eating proposition from alphabet soup to 
 animal crackers. I know the whole thing, 
 from the nine-dollar, nine-course banquet, 
 with every course bathed freely in the same 
 kind of sauce and tasting exactly like all the 
 other courses, to the quick lunch, where the 
 
14 Cobb's Bill'of'Fare 
 
 only difiference between clear soup and beef 
 broth is that if you want the beef broth the 
 waiter sticks his thumb into the clear soup 
 and brings it along. 
 
 ^^I have feasted copiously at grand hotels 
 where they charge you corkage on your own 
 hot-water bottle, and I have dallied frugally 
 with the forty-cent table d'hote with wine, 
 when the victuals were the product of the 
 well-known Sam Brothers — Flot and Jet — 
 and the wine tasted like the stuff that was 
 left over from graining the woodwork for a 
 mahogany finish. 
 
 ^^I now greatly desire to eat some regu- 
 lar food, and if such a thing be humanly 
 possible I should also prefer to eat it in 
 silence unbroken except by the noises I make 
 myself. I have eaten meals backed up so 
 close to the orchestra that the leader and I 
 were practically wearing the same pair of 
 suspenders. I have been howled at by a 
 troupe of Sicilian brigands armed with their 
 national weapons — the garlic and the guitar. 
 I have been tortured by mechanical pianos 
 and automatic melodeons, and I crave quiet. 
 But in any event I want food. I cannot 
 
T^m^^ 
 
 " I NOW GREATLY DESIRE TO EAT 
 SOME REGULAR FOOD " 
 
Cobb^s Bill'of'Fare 17 
 
 spare the time to travel nine hundred miles 
 to get it, and I must, therefore, take a chance 
 here." 
 
 So, as above stated, he entered this certain 
 restaurant and seated himself; and as soon 
 as the Hungarian string band had desisted 
 from playing an Italian air orchestrated by 
 a German composer he got the attention of 
 an omnibus, who was Greek, and the bus 
 enlisted the assistance of a side waiter, he 
 being French, and the side waiter in time 
 brought to him the head waiter, regarding 
 whom I violate no confidence in stating that 
 he was Swiss. The man I have been quoting 
 then drew from his pockets a number of 
 bank notes and piled them up slowly, one by 
 one, alongside his plate. Beholding the de- 
 nominations of these bills the head waiter 
 with difficulty restrained himself from kiss- 
 ing the hungry man upon the bald spot on 
 his head. The sight of a large bill inva- 
 riably quickens the better nature of a head 
 waiter. 
 
 ^^Now, then," said the enhungered one, ^^I 
 would have speech with you. I desire food 
 — food suitable for a free-born American 
 
18 Cobb's Bill'of-Fare 
 
 Stomach on such a day as this. No, you 
 needn't wave that menu at me. I can shut 
 my eyes and remember the words and music 
 of every menu that ever was printed. I don't 
 know what half of it means because I am no 
 court interpreter, but I can remember it. I 
 can sing it, and if I had my clarinet here I 
 could play it. Heave the menu over the side 
 of the boat and listen to me. What I want is 
 just plain food — food like mother used to 
 make and mother's fair-haired boy used to 
 eat. We will start off with turkey — turkey 
 a la America, understand; turkey that is all 
 to the Hail Columbia, Happy Land. With 
 it I want some cramberry sauce — no, not 
 cranberry, I guess I know it's real name — 
 some cramberry sauce; and some mashed 
 potatoes — mashed with enthusiasm and 
 nothing else, if you can arrange it — and 
 some scalloped oysters and maybe a few 
 green peas. Likewise I want a large cup of 
 coffee right along with these things — not 
 served afterward in a misses' and children's 
 sized cup, but along with the dinner." 
 ^^Salad?" suggested the head waiter, re- 
 
Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 19 
 
 luctantly withdrawing his fascinated vision 
 from the pile of bills. ^^Salad?" he said. 
 
 ^^No salad," said the homesick stranger, 
 ^^not unless you could chop me up some 
 lettuce and pow^der it with granulated sugar 
 and pour a little vinegar over it and bring it 
 in to me with the rest of the grub. Where 
 I was raised we always had chewing tobacco 
 for the salad course, anyhow." 
 
 The head waiter's whole being recoiled 
 from the bare prospect. He seemed on the 
 point of swooning, but looked at the money 
 and came to. 
 
 ^^Dessert?" he added, poising a pencil. 
 
 ^Well," said the man reflectively, ^^I don't 
 suppose you could fix me up some ambrosia 
 — that's sliced oranges with grated cocoanut 
 on top. And in this establishment I doubt 
 if you know anything about boiled custard, 
 with egg kisses bobbing round it and sunken 
 reefs of sponge cake underneath. So I guess 
 I'd better compromise on some plum pud- 
 ding; but mind you, not the imported Eng- 
 lish plum pudding. English plum pud- 
 ding is not a food, it's a missile, and when 
 eaten it is a concealed deadly weapon. I 
 
20 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 
 
 want an American plum pudding. Mark 
 well my words — an American plum pud- 
 ding. 
 
 ^'And/' he concluded, ^4f you can bring 
 me these things, just so, without any strange 
 African sauces or weird Oriental fixings or 
 trans-Atlantic goo stirred into them or 
 poured on to them or breathed upon them, I 
 shall be very grateful to you, and in addi- 
 tion I shall probably make you independ- 
 ently wealthy for life.'' 
 
 It was quite evident that the head waiter 
 regarded him as a lunatic — perhaps only a 
 lunatic in a mild form and undoubtedly one 
 cushioned with ready money — but neverthe- 
 less a lunatic. Yet he indicated by a stately 
 bow that he would do the bjest he could 
 under the circumstances, and withdrew to 
 take the matter up with the house com- 
 mittee. 
 
 ^^Now this," said the man, ^^is going to be 
 something like. To be sure the table is not 
 set right. As T remember how things used 
 to look at home there should be a mustache 
 cup at Uncle Hiram's plate, so he could 
 drink his floating island without getting his 
 
Cobb's BiU-of-Fare 21 
 
 cream-separators mussy, and there ought to 
 be a vinegar cruet at one end and a silver 
 cake basket at the other and about nine kinds 
 of pickles and jellies scattered round ; and in 
 the center of the table there should be a 
 winter bouquet — a nice, hard, firm, dark red 
 winter bouquet — containing, among other 
 things, a sheaf of wheat, a dried cockscomb 
 and a couple of oak galls. Yet if the real 
 provender is forthcoming I can put up with 
 the absence of the proper settings and deco- 
 rations." 
 
 He had ample leisure for these thoughts, 
 because, as you yourself may have noticed, 
 in a large restaurant when you order any- 
 thing that is out of the ordinary — which 
 m.eans anything that is ordinary — it takes 
 time to put the proposition through the 
 proper channels. The waiter lays your ap- 
 plication before the board of governors, and 
 after the board of governors has disposed 
 of things coming under the head of unfin- 
 ished business and good of the order it takes 
 a vote, and if nobody blackballs you the 
 treasurer is instructed to draw a warrant and 
 
22 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 
 
 the secretary engrosses appropriate resolu- 
 tions, and your order goes to the cook. 
 
 But finally this man's food arrived. And 
 he looked at it and sniffed at it daintily — 
 like a reluctant patient going under the 
 ether — and he tasted of it; and then he put 
 his face down in his hands and burst into 
 low, poignant moans. For it wasn't the real 
 thing at all. The stuffing of the turkey 
 defied chemical analysis ; and, moreover, the 
 turkey before serving should have been 
 dusted with talcum powder and fitted with 
 dress-shields, it being plainly a crowning 
 work of the art preservative — meaning by 
 that the cold-storage packing and pickling 
 industry. And if you can believe what Doc- 
 tor Wiley says — and if you can't believe the 
 man who has dedicated his life to warning 
 you against the things which you put in your 
 mouth to steal away your membranes, whom 
 can you believe? — the cranberry sauce be- 
 longed in a paint store and should have been 
 labeled Easter-egg dye, and the green peas 
 were green with Paris green. 
 
 As for the plum pudding, it was one of 
 those burglar-proof, enamel-finished prod- 
 
Cobb's Bill'of-Fare 23 
 
 ucts that prove the British to be indeed a 
 hardy race. And, of course, they hadn't 
 brought him his coffee along with his din- 
 ner, the management having absolutely re- 
 fused to permit of a thing so revolutionary 
 and unprecedented and one so calculated to 
 upset the whole organization. And at the 
 last minute the racial instincts of the cook 
 had triumphed over his instructions, and he 
 had impartially imbued everything with his 
 native brews, gravies, condiments, season- 
 ings, scents, preservatives, embalming fluids, 
 liquid extracts and perfumeries. So, after 
 weeping unrestrainedly for a time, the man 
 paid the check, which was enormous, and 
 tipped everybody freely and went away in 
 despair and, I think, committed suicide on 
 an empty stomach. At any rate, he came 
 no more. The moral of this fable is, there- 
 fore, that it can't be done. 
 
 But why can't it be done? I ask you 
 that and pause for a reply. Why can't it be 
 done? It is conceded, I take it, that in the 
 beginning our cookery was essentially of the 
 soil. Of course when our forebears came 
 over they brought along with them certain 
 
24 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 
 
 inherent and inherited Old World notions 
 touching on the preparation of raw pro- 
 vender in order to make it suitable for 
 human consumption; but these doubtless 
 were soon fused and amalgamated with the 
 cooking and eating customs of the original 
 or copper-colored inhabitants. The differ- 
 ence in environment and climate and condi- 
 tions, together with the amplified wealth of 
 native supplies, did the rest. In Merrie 
 England, as all travelers know, there are but 
 three staple vegetables — to wit, boiled pota- 
 toes, boiled turnips, and a second helping of 
 the boiled potatoes. But here, spread be- 
 fore the gladdened vision of the newly 
 arrived, and his to pick and choose from, 
 was a boundless expanse of new foodstuffs — 
 birds, beasts and fishes, fruits, vegetables 
 and berries, roots, herbs and sprouts. He 
 furnished the demand and the soil was there 
 competently with the supply. 
 
 We owe a lot to our red brother. From 
 him we derived a knowledge of the values 
 and attractions of the succulent clam, and 
 he didn't cook a clam so that it tasted like 
 O'Somebody's Heels of New Rubber either. 
 
Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 25 
 
 From the Indian we got the original idea 
 of the shore dinner and the barbecue, the 
 planked shad and the hoecake. By follow- 
 ing in his footsteps we learned about succo- 
 tash and hominy. He conferred upon us 
 the inestimable boon of his maize — hence 
 corn bread, corn fritters, fried corn and 
 roasting ears; also his pumpkin and his 
 sweet potato — hence the pumpkin pie of the 
 North and its blood brother of the South, 
 the sweet-potato pie. From the Indian we 
 got the tomato— let some agriculturist cor- 
 rect me if I err — though the oldest inhabi- 
 tant can still remember when we called it a 
 love apple and regarded it as poisonous. 
 From him we inherited the crook-neck 
 squash and the okra gumbo and the rattle- 
 snake watermelon and the wild goose plum, 
 and many another delectable thing. 
 
 So, out of all this and from all this our 
 ancestors evolved cults of cookery which, 
 though they differed perhaps as between 
 themselves, were all purely American and 
 all absolutely unapproachable. France lent 
 a strain to New Orleans cooking and Spain 
 did the same for California. Scrapple was 
 
26 Cobb^s Bill-of-Fare 
 
 Pennsylvania's, terrapin was Maryland's, 
 the baked bean was Massachusetts', and 
 along with a few other things spoon-bread 
 ranked as Kentucky's fairest product. In- 
 diana had dishes of which Texas wotted not, 
 nor kilowatted either, this being before the 
 day of electrical cooking contrivances. Vir- 
 ginia, mother of presidents and of natural- 
 born cooks, could give and take cookery 
 notions from Vermont. Likewise, this con- 
 dition developed the greatest collection of 
 cooks, white and black alike, that the world 
 has ever seen. They were inspired cooks, 
 needing no notes, no printed score to guide 
 them. They could burn up all the cook- 
 books that ever were printed and still cook. 
 They cooked by ear. 
 
 And perhaps they still do. If so, may 
 Heaven bless and preserve them! Some 
 carping critics may contend that our grand- 
 fathers and grandmothers lacked the proper 
 knowledge of how to serve a meal in courses. 
 Let 'em. Let 'em carp until they're as black 
 in the face as a German carp. For real food 
 never yet needed any vain pomp and cir- 
 cumstance to make it attractive. It stands 
 
Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 21 
 
 on its own merits, not on the scenic effects. 
 When you really have something to eat you 
 don't need to worry trying to think up the 
 French for napkin. Perhaps there may be 
 some among us here on this continent who, 
 on beholding a finger-bowl for the first time, 
 glanced down into its pellucid depths and 
 wondered what had become of the gold fish. 
 There may have been a few who needed a 
 laprobe drawn up well over the chest when 
 eating grapefruit for the first time. Indeed, 
 there may have been a few even whose exe- 
 cution in regard to consuming soup out of 
 the side of the spoon was a thing calculated 
 to remind you of a bass tuba player empty- 
 ing his instrument at the end of a hard street 
 parade. 
 
