SHARKS AND SAUSAGES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LII, Issue 16098, 11 December 1915, Page 1 (Supplement)

SHARKS AND SAUSAGES.

BT TRASOi MORTON.

To-pat, the thermometer standing at about ninety, I sat in a restaurant appalled and watched a fat, perspiring man devour sausages. You may say it is against nature. It was; but it happened. His collar was limp to the point of collapse, and the perspiration was trickling into his eyes; but he ate a plate of sausages eagerly, and then he came again. There is something to admire in an appetite so independent of climate and the temperature, so free of dubious imaginings based on the Drice of meat. In this world in which gourmets multiply it is heartening to note that there are still many men as frank and simple and unquestioning as sharks in the matter of their food. The other day a shark came into the surf just near where I am living and bit a man's heel off. Ho was a whaler shark, and according to all the rules should not touch human flesh. But he had followed a shoal of salmon into the shallows, and seeing a bather's heel handy he made a mouthful of it. He was catholic and simple, first cousin to the honest devourer of sausages. The fact that whalers eat heels has added a new spice of excitement to the surfer's sport. Everything that happens is thus somehow useful. If the shark had stuck to his salmon and resisted the lure of new food we should all be missing a pleasant thrill. The shark's cousins on the human side have, of course, been somehow depraved by civilisation and the shocking vice of experiment. To-night I saw a man with a shark's jaw placidly devouring icecream and wafers, while near at hand a small girl with a minnow's mouth was making an end of a large crab. Life at table is full of just such contradiction. Watch a curate who thinks himself unobserved, and see with what ferocity ho will gnaw a chicken-bone. And then— Have you ever seen a chorus-girl eat whitebait? Let us draw a veil. I have heard various modest reformers in New Zealand declare that the people eat too much meat. The Australians eat more meat still, but they eat it quicker. Two men come into a club for lunch. They belong to the humble commercial class, and in busy times like these they can seldom spare more than an hour for lunch. They go to the bar to have just one drink of the physic that guarantees your light of commerce against all disorders of the brain and stomach. At the bar are other sympathetic souls; so one drink becomes three or four, and half an hour leaps merrily by before the prophylactic begins to settle. Then there is a little discussion of points so far overlooked, and in the end our two honest citizens have eleven minutes in which to eat a porter-house steak and walk three blocks to their office. Men. must work. A woman is so different. fcvhe does not waste time at bars because she knows that all waste is sinful. When she is moved to take a little light refreshment, say at three o'clock in the afternoon, she goes to a teashop with a couple of friends. At the teashop other dames of good habit are j found. They talk of various philanthropic enterprises, they a rink their tea, and by five o'clock they are through with it, at a cost per head of not much more than sixpence. If you arrange to have a table for yourself and party it costs you ninepence per head, but then you acquire distinction as a well-known hostess, and if your name and deed is not recorded in the appropriate column of the newspaper you support you know that there is something wrong with the condition of society. In Sydney the most aspiring feminines go to the Hotel Australia for their cup of tea, and there the average cost per head goes up to a shilling or more. But there you may see the most astonishing frocks in Sydney crushed out of shape by the idlest and clackiest crowd on earth— which is surely well worth the extra twopence. In Australia they don't provide afternoon tea at a fixed charge; they count so much extra for every cake that disappears. That is why Sydney women eat much less pastry in the afternoons than New Zealand women do. I've been looking round, and these are some of the instructive things that I have found out. Happily, no strike has as yet affected teashop® ; but onlv the other day we had a strike that affected bars very badly. For days there was next to no beer to be had. It sounds tragic, but the queer thing was that nobody seemed to mind much ; hardened beer-drinkers merely tried whisky for a change, and waxed exceeding glad. Our most moral patriots are very anxious about the poor soldiers. They plead that if the poor soldiers are permitted to drink alcoholic beverages they will be injured in their qualities as fighting stuff. They talk much of the shining examples of complete abstention— somehow sounds much more scientific and picturesque than total abstinence. They say, " Look at the Apostle Paul! Look at Melchizedek! Look at Mr. King O'Malley!" lam -waiting to hear them say. Look at the Kaiser! He does not touch spirits or strong drinks. He will not even eat the dark meat of chickens. This it is that keeps him sober and chaste and godly." I marvel at their overlooking a shining exemplar like The standing trouble with vour amateur moralist lies in the fact that he so seldom takes time to consider. Look at the Turks now ! You don't get them going to bars and drinking the Awful Stuff. They never touch it. From the cradle to the crrave they are teetotallers. Ho! for a draught from the crystal spring. I speak of these things with a certain pathos. I follow the Turk, as it happens. I look not on the wine when it is red, nor on the whisky that blinketh yellow in the bottle corked in Caledonia's stern, wild dales. And so I am fading away to a shadow owing to my frantic exertions in the realm of forlorn discovery. I want Ito discover a teetotal drink. There is, of course, tea : but my doctor says that it is poison when a man drinks nothing pise. Coffee, he declares, is worse. Now pure. cold, rlamv. tasteless, discouraging, unadulterated water I take to be the most depressing and dehumanising of all drinks. I have tried it. Once upon a time I took my courage in both hands and drank a pint of water at a sitting. Then I wandered jaundiced into a world where faint Hope sat weeping. I experienced that shocking hollow staleness of the stomach that onlv water-drinkers know. I had a horrid sense of impending disaster. Everything went ill with the world. We who are St. Satan's penitents need some happy beverage that is nice without being exiictly naughty, and modern science so far has helped us not at all. Tea, taken in large quantities habitually, wrecks the nerves, cocoa silts up the system till the very brain seems clogged, coffee make? men mad, lomonade is all extravagance of insipidity, soda-water tastes like the drippings from some sodden store of unapperising sin. Whv should the teetotaller be

the only poor dog on earth ouite without hope in this one great respect? I wait for a reply. I have waited, already, four years. A man from London assured me the other day that the most fierce and insistent of the old suffragettes are all inveterate water-drinkers. So now I know what I know, and I am almnsst tempted to so and be hapnv in Te Kuiti. Unfortunately I know nothing whatever about the land agency business. And it is too late to studv law or attempt Holy Orders. And onlv yesterday a man asked me in all good faith to go along and try some 1804 brandy he has. He paid £25 a bottle for it. I feel that I am too old to be subjected to such tantalising inrushes on the fastness of mv settled virtue. After all. the really wise whaler is not to be tempted by heels.