It appeared, from a beautifully-engraved map hanging on the walls of the Sod Tavern, that this earthly tabernacle stood in the midst of an ideal town.  The map had probably been constructed by a poet, for it was quite superior to the limitations of sense and matter-of-fact.  According to the map, this solitary burrow was surrounded by Seminary, Depot, Court-House, Woolen Factory, and a variety of other potential institutions, which composed the flourishing city of New Cincinnati.  But the map was meant chiefly for Eastern circulation.

Charlton’s dietetic theories were put to the severest test at the table.  He had a good appetite.  A ride in the open air in Minnesota is apt to make one hungry.  But the first thing that disgusted Mr. Charlton was the coffee, already poured out, and steaming under his nose.  He hated coffee because he liked it; and the look of disgust with which he shoved it away was the exact measure of his physical craving for it.  The solid food on the table consisted of waterlogged potatoes, half-baked salt-rising bread, and salt-pork.  Now, young Charlton was a reader of the Water-Cure Journal of that day, and despised meat of all things, and of all meat despised swine’s flesh, as not even fit for Jews; and of all forms of hog, hated fat salt-pork as poisonously indigestible.  So with a dyspeptic self-consciousness he rejected the pork, picked off the periphery of the bread near the crust, cautiously avoiding the dough-bogs in the middle; but then he revenged himself by falling furiously upon the aquatic potatoes, out of which most of the nutriment had been soaked.

Jim, who sat alongside him, doing cordial justice to the badness of the meal, muttered that it wouldn’t do to eat by idees in Minnesoty.  And with the freedom that belongs to the frontier, the company begun to discuss dietetics, the fat gentleman roundly abusing the food for the express purpose, as Charlton thought, of diverting attention from his voracious eating of it.

“Simply despicable,” grunted the fat man, as he took a third slice of the greasy pork.  “I do despise such food.”

“Eats it like he was mad at it,” said Driver Jim in an undertone.

But as Charlton’s vegetarianism was noticed, all fell to denouncing it.  Couldn’t live in a cold climate without meat.  Cadaverous Mr. Minorkey, the broad-shouldered, sad-looking man with side-whiskers, who complained incessantly of a complication of disorders, which included dyspepsia, consumption, liver-disease, organic disease of the heart, rheumatism, neuralgia, and entire nervous prostration, and who was never entirely happy except in telling over the oft-repeated catalogue of his disgusting symptoms—­Mr. Minorkey, as he sat by his daughter, inveighed, in an earnest crab-apple voice, against Grahamism.  He would have been in his grave twenty years ago if it hadn’t been for good meat.  And then he recited in detail the many desperate attacks from which he had been saved by beefsteak.  But this pork he felt sure would make him sick.  It might kill him.  And he evidently meant to sell his life as dearly as possible, for, as Jim muttered to Charlton, he was “goin’ the whole hog anyhow.”