 But I doubt it. These stories were prob- 
 ably the creations of the professional hu- 
 morists in the first place. Those who are 
 given real food to eat may generally be 
 depended upon to do the eating without 
 undue noise or excitement. The gross per- 
 son featured in the comic papers, who con- 
 sumes his food with such careless abandon 
 that it is hard to tell whether the front 
 
28 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 
 
 of his vest was originally drygoods or 
 groceries, either doesn't exist in real life or 
 else never had any food that was worth 
 eating, and it didn't make any difference 
 whether he put it on the inside of his chest 
 or the outside. 
 
 Only a short time ago I saw a whole 
 turkey served for a Thanksgiving feast at a 
 large restaurant. It vaunted itself as a 
 regular turkey and was extensively charged 
 for as such on the bill. It wasn't though. 
 It was an ancient and a shabby ruin — a 
 genuine antique if ever there was one, with 
 those high-polished knobs all down the 
 front, like an old-fashioned highboy, and 
 Chippendale legs. To make up for its 
 manifold imperfections the chef back in the 
 kitchen had crowded it full of mysterious 
 laboratory products and then varnished it 
 over with a waterproof glaze or shellac, 
 which rendered it durable without making 
 it edible. Just to see that turkey w^as a thing 
 calculated to set the mind harking backward 
 to places and times when there had been real 
 turkeys to eat. 
 
 Back yonder in the old days we were a 
 
Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 29 
 
 simple and a husky race, weren't we? Boys 
 and girls were often fourteen years old* be- 
 fore they knew oysters didn't grow in a can. 
 Even grown people knew nothing, except by 
 vague hearsay, of cheese so runny that if you 
 didn't care to eat it you could drink it. 
 There was one traveled person then living 
 who was reputed to have once gone up to 
 the North somewhere and partaken of a 
 watermelon that had had a plug cut in it 
 and a whole quart of imported real Paris — • 
 France — champagne wine poured in the 
 plugged place. This, however, was gener- 
 ally regarded as a gross exaggeration of the 
 real facts. 
 
 But there was a kind of a turkey that they 
 used to serve in those parts on high state 
 occasions. It was a turkey that in his 
 younger days ranged wild in the woods and 
 ate the mast. At the frosted coming of the 
 fall they penned him up and fed him grain 
 to put an edge of fat on his lean; and then 
 fate descended upon him and he died the 
 ordained death of his kind. But, oh! the 
 glorious resurrection when he reached the 
 table! You sat with weapons poised and 
 
30 Cobb's Bill'of-Fare 
 
 ready — a knife in the right hand, a fork in 
 the left and a spoon handy — and looked 
 upon him and watered at the mouth until 
 you had riparian rights. 
 
 His breast had the vast brown fullness 
 that you see in pictures of old Flemish 
 friars. His legs were like rounded col- 
 umns and unadorned, moreover, with those 
 superfluous paper frills; and his tail was 
 half as big as your hand and it protruded 
 grandly, like the rudder of a treasure-ship, 
 and had flanges of sizzled richness on it. 
 Here was no pindling fowl that had taken 
 the veil and lived the cloistered life; here 
 was no wiredrawn and trained-down cross- 
 country turkey, but a lusty giant of a bird 
 that would have been a cassowary, probably, 
 or an emu, if he had lived, his bosom a 
 white mountain of lusciousness, his interior 
 a Golconda and not a Golgotha. At the 
 touch of the steel his skin crinkled delicately 
 and feU away; his tissues flaked ofif in tender 
 strips; and from him arose a bouquet of 
 smells more varied and more delectable 
 than anything ever turned out by the justly 
 celebrated Islands of Spice, It was a sin 
 
Cobb^^s Bill-of-Fare 31 
 
 to cut him up and a crime to leave him be. 
 
 He had not been stuffed by a taxidermist 
 or a curio collector, but by the master hand 
 of one of those natural-born home cooks — 
 stuffed with corn bread dressing that had 
 oysters or chestnuts or pecans stirred into it 
 until it was a veritable mine of goodness, 
 and this stuffing had caught up and retained 
 all the delectable drippings and essences of 
 his being, and his flesh had the savor of the 
 things upon which he had lived — the sweet 
 acorns and beechnuts of the woods, the but- 
 tery goobers of the plowed furrows, the 
 shattered corn of the horse yard. 
 
 Nor was he a turkey to be eaten by the 
 mere slice. At least, nobody ever did eat 
 him that way — you ate him by rods, poles 
 and perches, by townships and by sections — 
 ate him from his neck to his hocks and back 
 again, from his throat latch to his crupper, 
 from center to circumference, and from pit 
 to dome, finding something better all the 
 time; and when his frame was mainly de- 
 nuded and loomed upon the platter like a 
 scaffolding, you dug into his cadaver and 
 found there small hidden joys and titbits. 
 
32 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 
 
 You ate until the pressure of your waistband 
 stopped your watch and your vest flew open 
 like an engine-house door and your stomach 
 was pushing you over on your back and 
 sitting upon you, and then you half closed 
 your eyes and dreamed of cold-sliced turkey 
 for supper, turkey hash for breakfast the 
 next morning and turkey soup made of the 
 bones of his carcass later on. For each state 
 of that turkey would be greater than the 
 last. 
 
 There still must be such turkeys as this 
 one somewhere. Somewhere in this broad 
 and favored land, untainted by notions of 
 foreign cookery and unvisited by New York 
 and Philadelphia people who insist on call- 
 ing the waiter garqon, when his name is 
 Gabe or Roscoe, there must be spots where 
 a turkey is a turkey and not a cold-storage 
 corpse. And this being the case, why don't 
 those places advertise, so that by the hun- 
 dreds and the thousands men who live in 
 hotels might come from all over in the 
 fall of the year and just naturally eat 
 themselves to death? 
 
 Perchance also the sucking pig of the 
 
Cobb^^s Bill'of'Fare 33 
 
 good old days still prevails in certain shel- 
 tered vales and glades. He, too, used to 
 have his vogue at holiday times. Because 
 the gods did love him he died young — died 
 young and tender and unspoiled by the 
 world — and then everybody else did love 
 him too. For he was barbered twice over 
 and shampooed to a gracious pinkiness by 
 a skilled hand, and then, being basted, he 
 was roasted whole with a smile on his lips 
 and an apple in his mouth, and sometimes a 
 bow of red ribbon on his tail, and his juices 
 from within ran down his smooth flanks and 
 burnished him to perfection. His interior 
 was crammed with stuff and things and 
 truck and articles of that general nature — 
 I'm no cooking expert to go into further 
 particulars, but whatever the stuffing was, it 
 was appropriate and timely and suitable, I 
 know that, and there was onion in it and 
 savory herbs, and it was exactly what a 
 sucking pig needed to bring out all that was 
 good and noble in him. 
 
 You began operations by taking a man's- 
 size slice out of his midriff, bringing with it 
 a couple of pinky little rib bones, and then 
 
34 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 
 
 you ate your way through him and along 
 him in either direction or both directions 
 until you came out into the open and fell 
 back satiated and filled with the sheer joy 
 of living, and greased to the eyebrows. I 
 should like to ask at this time if there is any 
 section where this brand of sucking pig 
 remains reasonably common and readily 
 available? In these days of light house- 
 keeping and kitchenettes and gas stoves and 
 electric cookers, is there any oven big 
 enough to contain him? Does he still linger 
 on or is he now known in his true perfection 
 only on the magazine covers and in the 
 Christmas stories? 
 
 As a further guide to those who in the 
 goodness of their hearts may undertake a 
 search for him in his remaining haunts and 
 refuges, it should be stated that he was no 
 German wild boar, or English pork pie on 
 the hoof, and that he was never cooked 
 French style, or doctored up with anchovies, 
 caviar, marrons glaces, pickled capers out of 
 a bottle — where many of the best capers of 
 the pickled variety come from — imported 
 truffles, Mexican tamales or Hawaiian poi. 
 
" THOSE ^A^HO IN THE GOODNESS OP THEIR HEARTS 
 MAY UNDERTAKE A SEARCH FOR THE SUCKING PIG" 
 
Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 37 
 
 He was — and is, if he still exists — just a 
 plain little North American baby-shoat 
 cooked whole. And don't forget the red 
 apple in his mouth. None genuine without 
 this trademark. 
 
 But, shucks! what's the use of talking that 
 way? Patriotism is not dead and a demo- 
 cratic form of government still endures, and 
 surely real sucking pigs are still being 
 cooked and served whole somewhere this 
 very day. And in that same neighborhood, 
 if it lies to the eastward, there are cooks who 
 know the art of planking a shad in season — 
 not the arrangement of the effete East, con- 
 sisting of a greased skin wrapped round a 
 fine-tooth comb and reposing on a charred 
 clapboard — but a real shad; and if it lies 
 to the southward one will surely find in the 
 same vicinity a possum of a prevalent dark 
 brown tint, with sweet potatoes baked under 
 him and a certain inimitable, indescribable 
 dark rich gravy surrounding him, and on 
 the side corn pones — without any sugar in 
 them. I think probably the reason why the 
 possum doesn't flourish in the North is that 
 they insist on tacking an O on to his name, 
 
38 Cobb's Bi //-of- Fare 
 
 simply because some misguided writer of 
 dictionaries ordained it so. A possum is not 
 Irish, nor is he Scotch. His name is not 
 Opossum, neither is it MacPossum. He 
 belongs to an old Southern family and his 
 name is just possum. 
 
 Once I saw ostensible 'possum at a French 
 restaurant in New York. It was advertised 
 as Opossum, Southern style, and it was 
 chopped up fine and cooked in a sort of 
 casserole efifect, with green peas and carrots 
 and various other things mixed in along 
 with it. The quivering sensations which 
 were felt throughout the South on this occa- 
 sion, and which at the time were mistaken 
 for earthquake tremors, were really caused 
 by so many Southern cooks turning over 
 petulantly in their graves. 
 
 Still going on the assumption that the 
 turkey and the sucking pig and their kin- 
 dred spirits are yet to be found among us or 
 among some of us, anyhow, it is only logical 
 to assume that the food is not served in 
 courses at the ratio of a little of everything 
 and not enough of anything, but that it is 
 brought on and spread before the company 
 
Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 39 
 
 all together and at once — the turkey or the 
 pig or the ham or the chickens; the mashed 
 potatoes overflowing their receptacle like 
 drifted snow; the celery; the scalloped 
 oysters in a dish like a crock; the jelly layer 
 cake, the fruit cake and Prince of Wales 
 cake; and in addition, scattered about hither 
 and yon, all the different kinds of preserves 
 — pusserves, to use the proper title — includ- 
 ing sweet peach pickles dimpled with cloves 
 and melting away in their own sweetness, 
 and watermelon-rind pickles cut into cubes 
 just big enough to make one bite — that is to 
 say in cubes about three inches square — and 
 the various kinds of jellies — crab-apple, 
 currant, grape and quince — quivering in an 
 ecstacy as though at their very goodness, and 
 casting upon the white cloth where the light 
 catches them all the reflected, dancing tints 
 of beryl and amethyst, ruby and garnet — 
 crown-jewels in the diadem of real food. 
 
 People who eat dinners like this must, by 
 the very nature of things, cling also to the 
 ancient North American custom of starting 
 the day with an amount of regular food 
 called collectively a breakfast. This, of 
 
40 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 
 
 course, does not mean what the dweller in 
 the city by the seaboard calls a breakfast, 
 he knowing no better, poor wretch — a swal- 
 low of tea, a bite of a cold baker's roll, a 
 plate of gruel mayhap, or pap, and a sticky 
 spoonful of the national marmalade of Per- 
 fidious Albumen, as the poet has called it, 
 followed by a slap at the lower part of the 
 face with a napkin and a series of V-shaped 
 hiccoughs ensuing all the morning. No, 
 indeed. 
 
 In speaking thus of breakfast, I mean a 
 real breakfast. If it's in New England 
 there'll be doughnuts and pies on the table, 
 and not those sickly convict labor pies of 
 the city either, with the prison pallor yet 
 upon them, but brown, crusty, full-chested 
 pies. And if it's down South there will be 
 hot waffles and fresh New Orleans mo- 
 lasses; and if it's in any section of our coun- 
 try, north or south, east or west, such comfits 
 and kickshaws as genuine country smoked 
 sausage, put up in bags and spiced like 
 Araby the Blest, and fresh eggs fried in 
 pairs — never less than in pairs — with their 
 lovely orbed yolks turned heavenward like 
 
"WHERE DO YOU FIND THE PERCENTAGE OF DYSPEPTICS 
 RUNNING HIGHEST ? " 
 
Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 43 
 
 the topaz eyes of beauteous prayerful 
 blondes ; and slices of home-cured ham with 
 the taste of the hickory smoke and also of 
 the original hog delicately blended in them, 
 and marbled with fat and lean, like the 
 edges of law books; and cornbeef hash, and 
 flaky hot biscuits ; and an assortment of those 
 same pickles and preserves already men- 
 tioned ; the whole being calculated to make 
 a hungry man open his mouth until his face 
 resembles the general-delivery window at 
 the post-office — and sail right in. 
 
