In Germany, however, there is a pheasant agreeably smothered in young cabbage which is delicious and in season plentiful.  The only drawback to complete enjoyment of this dish is that the grasping and avaricious German restaurant keeper has the confounded nerve to charge you, in our money, forty cents for awhole pheasant and half a peck of cabbage—­say, enough to furnish a full meal for two tolerably hungry adults and a growing child.

The Germans like to eat and they love a hearty eater.  There should never be any trouble about getting a suitable person to serve us at the Kaiser’s court if the Administration at Washington will but harken to the voice of experience.  To the Germans the late Doctor Tanner would have been a distinct disappointment in an ambassadorial capacity; but there was a man who used to live in my congressional district who could qualify in a holy minute if he were still alive.  He was one of Nature’s noblemen, untutored but naturally gifted, and his name was John Wesley Bass.  He was the champion eater of the world, specializing particularly in eggs on the shell, and cove oysters out of the can, with pepper sauce on them, and soda crackers on the side.

I regret to be compelled to state, however, that John Wesley is no more.  At one of our McCracken County annual fairs, a few years back, he succumbed to overambition coupled with a mistake in judgment.  After he had established a new world’s record by eating at one sitting five dozen raw eggs he rashly rode on the steam merry-go-round.  At the end of the first quarter of an hour he fainted and fell off a spotted wooden horse and never spoke again, but passed away soon after being removed to his home in an unconscious condition.  I have forgotten what the verdict of the coroner’s jury was—­the attending physician gave it some fancy Latin name—­but among laymen the general judgment was that our fellow townsman had just naturally been scrambled to death.  It was a pity, too—­the German people would have cared for John Wesley as an ambassador.  He would have eaten his way right into their affections.

We have the word of history for it that Vienna was originally settled by the Celts, but you would hardly notice it now.  On first impressions you would say that about Vienna there was a noticeable suggestion—­a perceptible trace—­of the Teutonic; and this applies to the Austrian food in the main.  I remember a kind of Wiener-schnitzel, breaded, that I had in Vienna; in fact for the moment I do not seem to recall much else about Vienna.  Life there was just one Wiener-schnitzel after another.

In order to spread sweetness and light, and to the end, furthermore, that the ignorant people across the salted seas might know something of a land of real food and much food, and plenty of it and plenty of variety to it, I would that I might bring an expedition of Europeans to America and personally conduct it up and down our continent and back and forth crosswise of it.