Reader, do not shrink; grant us a patient
ear. You do not know how rapidly you may change your own opinion and
feelings. Do you not remember with what awe we first read in the
"Almanach des Gourmands," that a certain _sauce piquante_ was so fine
that with it a man would eat his own mother? This was only twenty years
ago; yet all of us, now, are helping a high-bred gentleman, trading, on
a gigantic scale, in the bones of his great ancestor. What sublimity of
peddling!
To those who say, It is unnatural to eat our friends, we would answer,
that it is the office of civilization to remove us farther and farther
from Nature. Analyze the present magnitude called Lady, and you can
arithmetically state it, how little of it is nature-woman, and how
much is hoop-civilization. To those, again, who object, that it is too
primitive, we would reply, that the highest civilization is always a
return to Nature, which is likewise exemplified by many of our ladies in
the ball-room,--we mean by their upper portion.
But _revenons a nos moutons_. The Rev. Messrs. Williams and Calvert,
missionaries, for many long years, among the Fijians, state, in their
recently published work, that those unsophisticated children of Nature
eat "long pig,"--as they call, with graceful humor, roast-man, in
contradistinction to "short-pig," by which they designate our squealing
fellow-roasters,--from three different motives.
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