 The cry has been raised that American 
 cooking is responsible for American dys- 
 pepsia, and that as a race we are given to 
 pouring pepsin pellets down ourselves be- 
 cause of the food our ancestors poured down 
 themselves. This is a base calumny. Old 
 John J. Calumny himself never coined a 
 baser one. You have only to look about you 
 to know the truth of the situation, which is, 
 that the person with the least digestion is 
 the one who always does the most for it, and 
 that those who eat the most have the least 
 trouble. Where do you find the percentage 
 of dyspeptics running highest, in the coun- 
 
44 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 
 
 try or the city? Where do you find the stout 
 woman who is banting as she pants and 
 panting as she bants? Again, the city. 
 Where do you encounter the unhappy male 
 creature who has been told that the only 
 cure for his dyspepsia is to be a Rebecca at 
 the Well and drink a gallon of water before 
 each meal and then go without the meal, 
 thus compelling him to double in both roles 
 and first be Rebecca and then be the Well? 
 Where do you see so many of those misera- 
 ble ones who have the feeling, after eating, 
 that rude hands are tearing the tapestries 
 ofT the walls of their respective dining 
 rooms? 
 
 Not in the country, where, happily, food 
 is perhaps yet food. In the city, that's 
 where — in the cities, where they have 
 learned to cook food and to serve it and to 
 eat it after a fashion different from the 
 fashions their grandsires followed. 
 
 That's a noble slogan which has lately 
 been promulgated — See America First. But 
 while we're doing so wouldn't it be a fine 
 idea to try to see some American cooking? 
 
Cobb'^s Bill-of-Fare 
 
 MUSIC 
 
Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 
 
 Music 
 
 IF YOU, the reader, are anything like 
 me, the writer, it happens to you about 
 every once in so long that some well- 
 meaning but semi-witted friend rigs a dead- 
 fall for you, and traps you and carries you 
 off, a helpless captive, for an evening among 
 the real music-lovers. 
 
 Catching you, so to speak, with your de- 
 fense leveled and your breastworks un- 
 manned, he speaks to you substantially as 
 follows: ^^Old man, we're going to have a 
 few people up to the house tonight — just a 
 little informal affair, you understand, with 
 a song or two and some music — and the 
 missus and I would appreciate it- mightily 
 if you'd put on your Young Prince Charm- 
 ings and drop in on us along toward eight. 
 How about it — can we count on you to be 
 among those prominently present?" 
 
48 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 
 
 Forewarned is forearmed, and you know 
 all about this person already. You know 
 him to be one of the elect in the most ex- 
 clusive musical coterie of your fair city, 
 wherever your fair city may be. You know 
 him to be on terms of the utmost intimacy 
 with the works of all the great composers. 
 Bill Opus and Jeremiah Fugue have no 
 secrets from him — none whatever — and in 
 conversation he creates the impression that 
 old Issy Sonata was his first cousin. He can 
 tell you offhand which one of the Shuberts 
 — Lee or Jake — ^^wrote that Serenade. He 
 speaks of Mozart and Beethoven in such a 
 way a stranger would probably get the idea 
 that Mote and Bate used to work for his 
 folks. He can go to a musical show, and 
 while the performance is going on he can 
 tell everybody in his section just which com- 
 poser each song number was stolen from, 
 humming the original air aloud to show the 
 points of resemblance. He can do this, I 
 say, and, what is more, he does do it. At 
 the table d'hote place, when the Neapolitan 
 troubadours come out in their little green 
 jackets and their wide red sashes he is right 
 
Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 49 
 
 there at the middle table, poised and wait- 
 ing; and when they put their heads together 
 and lean in toward the center and sing their 
 national air, Come Into the Garlic, Maud, 
 it is he who beats time for them with his 
 handy lead-pencil, only pausing occasion- 
 ally to point out errors in technic and execu- 
 tion on the part of the performers. He is 
 that kind of a pest, and you know it. 
 
 What you should do under these circum- 
 stances, after he has invited you to come up 
 to his house, would be to look him straight 
 in the eye and say to him : ^ Well, old chap, 
 that's awfully kind of you to include me in 
 your little musical party, and just to show 
 you how much I appreciate it and how I 
 feel about it here's something for you." And 
 then hit him right where his hair parts with 
 a cut-glass paperweight or a bronze clock or 
 a fire-ax or something, after which you 
 should leap madly upon his prostrate form 
 and dance on his cozy corner with both feet 
 and cave in his inglenook for him. That is 
 what you should do, but, being a vacillating 
 person — I am still assuming, you see, that 
 you are constituted as I am — you weakly 
 
50 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 
 
 surrender and accept the invitation and 
 promise to be there promptly on time, and 
 he goes away to snare more victims in order 
 to have enough to make a mess. 
 
 And so it befalls at the appointed time 
 that you deck your form in your after-six- 
 P. M. clothes and go up. On the way you 
 get full and fuller of dark forebodings at 
 every step ; and your worst expectations are 
 realized as soon as you enter and are re- 
 lieved of your hat by a colored person in 
 white gloves, and behold spread before you 
 a great horde of those ladies and gentlemen 
 whose rapt expressions and general air of 
 eager expectancy stamp them as true de- 
 votees of whatever is most classical in the 
 realm of music. You realize that in such a 
 company as this you are no better than a 
 rank outsider, and that it behooves you to 
 attract as little attention as possible. There 
 is nobody else here who will be interested 
 in discussing with you whether the Giants 
 or the Cubs will finish first next season; no- 
 body except you who cares a whoop how In- 
 diana will go for president — in fact, most of 
 them probably haven't heard that Indiana 
 
"SHE TRIES TO TEAR ALL ITS FRONT TEETH OUT 
 WITH HER BARE HANDS " 
 
Cobb's Bi //-of- Fare 53 
 
 was thinking of going. Their souls are soar- 
 ing among the stars in a rarefied atmosphere 
 of culture, and even if you could you 
 wouldn't dare venture up that far with 
 yours, for fear of being seized by an uncon- 
 trollable impulse to leap off and end all, the 
 same as some persons are affected when on 
 the roof of a tall building. So you back 
 into the nearest corner and try to look like 
 a part of the furniture — and wait in dumb 
 misery. 
 
 Usually you don't have to wait very long. 
 These people are beggars for punishment 
 and like to start early. It is customary to 
 lead off the program with a selection on the 
 piano by a distinguished lady graduate of 
 somebody-with-an-Italian-name's school of 
 piano expression. Under no circumstances 
 is it expected that this lady will play any- 
 thing that you can understand or that I 
 could understand. It would be contrary 
 to the ethics of her calling and deeply re- 
 pugnant to her artistic temperament to play 
 a tune that would sound well on a phono- 
 graph record. This would never do. She 
 comes forward, stripped for battle, and 
 
54 Cobb^s Bill'of'Fare 
 
 bows and peels off her gloves and fiddles 
 with the piano-stool until she gets it ad- 
 justed to suit her, and then she sits down, 
 prepared to render an immortal work com- 
 posed by one of the old masters who was 
 intoxicated at the time. 
 
 She starts gently. She throws her head 
 far back and closes her eyes dreamily, and 
 hits the keys a soft, dainty little lick — 
 tippy-tap! Then leaving a call with the 
 night clerk for eight o'clock in the morn- 
 ing, she seems to drift off into a peaceful 
 slumber, but awakens on the moment and 
 hurrying all the way up to the other end of 
 Main Street she slams the bass keys a couple 
 of hard blows— bumetty-bum! And so it 
 goes for quite a long spell after that: Tippy- 
 tap! — off to the country for a week-end 
 party, Friday to Monday; bumetty-bum! — 
 six months elapse between the third and 
 fourth acts; tippetty-tip! — two years later; 
 dear me, how the old place has changed! 
 Biffetty-biff ! Gracious, how time flies, for 
 here it is summer again and the flowers are 
 all in bloom! You sink farther and farther 
 into your chair and debate with yourself 
 
Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 55 
 
 whether you ought to run like a coward or 
 stay and die like a hero. One of your legs 
 goes to sleep and the rest of you envies the 
 leg. You can feel your whiskers growing, 
 and you begin to itch in two hundred sepa- 
 rate places, but can't scratch. 
 
 The strangest thing about it is that those 
 round you appear to be enjoying it. Incred- 
 ible though it seems, they are apparently 
 finding pleasure in this. You can tell that 
 they are enjoying themselves because they 
 begin to act as real music-lovers always act 
 under such circumstances — some put their 
 heads on one side and wall up their eyes in 
 a kind of dying-calf attitude and listen so 
 hard you can hear them listening, and some 
 bend over toward their nearest neighbors 
 and murmur their rapture. It is all right 
 for them to murmur, but if you so much as 
 Scrooge your feet, or utter a low, despairing 
 moan or anything, they all turn and glare 
 at you reproachfully and go ^^Sh!" like a 
 collection of steam-heating fixtures. De- 
 pend on them to keep you in your place! 
 
 All of a sudden the lady operator comes 
 out of her trance. She comes out of it with 
 
56 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 
 
 a violent start, as though she had just been 
 bee-stung. She now cuts loose, regardless 
 of the piano's intrinsic value and its associa- 
 tions to its owners. She skitters her flying 
 fingers up and down the instrument from 
 one end to the other, producing a sound like 
 hailstones falling on a tin roof. She grabs 
 the helpless thing by its upper lip and tries 
 to tear all its front teeth out with her bare 
 hands. She fails in this, and then she goes 
 mad from disappointment and in a frenzy 
 resorts to her fists. 
 
 As nearly as you are able to gather, a ter- 
 rific fire has broken out in one of the most 
 congested tenement districts. You can hear 
 the engines coming and the hook-and-ladder 
 trucks clattering over the cobbles. Ambu- 
 lances come, too, clanging their gongs, and 
 one of them runs over a dog; and a wall 
 falls, burying several victims in the ruin. 
 At this juncture persons begin jumping out 
 of the top-floor windows, holding cooking 
 stoves in their arms, and a team runs away 
 and plunges through a plate-glass window 
 into a tinware and crockery store. People 
 are all running round and shrieking, and the 
 
RO-HOCKED IN THE CRA-HADLE OF THE DA-HEEP 
 I LA-HAY ME DOWN IN PE-HEACE TO SA-LEEP!" 
 
Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 59 
 
 dog that was run over is still yelping — he 
 wasn't killed outright evidently, but only 
 crippled — and several tons of dynamite ex- 
 plode in a basement. 
 
 As the crashing reverberations die away 
 the lady arises, wan but game, and bows low 
 in response to the applause and backs away, 
 leaving the wreck of the piano jammed back 
 on its haunches and trembling like a leaf in 
 every limb. 
 
 All to yourself, off in your little corner, 
 you are thinking that surely this has been 
 suffering and disaster enough for one even- 
 ing and everybody will be willing to go 
 away and seek a place of quiet. But no. In 
 its demand for fresh horrors this crowd is 
 as insatiate as the ancient Romans used to 
 be when Nero was giving one of those bene- 
 fits at the Colosseum for the fire sufferers of 
 his home city. There now advances to the 
 platform a somber person of a bass aspect, 
 he having a double-yolk face and a three- 
 ply chin and a chest like two or three chests. 
 
 You know in advance what the big- 
 mouthed black bass is going to sing — there 
 is only one regular song for a bass singer to 
 
60 Cobb's Bill-of'Fare 
 
 sing. From time to time insidious efforts 
 have been made to work in songs for basses 
 dealing with the love affairs of Bedouins 
 and the joys of life down in a coal mine; 
 but after all, to a bass singer who really 
 values his gift of song and wishes to make 
 the most of it, there is but one suitable selec- 
 tion, beginning as follows : 
 
 Ro-hocked in the cra-hadle of the da-heep, 
 I la-hay me down in pe-heace to sa-leep! 
 Collum and pa-heaceful be my sa-leep 
 Ro-hocked in the cra-hadle of the da-heep! 
 
 That is the orthodox offering for a bass. 
 The basses of the world have always used 
 it, I believe, and generally to advantage. 
 From what I have been able to ascertain I 
 judge that it was first written for use on the 
 Ark. Shem sang it probably. If there is 
 anything in this doctrine of heredity Ham 
 specialized in banjo solos and soft-shoe 
 dancing, and Japhet, I take it, was the tenor 
 — he certainly had a tenor-sounding kind of 
 a name. So it must have been Shem, and 
 undoubtedly he sang it when the animals 
 
"SHEM UNDOUBTEDLY SANG IT 
 WHEN THE ANIMALS ^VERE HUNGRY'^ 
 
CobPs Bill-of-Fare 63 
 
 were hungry, so as to drown out the sounds 
 of their roaring. 
 
 So this, his descendant — this chip ofif the 
 old cheese, as it were — stands up on the plat- 
 form facing you, with his chest well ex- 
 tended to show his red suspender straps 
 peeping coyly out from the arm openings 
 of his vest, and he inserts one hand into his 
 bosom, and over and over again he tells you 
 that he now contemplates laying himself 
 down in peace to sleep — which is more than 
 anybody else on the block will be able to 
 do; and he rocks you in the cradle of the 
 deep until you are as seasick as a cow. You 
 could stand that, maybe, if only he wouldn't 
 make faces at you while he sings. Some day 
 I am going to take the time off to make sci- 
 entific research and ascertain why all bass 
 singers make faces when they are singing. 
 Surely there's some psychological reason for 
 this, and if there isn't it should be stopped 
 by legislative enactment. 
 
 When Sing-Bad the Sailor has quit rock- 
 ing the boat and gone ashore, a female sing- 
 er generally obliges and comes off the nest 
 after a merry lay, cackling her triumph. 
 
64 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 
 
 Then there is something more of a difficult 
 and painful nature on the piano; and nearly 
 always, too, there is a large lady wearing a 
 low-vamp gown on a high-arch form, who 
 in flute-like notes renders one of those 
 French ballads that's full of la-las and is 
 supposed to be devilish and naughty because 
 nobody can understand it. For the finish, 
 some person addicted to elocution usually 
 recites a poem to piano accompaniment. 
 The poem Robert of Sicily is much used for 
 these purposes, and whenever I hear it Rob- 
 ert invariably has my deepest sympathy and 
 so has Sicily. Toward midnight a cold col- 
 lation is served, and you recapture your hat 
 and escape forth into the starry night, swear- 
 ing to yourself that never again will you 
 permit yourself to be lured into an orgy of 
 the true believers. 
 
 But the next time an invitation comes 
 along you will fall again. Anyhow that's 
 what I always do, meanwhile raging in- 
 wardly and cursing myself for a weak and 
 spineless creature, who doesn't know when 
 he's well off. Yet I would not be regarded 
 as one who is insensible to the charms of 
 
Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 65 
 
 music. In its place I like music, if it's the 
 kind of music I like. These times, when so 
 much of our music is punched out for us by 
 machinery like buttonholes and the air vents 
 in Swiss cheese, and then is put up in cans 
 for the trade like Boston beans and baking- 
 powder, nothing gives me more pleasure 
 than to drop a nickel in the slot and hear an 
 inspiring selection by the author of Alexan- 
 der's Ragtime Band. 
 
 I am also partial to band music. When 
 John Philip Sousa comes to town you can 
 find me down in the very front row. I 
 appreciate John Philip Sousa when he faces 
 me and shows me that breast full of medals 
 extending from the whiskerline to the belt- 
 line, and I appreciate him still more when 
 he turns round and gives me a look at that 
 back of his. Since Colonel W. F. Cody 
 practically retired and Miss Mary Garden 
 went away to Europe, I know of no public 
 back which for inherent grace and poetry 
 of spinal motion can quite compare with 
 Mr. Sousa's. 
 
 I am in my element then. I do not care 
 so very much for Home, Sweet Home, as 
 
66 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 
 
 rendered with so many variations that it's 
 almost impossible to recognize the old place 
 any more ; but when they switch to a march, 
 a regular Sousa march full of um-pahs, then 
 I begin to spread myself. A little tingle of 
 anticipatory joy runs through me as Mr. 
 Sousa advances to the footlights and first 
 waves his baton at the great big German 
 who plays the little shiny thing that looks 
 like a hypodermic and sounds like stepping 
 on the cat, and then turns the other way and 
 waves it at the little bit of a German who 
 plays the big thing that looks like a venti- 
 lator ofif an ocean liner and sounds like feed- 
 ing-time at the zoo. And then he makes the 
 invitation general and calls up the brasses 
 and the drums and the woods and the wood- 
 winds, and also the thunders and the light- 
 nings and the cyclones and the earthquakes. 
 And three or four of the trombonists pull 
 the slides away out and let go full steam 
 right in my face, with a blast that blows my 
 hair out by the roots, and all hands join in 
 and make so much noise that you can't hear 
 the music. And I enjoy it more than words 
 can tell! 
 
"AND I ENJOY IT 
 MORE THAN ^VORDS CAN TELL!" 
 
Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 69 
 
 On the other hand, grand wopra does not 
 appeal to me. I can enthuse over the robin's 
 song in the spring, and the sound of the sum- 
 mer wind rippling through the ripened 
 wheat is not without its attractions for me; 
 but when I hear people going into convul- 
 sions of joy over Signor Massacre's immor- 
 tal opera of Medulla Oblongata I feel that 
 I am out of my element and I start back- 
 pedaling. Lucy D. Lammermore may have 
 been a lovely person, but to hear a lot of 
 foreigners singing about her for three hours 
 on a stretch does not appeal to me. I have 
 a better use for my little two dollars. For 
 that amount I can go to a good minstrel 
 show and sit in a box. 
 
 You may recall when Strauss' Elektra was 
 creating such a furor in this country a 
 couple of years ago. All the people you 
 met were talking about it whether they 
 knew anything about it or not, as generally 
 they didn't. I caught the disease myself; 
 I went to hear it sung. 
 
 I only lasted a little while — I confess it 
 unabashedly — if there is such a word as 
 unabashedly — and if there isn't then I con- 
 
10 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 
 
 f ess it unashamedly. As well as a mere lay- 
 man could gather from the opening pro- 
 ceedings, this opera of Elektra was what 
 the life story of the Bender family of Kan- 
 sas would be if set to music by Fire-Chief 
 Croker. In the quieter moments of the ac- 
 tion, when nobody was being put out of the 
 way, half of the chorus assembled on one 
 side of the stage and imitated the last rav- 
 ings of John McCuUough, and the other 
 half went over on the other side of the stage 
 and clubbed in and imitated Wallace, the 
 Untamable Lion, while the orchestra, to 
 show its impartiality, imitated something 
 else — Old Home Week in a boiler factory, 
 I think. It moved me strangely — strangely 
 and also rapidly. 
 
 Taking advantage of one of these periods 
 of comparative calm I arose and softly stole 
 away. I put a dummy in my place to de- 
 ceive the turnkeys and I found a door provi- 
 dentially unlocked and I escaped out into 
 the night. Three or four thousand automo- 
 biles were charging up and down Broad- 
 way, and there was a fire going on a couple 
 of blocks up the street, and I think a suf- 
 
Cobb's Bi //-of- Fare 71 
 
 fragette procession was passing, too; but 
 after what Fd just been through the quiet 
 was very soothing to my eardrums. I don't 
 know when IVe enjoyed anything more 
 than the last part of Elektra, that I didn't 
 hear. 
 
 Yet my reader should not argue from this 
 admission that I am deaf to the charms of 
 the human voice when raised in song. Un- 
 naturalized aliens of a beefy aspect vocaliz- 
 ing in a strange tongue while an orchestra 
 of two hundreds pieces performs — that, I 
 admit, is not for me. But just let a pretty 
 girl in a white dress with a flower in her 
 hair come out on a stage, and let her 
 have nice clear eyes and a big wholesome- 
 looking mouth, and let her open that mouth 
 and show a double row of white teeth that'd 
 remind you of the first roasting ear of the 
 season — just let her be all that and do all 
 that, and then let her look right at me and 
 sing The Last Rose of Summer or Annie 
 Laurie or Believe Me, If All Those En- 
 dearing Young Charms — and I am hers to 
 command, world without end, forever and 
 ever, amen! My eyes cloud up for a rainy 
 
12 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 
 
 Spell, and in my throat there comes a lump 
 so big I feel like a coach-whip snake that 
 has inadvertently swallowed a china darn- 
 ing-egg. And when she is through I am 
 the person sitting in the second row down 
 front who applauds until the flooring gives 
 way and the plastering is jarred loose on the 
 next floor. She can sing for me by the hour 
 and I'll sit there by the hour and listen to 
 her, and forget that there ever was such a 
 person in the whole world as the late Vog- 
 ner! That's the kind of a music-lover I 
 am, and I suspect, if the truth were known, 
 there are a whole lot more just like me. 
 
 If I may be excused for getting sort of 
 personal and reminiscent at this point I 
 should like to make brief mention here of 
 the finest music I ever heard. As it hap- 
 pened this was instrumental music. I had 
 come to New York with a view to revolu- 
 tionizing metropolitan journalism, and jour- 
 nalism had shown a reluctance amounting to 
 positive diffidence about coming forward 
 and being revolutionized. Pending the time 
 when it should see fit to do so, I was stop- 
 ping at a boarding house on West Fifty- 
 
Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 13 
 
 Seventh Street. It has been my observation 
 that practically everybody who comes to 
 New York stops for a while in a boarding 
 house on West Fifty-Seventh Street. 
 
 West Fifty-Seventh Street was where I 
 was established, in a hall bedroom on the 
 top floor — a hall bedroom so form-fitting 
 and cozy that when I went to bed I always 
 opened the transom to prevent a feeling of 
 closeness across the chest. If I had as many 
 as three callers in my room of an evening 
 and one of them got up to go first, the others 
 had to sit quietly while he was picking out 
 his own legs. But up to the time I speak 
 of I hadn't had any callers. I hadn't been 
 there very long and I hadn't met any of the 
 other boarders socially, except at the table. 
 I had only what you might call a feeding 
 acquaintance with them. 
 
 Christmas Eve came round. I was a 
 thousand miles from home and felt a mil- 
 lion. I shouldn't be surprised if I was a 
 little bit homesick. Anyhow it was Christ- 
 mas Eve, and it was snowing outside accord- 
 ing to the orthodox Christmas Eve formula, 
 and upward of five million other people in 
 
14 Cobb's Bill-ofFare 
 
 New York were getting ready for Christ- 
 mas without my company, co-operation or 
 assistance. You'd be surprised to know how 
 lonesome you can feel in the midst of five 
 million people — until you try it on a Christ- 
 mas Eve. 
 
 After dinner I wxnt up to my room and 
 sat down with my back against the door and 
 my feet on the window-ledge, and I rested 
 one elbow in the washpitcher and put one 
 knee on the mantel and tried to read the 
 newspapers. The first thing I struck was 
 a Christmas poem, a sentimental Christmas 
 poem, full of allusions to the family circle, 
 and the old homestead, and the stockings 
 hanging by the fireplace, and all that sort 
 of thing. 
 
 That was enough. I put on my hat and 
 overcoat and went down into the street. The 
 snow was coming down in long, slanting 
 lines and the sidewalks were all white, and 
 where the lamplight shone on them they 
 looked like the frosting on birthday cakes. 
 People laden with bundles were diving in 
 and out of all the shops. Every other shop 
 window had a holly wreath hung in it, and 
 
Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 75 
 
 when the doors were opened those spicy 
 Christmassy smells of green hemlock and 
 pine came gushing out in my face. 
 
 So far as I could tell, everybody in New 
 York — except me — was buying something 
 for his or her or some other body's Christ- 
 mas. It was a tolerably lonesome sensation. 
 I walked two blocks, loitering sometimes in 
 front of a store. Nobody spoke to me ex- 
 cept a policeman. He told me to keep mov- 
 ing. Finally I went into a little family 
 liquor store. Strangely enough, consider- 
 ing the season, there was nobody there ex- 
 cept the proprietor. He was reading a 
 German newspaper behind the bar. I con- 
 ferred with him concerning the advisability 
 of an egg-nog. He had never heard of such 
 a thing as an egg-nog. I mentioned two old 
 friends of mine, named Tom and Jerry, 
 respectively, and he didn't know them 
 either. So I compromised on a hot lemon 
 toddy. The lemon was one that had grown 
 up with him in the liquor business, I think, 
 and it wasn't what you would call a spec- 
 tacular success as a hot toddy; but it was 
 warming, anyhow, and that helped. I 
 
16 Cobb's Bill'of-Fare 
 
 expanded a trifle. I asked him whether he 
 wouldn't take something on me. 
 
 He took a small glass of beer! He was a 
 foreigner and he probably knew no better, 
 so I suppose I shouldn't have judged him 
 too harshly. But it was Christmas Eve and 
 snowing outside — and he took a small beer! 
 
 I paid him and came away. I went back 
 to my hall bedroom up on the top floor and 
 sat down at the window with my face 
 against the pane, like Little Maggie in the 
 poem. 
 
 By now the pavements were two inches 
 deep in whiteness and in the circle of light 
 around an electric lamp up at the corner of 
 Ninth Avenue I could see, dimly, the thick, 
 whirling white flakes chasing one another 
 about madly, playing a Chrismas game of 
 their own. Across the way foot-passen- 
 gers were still passing in a straggly stream. 
 I heard the flat clatter of feet upon the 
 stairs outside, heard someone wish some- 
 body else a Merry Christmas, and heard 
 the other person grunt in a non-committal 
 sort of way. There was the sound of a hall 
 door slamming somewhere on my floor. 
 
Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 77 
 
 After that there was silence — the kind of 
 silence that you can break ofif in chunks and 
 taste. 
 
 It continued to snow. I reckon I must 
 have sat there an hour or more. 
 
 Down in the street four stories below I 
 heard something — music. I raised the sash 
 and looked out. An Italian had halted in 
 front of the boarding house with a grind 
 organ and he was turning the crank and the 
 thing was playing. It wasn't much of a 
 grind organ as grind organs go. I judge it 
 must have been the original grind organ 
 that played with Booth and Barrett. It had 
 lost a lot of its most important works, and it 
 had the asthma and the heaves and one 
 thing and another the matter with it. 
 
 But the tune it was playing was My Old 
 Kentucky Home — and Kentucky was where 
 I'd come from. The Italian played it 
 through twice, once on his own hook and 
 once because I went downstairs and divided 
 my money with him. 
 
 I regard that as the finest music I ever 
 heard. 
 
 As I was saying before, the classical stuff 
 
18 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 
 
 may do for those who like it well enough to 
 stand it, but the domestic article suits me. 
 I like the kind of beer that this man Bach 
 turned out in the spring of the year, but I 
 don't seem to be able to care much for his 
 music. And so far as Chopin is concerned, 
 I hope you'll all do your Christmas Chopin 
 early. 
 
CobPs Bill-of-Fare 
 
 ART 
 
Cobb's Bil/'of-Fare 
 
 Art 
 
 IN ART as in music I am one who is very 
 easily satisfied. All I ask of a picture is 
 that it shall look like something, and all 
 I expect of music is that it shall sound like 
 something. 
 
 In this attitude I feel confident that I am 
 one of a group of about seventy million 
 people in this country, more or less, but only 
 a few of us, a very heroic few of us, have the 
 nerve to come right out and take a firm posi- 
 tion and publicly express our true senti- 
 ments on these important subjects. Some 
 are under the dominion of strong-minded 
 wives. Some hesitate to reveal their true 
 artistic leanings for fear of being called 
 low-browed vulgarians. Some are plastic 
 posers and so pretend to be something they 
 are not to win the approval of the ultra- 
 intellectuals. There are only a handful of 
 
82 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 
 
 US who are ready and willing to go on rec- 
 ord as saying where we stand. 
 
 It is because of this cowardice on the part 
 of the great silent majority that every year 
 sees us backed farther and farther into a 
 corner. We walk through miles and miles 
 of galleries, or else we are led through them 
 by our wives and our friends, and we look 
 in vain for the kind of pictures that mother 
 used to make and father used to buy. What 
 do we find? Once in a while we behold a 
 picture of something that we can recognize 
 without a chart, and it looms before our 
 gladdened vision like a rock-and-rye in a 
 weary land. But that is not apt to happen 
 often — not in a 1912-model gallery. In 
 such an establishment one is likely to meet 
 only Old Masters and Young Messers. If 
 it's an Old Master we probably behold a 
 Flemish saint or a German saint or an Ital- 
 ian saint — depending on whether the artist 
 was Flemish or German or Italian — de- 
 picted as being shot full of arrows and en- 
 joying same to the uttermost. If it is a 
 Young Messer the canvas probably presents 
 to us a view of a poached egg apparently 
 
""WE LOOKED IN VAIN FOR THE KIND OP PICTURES 
 
 THAT MOTHER USED TO MAKE AND FATHER USED TO BUY ' 
 
Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 85 
 
 bursting into a Welsh rarebit. At least that 
 is what it looks like to us — a golden buck, 
 forty cents at any good restaurant — in the 
 act of undergoing spontaneous combustion. 
 But we are informed that this is an impres- 
 sionistic interpretation of a sunset at sea, and 
 we are expected to stand before it and carry 
 on regardless. 
 
 But I for one must positively decline to 
 carry on. This sort of thing does not appeal 
 to me. I don't want to have to consult the 
 official catalogue in order to ascertain for 
 sure whether this year's prize picture is a 
 quick lunch or an Italian gloaming. I'm 
 very peculiar that way. I like to be able to 
 tell what a picture aims to represent just by 
 looking at it. I presume this is the result of 
 my early training. I date back to the 
 Rutherford B. Hayes School of Interior 
 Decorating. In a considerable degree I am 
 still wedded to my early ideals. I distinctly 
 recall the time when upon the walls of every 
 wealthy home of America there hung, 
 among other things, two staple oil paintings 
 — a still-life for the dining room, showing a 
 dead fish on a plate, and a pastoral for the 
 
86 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 
 
 parlor, showing a collection of cows drink- 
 ing out of a purling brook. A dead fish with 
 a glazed eye and a cold clammy fin was not 
 a thing you would care to have around the 
 house for any considerable period of time, 
 except in a picture, and the same was true of 
 cows. People who could not abide the idea 
 of a cow in the kitchen gladly welcomed 
 one into the parlor when painted in connec- 
 tion with the above purling brook and sev- 
 eral shade trees. 
 
 Those who could not afford oil paintings 
 went in for steel engravings and chromos — 
 good reliable brands, such as the steel en- 
 graving of Henry Clay's Farewell to the 
 American Senate and the Teaching Baby to 
 Waltz art chromo. War pictures were also 
 very popular back in that period. If it 
 were a Northern household you could be 
 pretty sure of seeing a work entitled Gettys- 
 burg, showing three Union soldiers, two 
 plain and one colored, in the act of repuls- 
 ing Pickett's charge. If it were a Southern 
 household there would be one that had been 
 sold on subscription by a strictly non-parti- 
 san publishing house in Charleston, South 
 
Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 81 
 
 Carolina, and guaranteed to be historically 
 correct in all particulars, representing Rob- 
 ert E. Lee chasing U. S. Grant up a pal- 
 metto tree, while in the background were a 
 large number of deceased Northern invad- 
 ers neatly racked up like cordwood. 
 
 Such things as these were a part of the 
 art education of our early youth. Along 
 with them we learned to value the family 
 photograph album, which fastened with a 
 latch like a henhouse door, and had a nap 
 on it like a furred tongue, and contained, 
 among other treasures, the photograph of 
 our Uncle Hiram wearing his annual collar. 
 
 And there were also enlarged crayon por- 
 traits in heavy gold frames with red plush 
 insertions, the agent having thrown in the 
 portraits in consideration of our taking the 
 frames; and souvenirs of the Philadelphia 
 Centennial ; and w^ooden scoop shovels heav- 
 ily gilded by hand with moss roses painted 
 on the scoop part and blue ribbon bows to 
 hang them up by; and on the what-not in 
 the corner you were reasonably certain of 
 finding a conch shell with the Lord's Prayer 
 engraved on it; and if you held the shell up 
 
.VcV Cohh's Bill-of-Fare 
 
 to your young ear you could hear the mur- 
 mur of the sea just as plain as anything. Of 
 course you could secure the same murmur- 
 ing effect by holding an old-fashioned tin 
 cuspidor up to your ear, too, but in this case 
 the poetic effect would have been lacking. 
 And, besides, there were other uses for the 
 cuspidor. 
 
 Almost the only Old Masters with whose 
 works we were well acquainted were John 
 L. Sullivan and Nonpareil Jack Dempsey. 
 But Rosa Bonheur's Horse Fair suited us 
 clear down to the ground — her horses 
 looked like real horses, even if they were the 
 kind that haul brewery wagons; and in the 
 matter of sculpture Powers' Greek Slave 
 seemed to fill the bill to the satisfaction of 
 all. Anthony Comstock and the Boston 
 Purity League had not taken charge of our 
 art as yet, and nobody seemed to find any 
 fault because the Greek lady looked as 
 though she'd slipped on the top step and 
 come down just as she was, wearing nothing 
 to speak of except a pair of handcuffs. No- 
 body did speak of it either — not in a mixed 
 company anyhow. 
 
Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 89 
 
 Furniture was preferred when it was new 
 — the newer -the better. We went in for 
 golden oak and for bird's eye maple, de- 
 pending on whether we liked our furniture 
 to look tanned or freckled; and when the 
 careful housekeeper threw open her parlor 
 for a social occasion, such as a funeral, the 
 furniture gave ofif a splendid new sticky 
 smell, similar to a paint and varnish 
 store on a hot day. The vogue for antiques 
 hadn't got started yet; that was to de- 
 scend upon us later on. We rather liked 
 the dining-room table to have all its legs 
 still, and the bureau to have drawers that 
 could be opened without blasting. In 
 short, that was the period of our national 
 life when only the very poor had to put up 
 with decrepit second-hand furi^iture, as op- 
 posed to these times when only the very rich 
 can afiford to own it. If you have any doubts 
 regarding this last assertion of mine I 
 should advise you to drop into any reliable 
 antique shop and inquire the price of a ma- 
 hogany sideboard suffering from tetter and 
 other skin diseases, or a black walnut cup- 
 board with doors that froze up solid about 
 
90 Cobb's Bi //-of- Fare 
 
 the time of the last Seminole War. I sup- 
 pose these things go in cycles — in fact, Fm 
 sure they do. Some day the bare sight of 
 the kind of furniture which most people 
 favor nowadays will cause a person of artis- 
 tic sensibilities to burst into tears, just as the 
 memory of the things that everybody liked 
 twenty-five or thirty years ago gives such 
 poignant pain to so many at present. 
 
 Even up to the time of the World's Fair 
 quite a lot of people still favored the sim- 
 pler and more understandable forms of art 
 expression. We went to Chicago and reli- 
 giously visited the Art Building, and in our 
 nice new creaky shoes we walked past miles 
 and miles of brought-on paintings by for- 
 eign artists, whose names we could not pro- 
 nounce, in order to find some sentimental 
 domestic subject. After we had found it 
 we would stand in front of it for hours on a 
 stretch with the tears rolling down our 
 cheeks. Some of us wept because the spirit 
 of the picture moved us, and some because 
 our poor tired feet hurt us and the picture 
 gave us a good excuse for crying in public, 
 and so we did so — freely and openly. 
 
Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 91 
 
 Grant if you will that our taste was crude 
 and raw and provincial, yet we knew what 
 we liked and the bulk of us weren't ashamed 
 to say so, either. What we liked was a pic- 
 ture or a statue which remotely at least re- 
 sembled the thing that it was presumed to 
 represent. Likewise we preferred pictures 
 of things that we ourselves knew about and 
 could understand. 
 
 Maybe it was because of that early train- 
 ing that a good many of us have never yet 
 been able to work up much enthusiasm over 
 the Old Masters. Mind you, we have no 
 quarrel with those who become incoherent 
 and babbling with joy in the presence of 
 an Old Master, but — doggone 'em! — they 
 insist on quarreling with us because we 
 think differently. We fail to see anything 
 ravishingly beautiful in a faded, blistered, 
 cracked, crumbling painting of an early 
 Christian martyr on a grill, happily frying 
 on one side like an egg — a picture that looks 
 as though the Old Master painted it some 
 morning before breakfast, when he wasn't 
 feeling the best in the world, and then wore 
 it as a liver pad for forty or fifty years. We 
 
92 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 
 
 cannot understand why they love the Old 
 Masters so, and they cannot understand why 
 we prefer the picture of Custer's Last Stand 
 that the harvesting company used to give 
 away to advertise its mowing machines. 
 
 Once you get away from the early settlers 
 among the Old Masters the situation be- 
 comes different. Rembrandt and Hals 
 painted some portraits that appeal deeply 
 to the imagination of nearly all of my set. 
 The portraits which they painted not only 
 looked like regular persons, but so far as my 
 limited powers of observation go, they were 
 among the few painters of Dutch subjects 
 who didn't always paint a windmill or two 
 into the background. It probably took 
 great resolution and self-restraint, but they 
 did it and I respect them for it. 
 
 I may say that I am also drawn to the 
 kind of ladies that Gainsborough and Sir 
 Joshua Reynolds painted. They certainly 
 turned out some mighty good-looking ladies 
 in those days, and they were tasty dressers, 
 too, and I enjoy looking at their pictures. 
 Coming down the line a little farther, I 
 want to state that there is also something 
 
THE INSCRUTABLE SMILE OF A SALESLADY 
 WOULD MAKE MONA LISA SEEM A MERE AMATEUR ' 
 
Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 95 
 
 very fascinating in those soft-boiled pink 
 ladies, sixteen hands high, with sorrel 
 manes, that Bouguereau did; and the soldier 
 pictures of Meissonier and Detaille appeal 
 to me mightily. Their soldiers are always 
 such nice neat soldiers, and they never 
 have their uniforms mussed up or their 
 accouterments disarranged, even when they 
 are being shot up or cut down or something. 
 Corot and Rousseau did some landscapes 
 that seem to approximate the real thing, and 
 there are several others whose names escape 
 me; but, speaking for myself alone, I wish 
 to say that this is about as far as I can go at 
 this writing. I must admit that I have 
 never been held spellbound and enthralled 
 for hours on a stretch by a contemplation of 
 the inscrutable smile on Mona Lisa. To 
 me she seems merely a lady smiling about 
 something — simply that and nothing more. 
 Any woman can smile inscrutably; that is 
 one of the specialties of the sex. The in- 
 scrutable smile of a saleslady in an exclusive 
 Fifth Avenue shop when a customer asks to 
 look at something a little cheaper would 
 make Mona Lisa seem a mere amateur as 
 
96 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 
 
 an inscrutable smiler. Quite a number of 
 us remained perfectly calm when some gen- 
 tlemen stole Miss Lisa out of the Louvre, 
 and we expect to remain equally calm if she 
 is never restored. 
 
 As I said before, our little band is shrink- 
 ing in numbers day by day. The popula- 
 tion as a whole are being educated up to 
 higher ideals in art. On the wings of sym- 
 bolism and idealism they are soaring ever 
 higher and higher, until a whole lot of them 
 must be getting dizzy in the head by now. 
 
 First, there was the impressionistic 
 school, which started it; and then there was 
 the post-impressionistic school, suffering 
 from the same disease but in a more violent 
 form; and here just recently there have 
 come along the Cubists and the Futurists. 
 
 You know about the Cubists? A Cubist 
 is a person who for reasons best known to 
 the police has not been locked up yet, who 
 asserts that all things in Nature, living and 
 inanimate, properly resolve themselves into 
 cubes. What is more, he goes and paints 
 pictures to prove it — pictures of cubic 
 waterfalls pouring down cubic precipices, 
 
" A PERSON WHO FOR REASONS BEST KNOAVN 
 TO THE POLICE HAS NOT BEEN LOCKED UP" 
 
Cobb's Bi //-of Fare 99 
 
 and cubic ships sailing on cubic oceans, and 
 cubic cows being milked by cubic milk- 
 maids. He makes portraits, too — portraits 
 of persons with cubic hands and cubic feet, 
 who are smoking cubeb cigarettes and have 
 solid cubiform heads. On that last propo- 
 sition we are with them unanimously; we 
 will concede that there are people in this 
 world with cube-shaped heads, they being 
 the people who profess to enjoy this style 
 of picture. 
 
 A Futurist begins right where a Cubist 
 leaves off, and gets worse. The Futurists 
 have already had exhibitions in Paris and 
 London and last Spring they invaded New 
 York. They call themselves art anarchists. 
 Their doctrine is a simple and a cheerful 
 one — they merely preach that whatever is 
 normal is wrong. They not only preach it, 
 they practice it. 
 
 Here are some of their teachings: 
 
 ^^We teach the plunge into shadowy death 
 under the white set eyes of the ideal! 
 
 ^^The mind must launch the flaming 
 body, like a fire-ship, against the enemy, the 
 
100 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 
 
 eternal enemy that, if he do not exist, must 
 be invented! 
 
 ^^The victory is ours — I am sure of it, for 
 the maniacs are already hurling their hearts 
 to heaven like bombs! Attention! Fire! 
 Our blood? Yes! All our blood in tor- 
 rents to redye the sickly auroras of the 
 earth! Yes, and we shall also be able to 
 warm thee within our smoking arms, O 
 wretched, decrepit, chilly Sun, shivering 
 upon the summit of the Gorisankor!" 
 
 There you have the whole thing, you see, 
 simply, dispassionately and quietly pre- 
 sented. Most of us have seen newspaper 
 reproductions of the best examples of the 
 Futurists' school. As well as a body can 
 judge from these reproductions, a Futurist's 
 method of execution must be comparatively 
 simple. After looking at his picture, you 
 would say that he first put on a woolly over- 
 coat and a pair of overshoes; that he then 
 poured a mixture of hearth paint, tomato 
 catsup, liquid bluing, burnt cork, English 
 mustard, Easter dyes and the yolks of a 
 dozen eggs over himself, seasoning to taste 
 with red peppers. Then he spread a large 
 
Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 101 
 
 tarpaulin on the floor and lay down on it 
 and had an epileptic fit, the result being a 
 picture which he labeled Revolt, or Colli- 
 sion Between Two Heavenly Bodies, or 
 Premature Explosion of a Custard Pie, or 
 something else equally appropriate. The 
 Futurists ought to make quite a number of 
 converts in this country, especially among 
 those advanced lovers of art who are begin- 
 ning to realize that the old impressionistic 
 school lacked emphasis and individuality in 
 its work. But I expect to stand firm, and 
 when everybody else nearly is a Futurist 
 and is tearing down Sargent's pictures and 
 Abbey's and Whistler's to make room for 
 immortal Young Messers, I and a few 
 others will still be holding out resolutely 
 to the end. 
 
 At such times as these I fain would send 
 my thoughts back longingly to an artist who 
 flourished in the town where I was born and 
 brought up. He was practically the only 
 artist we had, but he was versatile in the ex- 
 treme. He was several kinds of a painter 
 rolled into one — house, sign, portrait, land- 
 scape, marine and wagon. In his lighter 
 
102 Cobb's Btll-of-Fare 
 
 hours, when building operations were dull, 
 he specialized in oil paintings of life and 
 motion — mainly pictures of horse races and 
 steamboat races. When he painted a horse 
 race, the horses were always shown running 
 neck and neck with their mouths wide open 
 and their eyes gleaming; and their nostrils 
 were widely extended and painted a deep 
 crimson, and their legs were neatly arranged 
 just so, and not scrambled together in any 
 old fashion, as seems to be the case with the 
 legs of the horses that are being painted 
 nowadays. And when he painted a steam- 
 boat race it would always be the Natchez 
 and the Robert E. Lee coming down the 
 river abreast in the middle of the night, 
 with the darkies dancing on the lower decks 
 and heavy black smoke rolling out of the 
 smokestacks in four distinct columns — one 
 column to each smokestack — and showers of 
 sparks belching up into the vault of night. 
 There was action for you — action and at- 
 tention to detail. With this man's paintings 
 you could tell a horse from a steamboat at 
 a glance. He was nothing of an impres- 
 sionist; he never put smokestacks on the 
 
"COLLISION BETWEEN TWO HEAVENLY BODIES 
 OR PREMATURE EXPLOSION OF A CUSTARD PIE " 
 
CobPs Bill-of-Fare 105 
 
 horse nor legs on the steamboat. And his 
 work gave general satisfaction throughout 
 that community. 
 
 Frederic Remington wasn't any impres- 
 sionist either; and so far as I can learn he 
 didn't have a cubiform idea in stock. When 
 Remington painted an Indian on a pony it 
 was a regular Indian and a regular pony — 
 not one of those cotton-batting things with 
 fat legs that an impressionist slaps on to a 
 canvas and labels a horse. You could smell 
 the lathered sweat on the pony's hide and 
 feel the dust of the dry prairie tickling your 
 nostrils. You could see the slide of the 
 horse's withers and watch the play of the 
 naked Indian's arm muscles. I should like 
 to enroll as a charter member of a league of 
 Americans who believe that Frederic Rem- 
 ington and Howard Pyle were greater 
 painters than any Old Master that ever 
 turned out blistered saints and fly-blown 
 cherubim. And if every one who secretly 
 thinks the same way about it would only 
 join in — of coyrse they wouldn't, but if they 
 would — we'd be strong enough to elect a 
 president on a platform calling for a pro- 
 
106 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 
 
 hibitive tariff against the foreign-pauper- 
 labor Old Masters of Europe. 
 
 While we were about it our league could 
 probably do something in the interests of 
 sculpture. It is apparent to any fair-minded 
 person that sculpture has been very much 
 overdone in this country. It seems to us 
 there should be a law against perpetuating 
 any of our great men in marble or bronze or 
 stone or amalgam fillings until after he has 
 been dead a couple of hundred years, and 
 by that time a fresh crop ought to be coming 
 on and probably we shall have lost the de- 
 sire to create such statues. 
 
 A great man who cannot live in the affec- 
 tionate and grateful memories of his fellow 
 countrymen isn't liable to live if you put up 
 statues of him; that, however, is not the 
 main point. 
 
 The artistic aspect is the thing to consider. 
 So few of our great men have been really 
 pretty to look at. Andrew Jackson made a 
 considerable dent in the history of his per- 
 iod, but when it comes to beauty, there isn't 
 a floor-walker in a department store any- 
 where that hasn't got him backed clear off 
 
Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 107 
 
 the pedestal. In addition to that, the sort 
 of clothes weVe been wearing for the last 
 century or so do not show up especially well 
 in marble. Putting classical draperies on 
 our departed solons has been tried, but carv- 
 ing a statesman with only a towel draped 
 over him, like a Roman senator coming out 
 of a Turkish bath, is a departure from the 
 real facts and must be embarrassing to his 
 shade. The greatest celebrities were ever 
 the most modest of men. TU bet the spirit 
 of the Father of His Country blushes every 
 time he flits over that statue of himself 
 alongside the Gapitol at Washington — the 
 one showing him sitting in a bath cabinet 
 with nothing on but a sheet. 
 
 Sticking to the actual conditions doesn't 
 seem to help much either. Future genera^ 
 tions will come and stand in front of the 
 statue of a leader of thought who flourished 
 back about 1840, say,* and wonder how any- 
 body ever had feet like those and lived. 
 Horace Greeley's chin whiskers no doubt 
 looked all right on Horace when he was 
 alive, but when done in bronze they invar- 
 iably present a droopy not to say dropsical 
 
108 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 
 
 appearance; and the kind of bone-handled 
 umbrella that Daniel Webster habitually 
 carried has never yet been successfully 
 worked out in marble. When you contem- 
 plate the average statue of Lincoln — and 
 most of them, as you may have noticed, are 
 very average — you do not see there the 
 majesty and the grandeur and the abiding 
 sorrow of the man and the tragedy of his 
 life. At least I know I do not see those 
 things. I see a pair of massive square-toed 
 boots, such as Fm sure Father Abe never 
 wore — he couldn't have worn 'em and 
 walked a step — and I see a beegum hat 
 weighing a ton and a half, and I say to my- 
 self : ^^This is not the Abraham Lincoln who 
 freed the slaves and penned the Gettysburg 
 address. No, sir! A man with those legs 
 would never have been president — he'd 
 have been in a dime museum exhibiting his 
 legs for ten cents a look — and they'd have 
 been worth the money too." 
 
 Nobody seems to have noticed it, but we 
 undoubtedly had the cube form of expres- 
 sion in our native sculpture long before it 
 came out in painting. 
 
Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 109 
 
 To get a better idea of what Fm trying 
 to drive at, just take a trip up through Cen- 
 tral Park the next time you are in New 
 York and pause a while before those bronzes 
 of Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns 
 which stand on the Mall. They are called 
 bronzes, but to^me they always looked more 
 like castings. I don't care if you are as 
 Scotch as a haggis, I know in advance what 
 your feelings will be. If you decide that 
 these two men ever looked in life like those 
 two bronzes you are going to lose some of 
 your love and veneration for them right 
 there on the spot; or else you are going to 
 be filled with an intense hate for the persons 
 who have libeled them thus, after they were 
 dead and gone and not in position to pro- 
 tect themselves legally. But you don't nec- 
 essarily have to come to New York — 
 you've probably got some decoration in your 
 home town that is equally sad. ThereVe 
 been a lot of good stone-masons spoiled in 
 this country to make enough sculptors to go 
 round. 
 
 But while we are thinking these things 
 about art and not daring to express them, I 
 
no Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 
 
 take note that new schools may come and 
 new schools may go, but there is one class 
 of pictures that always gets the money and 
 continues to give general satisfaction among 
 the masses. 
 
 I refer to the moving pictures. 
 
Cobb's Bill-ofFare 
 
 SPORT 
 
Cobb's Bill'of-Fare 
 
 Sport 
 
 AS I UNDERSTAND it, sport is hard 
 / \ work for which you do not get paid. 
 JL l^If, for hire, you should consent to go 
 forth and spend eight hours a day slamming 
 a large and heavy hammer at a mark, that 
 would be manual toil, and you would be- 
 long to the union and carry a card, and have 
 political speeches made to you by persons 
 out for the labor vote. But if you do this 
 without pay, and keep it up for more than 
 eight hours on a stretch, it then becomes 
 sport of a very high order — and if you con- 
 tinue it for a considerable period of time, at 
 more or less expense to yourself, you are 
 eventually given a neat German-silver 
 badge, costing about two dollars, which you 
 treasure devotedly ever after. A man who 
 walks twenty-five miles a day for a month 
 without getting anything for it — except two 
 
114 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 
 
 lines on the sporting page — is a devotee of 
 pedestrianism, and thereby acquires great 
 merit among his fellow athletes. A man 
 who walks twenty-five miles a day for a 
 month and gets paid for it is a letter-carrier. 
 
 Also sport is largely a point of view. A 
 skinny youth who flits forth from a gymna- 
 sium attired in the scenario of a union suit, 
 with a design of a winged Welsh rarebit on 
 his chest, and runs many miles at top speed 
 through the crowded marts of trade, is high- 
 ly spoken of and has medals hung on him. 
 If he flits forth from a hospital somewhat 
 similarly attired, and does the same thing, 
 the case is diagnosed as temporary insanity 
 — and we drape a strait-jacket on him and 
 send for his folks. Such is the narrow mar- 
 gin that divides Marathon and mania; and 
 it helps to prove that sport is mainly a state 
 of mind. 
 
 I am speaking now with reference to our 
 own country. Different nations have dif- 
 ferent conceptions of this subject. Golf and 
 eating haggis in a state of original sin are 
 the national pastimes of the Scotch, a hardy 
 race. At submarine boating and military 
 
Cobb's Bill-ofFare 115 
 
 ballooning the French acknowledge no 
 superiors. Their balloons go up and never 
 come down, and their submarines go down 
 and never come up. The Irish are born club 
 swingers, as witness any police force; and 
 the Swiss, as is well known, have no equals 
 at Alpine mountain climbing, chasing 
 cuckoos into wooden clocks, and running 
 hotels. Fve always believed that, if the 
 truth were only known, the reason why the 
 Swiss Family Robinson did so well in that 
 desert clime was because they opened a 
 hotel and took in the natives to board. 
 
 Among certain branches of the Teutonic 
 races the favorite indoor sport is suicide by 
 gas, and the favorite outdoor sport is going 
 to a schutzenfest and singing Ach du lieber 
 Augustin! coming home. To Italy the rest 
 of us are indebted for unparalleled skill in 
 eating spaghetti with one tool — they use the 
 putting iron all the way round. Our cousins, 
 the English, excel at archery, tea-drinking 
 and putting the fifty-six pound protest. 
 Thus we lead the world at contesting Olym- 
 pian games and winning them, and they lead 
 the world at losing them first and then con- 
 
116 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 
 
 testing them. In catch-as-catch-can wrest- 
 ling between Suffragettes and policemen the 
 English also hold the present championship 
 at all weights. And so it goes. 
 
 We in America have a range of sports and 
 pastimes that is as wide as our continent, 
 which is fairly wide as continents go. In 
 using the editorial we here I do not mean, 
 however, to include myself. At sport I am 
 no more than an inoffensive onlooker. One 
 time or another I have tried many of our 
 national diversions and have found that 
 those which are not strenuous enough are 
 entirely too strenuous for a person of fairly 
 settled habits. It is much easier to look on 
 and less fatiguing to the system. I find that 
 the best results along sporting lines are at- 
 tained by taking a comfortable seat up in 
 the grandstand, lighting a good cigar and 
 leaning back and letting somebody else do 
 the heavy work. Reading about it is also a 
 very good way. 
 
 Take fishing, now, for example. What 
 can be more delightful on a bright, pleasant 
 afternoon, when the wind is in exactly the 
 right quarter, than to take up a standard 
 
Cobb's Bill'of-Fare 111 
 
 work on fishing, written by some gifted 
 traveling passenger agent, and with him to 
 snatch the elusive finny tribe out of their 
 native element, while the reel whirs deliri- 
 ously and the hooked trophy leaps high in 
 air, struggling against the feathered barb of 
 the deceptive lure, and a waiter is handy if 
 you press the button? I have forgotten the 
 rest of the description; but any railroad line 
 making a specialty of summer-resort busi- 
 ness will be glad to send you the full details 
 by mail, prepaid. In literature, fishing is 
 indeed an exhilarating sport; but, so far as 
 my experience goes, it does not pan out 
 when you carry the idea farther. 
 
 To begin with, there is the matter of 
 tackle. Some people think collecting 
 orchids is expensive — and I guess it is, the 
 way the orchid market is at present; and 
 some say matching up pearls costs money. 
 They should try buying fishing tackle once. 
 If J. Pierpont Morgan had gone in for fish- 
 ing tackle instead of works of art he would 
 have died in the hands of a receiver. Any 
 self-respecting dealer in sporting goods 
 would be ashamed to look his dependent 
 
118 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 
 
 family in the face afterward if he suffered 
 you to escape from his lair equipped for 
 even the simplest fishing expedition unless 
 he had sawed off about ninety dollars' worth 
 of fishing knickknacks on you. 
 
 Let us say, then, that you have mortgaged 
 the old home and have acquired enough 
 fishing tackle to last you for a whole day. 
 Then you go forth, always conceding that 
 vou are an amateur fisherman who fishes for 
 fun as distinguished from a professional 
 fisherman who fishes for fish — and you get 
 into a rowboat that you undertake to pull 
 yourself and that starts out by weighing half 
 a ton and gets half a ton heavier at each 
 stroke. You pull and pull until your spine 
 begins to unravel at both ends, and your 
 palms get so full of water blisters you feel 
 as though you were carrying a bunch of 
 hothouse grapes in each hand. And after 
 going about nine miles you unwittingly an- 
 chor off the mouth of a popular garbage 
 dump and everything you catch is second- 
 hand. The sun beats down upon you with 
 unabated fervor and the back of your neck 
 colors up like a meerschaum pipe; and after 
 
'EVERYTHING YOU CATCH 
 IS SECOND-HAND" 
 
Cobb's Bi //-of- Fare 121 
 
 about ten minutes you begin to yearn with a 
 great, passionate yearning for a stiff collar 
 and some dry clothes, and other delights of 
 civilization. 
 
 If, on the other hand, I am being guided 
 by an experienced angler it has been my ob- 
 servation that he invariably takes me to a 
 spot where the fish bit greedily yesterday 
 and will bite avariciously tomorrow, but, 
 owing to a series of unavoidable circum- 
 stances, are doing very little in the biting 
 line today. Or if by any chance they should 
 be biting they at once contract an intense 
 aversion for my goods. Others may catch 
 them as freely as the measles, but toward me 
 fish are never what you would call infec- 
 tious. I'm one of those immunes. Or else 
 the person in charge forgets to bring any 
 bait along. This frequently happens when 
 I am in the party. 
 
 One day last summer I went fishing in the 
 Savannah River, and we traveled miles and 
 miles to reach the fishing-ground. We found 
 the water there alive with fish, and anchored 
 where they were thickest; and then the per- 
 son who was guiding the expedition discov- 
 
122 Cobb'^s Bill'of'Fare 
 
 ered that he had left the bait on the wharf. 
 He is the most absent-minded man south of 
 the Ohio anyhow. In the old days before 
 Georgia went dry he had to give up carry- 
 ing a crook-handled umbrella. He would 
 invariably leave it hanging on the rail. So 
 I should have kept the bait in mind myself 
 — but I didn't, being engaged at the time in 
 sun-burning a deep, radiant magenta. How- 
 ever it was not a fast color — long before 
 night it was peeling off in long, painful 
 strips. 
 
 Suppose you do catch something! You 
 cast and cast, sometimes burying your hook 
 in submerged debris and sometimes in ten- 
 der portions of your own person. After a 
 while you land a fish; but a fish in a boat 
 is rarely so attractive as he was in a book. 
 One of the drawbacks about a fish is that he 
 becomes dead so soon — and so thoroughly. 
 
 I have been speaking thus far of river 
 fishing. I would not undertake to describe 
 at length the joys of brook fishing, because 
 T tried it only once. Once was indeed suffi- 
 cient, not to say ample. On this occasion I 
 was chaperoned by an old, experienced 
 
Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 123 
 
 brook fisherman. I was astonished when I 
 got my first view of the stream. It seemed 
 to me no more than a trickle of moisture 
 over a bed of boulders — a gentle perspira- 
 tion coursing down the face of Nature, as it 
 were. Any time they tapped a patient for 
 dropsy up that creek there would be a de- 
 structive freshet, I judged; but, as it devel- 
 oped, this brook was deceptive — it was full 
 of deep, cold holes. I found all these holes. 
 I didn't miss a single one. While I was 
 finding them and then crawling out of them, 
 my companion was catching fish. He 
 caught quite a number, some of them being 
 nearly three inches long. They were 
 speckled and had rudimentary gills and 
 suggestions of fins, and he said they were 
 brook trout — and I presume they were; but 
 if they had been larger they would have 
 been sardines. You cannot deceive me re- 
 garding the varieties of fish that come in 
 cans. I would say that the best way to land 
 a brook trout is to go to a restaurant and 
 order one from a waiter in whom you have 
 confidence. In that way you will avoid 
 those deep holes. 
 
124 Cobb's Bill-ofFare 
 
 Nor have I ever shone as a huntsman. If 
 the shadowy roeshad is not for me neither is 
 her cousin, the buxom roebuck. Nor do I 
 think I will ever go in for mounta-in-climb- 
 ing as a steady thing, having tried it. Poets 
 are fond of dwelling upon the beauties of 
 the everlasting hills, swimming in purple 
 and gold — but no poet ever climbed one. If 
 he ever did he would quit boosting and start 
 knocking. I was induced to scale a large 
 mountain in the northern part of New York. 
 It belonged to the state; and, like so many 
 other things the state undertakes to run, it 
 was neglected. No effort whatever had 
 been made to make it cozy and comfortable 
 for the citizen. It was one of those moun- 
 tains that from a distance look smooth and 
 gentle of ascent, but turn out to be rugged 
 and seamy and full of rocks with sharp cor- 
 ners on them at about the height of the aver- 
 age human knee or shin. The lady for 
 whom that mountain in Mexico, Chapulte- 
 pec, is named — oh, yes. Miss Anna Peck — 
 would have had a perfectly lovely time scal- 
 ing that mountain ; but I didn't. 
 
 After we had climbed upward at an acute 
 
" HE COULD BEAT ME CLIMBING, 
 
 PUT AT PANTING I HAD HIM LICKED TO A WHISPER " 
 
Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 121 
 
 angle for several hundred miles — my com- 
 panion said yards, but I know better; it was 
 miles — I threw myself prone upon the softer 
 surfaces of a large granite slab, feeling that 
 I could go no farther. I also wished to 
 have plenty of room in which to pant. He 
 could beat me climbing, but at panting I 
 had him licked to a whisper. He was a 
 person without sympathy. In his bosom the 
 milk of human kindness had clabbered and 
 turned to a brick-cheese. He stood there 
 and laughed. There are times to laugh, but 
 this was not one of the times. Anyway I al- 
 ways did despise those people who are built 
 like sounding boards and have fine acoustic 
 qualities inside their heads — and not much 
 of anything else; but never did I despise 
 them more than at that moment. He sent his 
 grating, raucous, discordant, ill-timed guf- 
 faws reverberating ofif among the precipi- 
 tous crags, and then he turned from me and 
 went forging ahead. 
 
 He was almost out of sight when I re- 
 membered about there being bears on that 
 mountain; so I rose and undertook to forge 
 ahead too. I was not a great success at it 
 
128 Cobb's Btll-of-Fare 
 
 however. I know now that if ever I should 
 turn to a life of crime forgery would not be 
 my forte. I do not forge readily. Eventu- 
 ally, though, I reached the summit, he being 
 already there. We had come up for the 
 view, but I seemed to have lost my interest 
 in views ; so, while he looked at the view, I 
 reclined in a prostrate position and resumed 
 panting. That was three years ago and I 
 am still somewhat behind with my pants. 
 I am going to take a week ofif sometime and 
 pant steadily and try to catch up ; but the 
 outing taught me one thing — I learned a 
 simple way of descending a steep mountain. 
 If one is of a circular style of construction 
 it is very simple. One rolls. 
 
 Camping is highly spoken of, and I have 
 tried camping a number of times. When I 
 go camping it rains. It begins to rain when 
 I start and it keeps on raining until I come 
 back. It never fails. I have often thought 
 that drought-sufiferers in various parts of the 
 country who seek to attract rain in dry spells 
 make a mistake. They try the old-fashioned 
 Methodist way of praying for it, or the new 
 scientific way of shooting dynamite bombs 
 
Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 129 
 
 off and trying to blast it out of the heavens ; 
 when, as a matter of fact, the best plan 
 would be to send for me and get me to go 
 camping in the arid district. It would then 
 rain heavily and without cessation. 
 
 It is a fine thing to talk about the per- 
 fumed and restful bed of balsam boughs, 
 and the crackle of the campfire at dusk, and 
 the dip in the mirrored bosom of the pel- 
 lucid lake at dawn — old Emerson Hough 
 does all that to perfection; but these things 
 assume a different aspect when it rains. 
 There are three conditions in life when any 
 latent selfishness in a man's being, however 
 far down it may be buried ordinarily, will 
 come surging to the surface — when he is 
 courting a girl against strong opposition; 
 when he is playing a gentleman's game of 
 poker, purely for sociability; and when he 
 is camping out and it rains. Before a man 
 makes up his mind that he will take a girl 
 to be his wife he should induce her to go in 
 surf bathing and see how she looks when she 
 comes out; and before he makes up his mind 
 that he will take a man to be his best friend 
 he should go camping with him in the rainy 
 
130 Cobb^s Bill'of'Fare 
 
 season — the answer in both cases being that 
 then he won't do either one. 
 
 I remember going camping once with a 
 man who before that had appeared to be all 
 that one could ask in the way of a chosen 
 comrade; but after we had spent four days 
 cooped up together in an eight-by-ten tent 
 that was built with sloping shoulders, like 
 an Englishman's overcoat, listening to the 
 sough of the wind through the wet pine 
 trees without, and dodging the streams of 
 water that percolated through the dripping 
 roof within, I could think of more than 
 seven thousand things about that man that 
 I cordially disliked. 
 
 His whiskers gradually became the most 
 distasteful of all to me. Either he hadn't 
 brought a razor along or it was too wet for 
 shaving — or something; and his whiskers 
 grew out, and they were bristly and red in 
 color, which was something I had not sus- 
 pected before. As I sat there with the little 
 rivulets running down the back of my neck 
 and the rust forming on my amalgam fill- 
 ings and mold on my shoes and mushrooms 
 sprouting under my hatband, it seemed to 
 
CobPs Bill-of-Fare 131 
 
 me that he had taken an unfair advantage 
 of me by having red whiskers. Viewed 
 through the drizzle they appeared to be the 
 reddest, the most inflammatory, the most 
 poisonous-looking whiskers I ever saw! 
 They were too red to be natural. 
 
 I decided finally that he must have been 
 scared by a Jersey bull so that his whiskers 
 turned red in a single night — and I was get- 
 ting ready to twit him about it; but he beat 
 me to it. It seemed that all this time he 
 had been feeling more and more deeply of- 
 fended at the way in which my ears were 
 adjusted to my head. He couldn't make up 
 his mind, he said, which way he would hate 
 me more — with my ears or without them; 
 but he was willing to take a butcher knife 
 and experiment. He also said that, as an 
 expert bookkeeper, he wouldn't know 
 whether to enter my ears as outstanding 
 losses or amounts brought forward. Going 
 into those woods we were just the same as 
 Damon and Pythias ; but coming out his bite 
 would have been instant death, and I felt 
 toward him exactly as the tarantula does 
 
132 Cobb^s Bill'of'Fare 
 
 toward the centipede. We were the origi- 
 nal Blue-Gum Twins. 
 
 Coming now to aquatic sports as distin- 
 guished from pastimes ashore, I feel that I 
 am better qualified to speak authoritatively, 
 having had more experience in that direc- 
 tion. Let us start with canoeing. Canoeing 
 is a sport fraught with constant surprises. A 
 canoeing trip is rarely the same thing twice 
 in succession; and particularly is this true 
 in streams where the temperature of the 
 water is subject to change. It is compara- 
 tively easy to paddle a canoe if you only 
 remember to scoop toward you. You merely 
 reverse the process by which truly refined 
 people imbibe soup. Even if you never 
 master the art of paddling you may still get 
 along fairly well if you know how to swim. 
 On the whole I would say that one is liable 
 to enjoy a longer career as a canoeist where 
 one swims but can't paddle, than where one 
 paddles but can't swim. 
 
 Approaching the subject of motor-boat- 
 ing as compared with sailboating, we find 
 the situation becoming complicated and 
 growing technical. In sailing, as is gener- 
 
Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 133 
 
 ally known, you depend upon the wind; and 
 there are only two things the wind does — 
 one is to blow and the other is not to blow. 
 But when you begin to figure up the things 
 that a motor boat will do when you don't 
 want it to, and won't do when you do want 
 it to, you are face to face with one of 
 the most complicated mathematical jobs 
 known to the realm of mechanical science. 
 A motor boat undoubtedly has a larger 
 and fancier repertoire of cute tricks and un- 
 expected ways than anything in the nature 
 of machinery. I know this to be true, be- 
 cause I have a relative who suffers from 
 motor-boatitis in an advanced form. He has 
 owned many different brands of motor boats 
 — that is one reason, I think, why he is not 
 wealthier; in fact he has had about all the 
 kinds there are except a kind that will start 
 when you wish it to and stop when you ex- 
 pect it to. His motor boats do nearly every- 
 thing — backfire, and fail to spark, and clog 
 up, and blow up, and break down, and 
 smash up and drift ashore, and drift out 
 from shore, and have the asthma and the 
 heaves and impediments of speech; but he 
 
134 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 
 
 has never yet owned one that could be de- 
 pended upon to do the two things I have 
 just mentioned. 
 
 After trying various models and discard- 
 ing them, he now has one of the most com- 
 plete motor boats made. It has what is 
 known as a hunting cabin, it being so called, 
 I think, because the moment anybody gets 
 into it he has to get out again while the 
 owner crawls in and takes up all the seats 
 and hunts for something. It is the theory 
 that one could live afloat in this hunting 
 cabin — and so one could if one were only 
 a dachshund and inured to exposure. It is 
 plenty wide enough for the average dachs- 
 hund and plenty high enough, too, but not 
 more than about two-thirds long enough. If 
 one were a dachshund one would either 
 have to coil up or else remain partly out- 
 doors. Also, on board is a galley, which 
 would be a success in every way if you could 
 find a style of cook who could get used to 
 sitting on one hole of the stove while he 
 cooked on the other. One of those talented 
 parlor magicians who does light housekeep- 
 ing in a borrowed high hat by breaking raw 
 
Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 135 
 
 eggs into it and then taking out omelet 
 souffles, might fill the bill — only I never 
 have chanced to see a parlor magician yet 
 who could crowd himself and his feet into 
 that galley at the same time. 
 
 The principal feature of this motor boat, 
 however, is the engine, which is a very com- 
 plicated and beautiful thing, with coils and 
 plugs and brakes strewed about over it here 
 and there, and a big flywheel superimposed 
 right in front. It is the theory that, by open- 
 ing several cocks and closing several others, 
 and adjusting about fifteen or twenty little 
 duflickers just so, and then revolving this 
 wheel briskly with a crank provided for that 
 purpose, the engine can be started. It is 
 supposed to say chug-chug a couple of times 
 impatiently, and then go scooting away, 
 chug-chugging like an inspired slide-trom- 
 bone. 
 
 Such is the theory, but such is not the fact. 
 I've seen the owner crank her until his back- 
 bone comes unjointed, without getting any 
 response whatsoever. And then, just when 
 he is about to succumb to hate and overexer- 
 tion, the thing says tut-tut reprovingly — and 
 
136 Cobb's Bill'of'Fare 
 
 then gives one tired pish and a low mourn- 
 ful tush and coughs about a pint of warm 
 gasoline into his face and dies as dead as 
 Jesse James. I've seen her do that time 
 and time again; but if she ever does start, 
 the only way to stop her is to steer into some 
 solid immovable object, such as the Western 
 Hemisphere. 
 
 At that, motor-boating for an amateur 
 such as I am has certain advantages over 
 sailboating. A motor-boatist — even the most 
 reckless kind — knows enough to stay ashore 
 when a West Indian hurricane is romping 
 along the coast, playfully chasing its own 
 tail like a young puppy; but that kind of a 
 situation is just pie for your seasoned sail- 
 boatist. 
 
 Only last summer I had a very distressing 
 experience in connection with a sailboat, 
 which was owned by a friend of mine — or 
 perhaps I should say he was a friend of 
 mine until this matter came up. From the 
 clubhouse porch I had often admired his 
 boat skimming gracefully over the bay, 
 with its sail making a white gore against the 
 blue background; and one day he invited 
 
""ffiSSl^^- 
 
 " SHE WAS NOT MUCH LARGER 
 THAN A SOAPDISH" 
 
Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 139 
 
 me to go out with him for a sail. Before I 
 had time for that second thought which is so 
 desirable under such circumstances, I found 
 myself committed to the venture. 
 
 Right here, though, I wish to state that if 
 anybody ever gets me out in a small sailboat 
 again it will be over my dead body. 
 
 Well, anyway, we cast off, as he called it. 
 I did not like that phrase — cast oflf — it 
 sounded too much as though one were bid- 
 ding farewell to all earthly ties — and almost 
 immediately I was struck by other discon- 
 certing facts. The first one was that his 
 boat, which had looked roomy and commo- 
 dious when viewed from shore, appeared to 
 shrink up so when you were aboard her. 
 Really, she was not much larger than a soap- 
 dish and not nearly so reliable. And an- 
 other thing I noticed was a lot of the angri- 
 est-looking clouds that anybody ever saw, 
 piling up on the horizon. And the waves 
 were slopping up and down, and giving to 
 the water that dark, forbidding appearance 
 that is so inspiring in a marine painting, but 
 so depressing when you are thrown into 
 personal contact with it. 
 
140 Cobb's Bill -of- Fare 
 
 I made a suggestion. As I recall now, I 
 said something about waiting until the ty- 
 phoon was over; but my friend grinned in 
 an annoying, superior kind of way and said 
 he doubted whether the wind would blow 
 more than half a gale. He was right there 
 — but it was the last half. Anyhow he 
 swung her round and she heeled away over 
 in an alarming fashion, and we headed right 
 into the center of the vortex. He gave me 
 the end of a rope to hold and told me to 
 swing on to it, which I was very glad to do, 
 because there are times and places when it 
 gives you a slight sense of comfort to have 
 anything at all to hold to, even if it is only a 
 rope. On and on we careened madly. I 
 was so occupied with barkening to the howl 
 of the mad winds in the rigging and watch- 
 ing the mad waves that, when he suddenly 
 called out something which sounded like 
 Hard Ah Lee, I paid no attention. If his 
 fancy led him in a moment of dire peril like 
 this to be yelling for somebody with a 
 name like a Chinese laundryman, it was no 
 concern of mine. 
 
 Then he bellowed: ^^Leggo that sheet!" 
 
Cobb's Bi //-of- Fare 141 
 
 Now I knew there was something about a 
 sailboat called a sheet, but I naturally as- 
 sumed it was the sail. I leave it to any 
 disinterested person if a sail, being white 
 and more or less square in shape, doesn't 
 look more like a sheet than a mere rope 
 does. So, as I wasn't near the sail, but was 
 merely holding on to my rope, I started to 
 tell him I wasn't touching his blamed old 
 sheet. But the words were never spoken. 
 
 The boat tried to shy out from under me 
 and came very nearly succeeding. At the 
 same time, she buckjumped and stood right 
 up on one edge, like a demented gravy dish. 
 At the same moment, also, a considerable 
 portion of the Atlantic Ocean came aboard 
 and lit in my lap, and something struck me 
 alongside the head with frightful force; and 
 something else scraped me off the place 
 where I was sitting and hurled me head- 
 long. 
 
 When I came to, the man who owned the 
 boat was scrambling round, stepping on me 
 and my clothes, and grabbing at loose ends, 
 and swearing; but as soon as he had a mo- 
 ment to spare from these other duties he 
 
142 Cobb's Bi I /-of- Fare 
 
 called me a derned idiot! I was his guest, 
 mind you, and he used that language toward 
 me. 
 
 ^Tfou derned idiot!" he said. ^^Didn't you 
 see she was about to jibe?" 
 
 I told him in a dignified manner that I 
 certainly did not; that had I known she was 
 about to jibe I would most certainly have 
 jobe with her; that personally I preferred 
 any amount of jibbing, however painful, to 
 being drowned first and then beaten to 
 death. I demanded to know why he had 
 assaulted me upon the head and what he 
 did it with. 
 
 It developed, though, that he had not 
 struck me at all. The boom swung round 
 and hit me. This is a heavy section of lum- 
 ber, and I think it is called a boom from the 
 hollow, ringing sound it makes when dash- 
 ing out the brains of amateur sailors. In 
 my judgment these booms are dangerous and 
 their presence should not be permitted 
 aboard a sailing craft — or, at least, they 
 should be towed a safe distance aft. 
 
 But I digress. Referring to the devastat- 
 ing and angry elements that encompassed us. 
 
"THINK OF BEING LAID FACE DOWN^VARD 
 
 FIRMLY ACROSS A SINEAVY KNEE AND BEATEN FORTY-LOVE 
 
 AVITH ONE OF THOSE HARD CATGUT RACKETS!" 
 
Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 145 
 
 the owner of the boat said there was now a 
 nice, fresh breeze blowing, and that he 
 hated to miss the fun; but if I preferred to 
 he would run back in and hug the shore. 
 Hug it! I was ready to kiss it! What I 
 wanted to do was to take that dear shore in 
 both arms and press my throbbing cheeks 
 against her mossy breast, and swear that 
 nothing should ever again come between me 
 and the solid part of the continent of North 
 America. 
 
 So, by a sheer miracle escaping death on 
 the way, we returned, and I betook myself 
 off of that craft and headed straight for the 
 clubhouse. I wish to take advantage of 
 this opportunity, however, to deny the re- 
 port subsequently circulated by certain 
 malicious persons to the effect that I was 
 scared. Any passing agitation I may have 
 betrayed was due to my relief at finding 
 that the cyclone, despite its fury, had not 
 swept the North Atlantic Coast bare. I 
 also wish to deny the story that I was pale. 
 I have one of those complexions that come 
 and go. Anybody who knows me will tell 
 you that. 
 
146 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 
 
 However, I have decided to give up sail- 
 boating; and, to a person of my shape and 
 conservative tendencies, this leaves the 
 field of outdoor sport considerably circum- 
 scribed. I am too peaceful for baseball and 
 not warlike enough for football. I had 
 thought some of taking up tennis, but have 
 been deterred by the fact that so many young 
 women excel at tennis. I could stand being 
 licked by another man, but the idea of fac- 
 ing one of those sinewy young-lady cham- 
 pions whose stalwart face looks out at you 
 from the sporting page is repellent to me. 
 
 I can understand why so very few of these 
 ultra-athletic college girls marry ofif early. 
 A man instinctively is drawn to the cling- 
 ing-vine type of female. If there is any 
 sturdy oak round the place he wants to be it. 
 But what I cannot understand is how these 
 brawny young persons can be the grand- 
 daughters and the great granddaughters 
 of those fragile creatures, with wasp waists 
 and tiny feet, who lived back in the 
 Early Victorian period and suffered from 
 megrims and vapors. I'll venture that 
 none of this generation ever had a vapor in 
 
Cobb's Bi //-of- Fare 147 
 
 her life; and as for megrims, she wouldn't 
 know one if she met it in the big road. She 
 may be muscle-bound and throw a splint 
 sometimes, or get the Charley horse; but 
 megrims are not for her — believe me! 
 
 Oh, IVe seen them often — the adorable 
 yet brawny creatures, leaping six feet into 
 the air and smacking a defenseless tennis 
 ball with such vigor that it started right ofif 
 in the general direction of Sioux Falls at 
 the rate of upwards of ninety miles an hour, 
 and coming down flat-footed without hav- 
 ing jostled so m.uch as a hairpin out of 
 place. You may worship them, all right 
 enough, but it is safer to do so at long dis- 
 tance. 
 
 Suppose you were hooked up for life to 
 a lady champion and you happened to dis- 
 please her? She'd spank you! Think of 
 being laid face downward firmly across a 
 sinewy knee and beaten forty-love with one 
 of those hard catgut rackets! The very 
 suggestion is intolerable to a believer in the 
 supremacy of the formerly sterner sex. 
 
 So I have decided not to take up tennis; 
 but the doctor says I need exercise, and I 
 
148 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 
 
 think I will go in for golf, which is a young 
 man's vice and an old man's penance. I 
 have already taken the preliminary steps. 
 I have joined a country club; I have also 
 chosen my caddie. He is a deaf-and-dumb 
 caddie, who has never been known to laugh 
 at anything. 
 
 That is why I chose him. 
 
 ^fij, 
 
 V?3