Pipefuls | Page 4

of Dove's soul are the palette upon which the decumbent sun of
his spirit casts its vivid orange and scarlet colours. His joy is the more
perfect to behold because it bursts goldenly through the pangs of his
tender heart. His soul is like the infant Moses, cradled among dark and
prickly bullrushes; but anon it floats out upon the river and drifts
merrily downward on a sparkling spate.
It has nothing to do with Dove, but we will here interject the remark
that a pessimist overtaken by liquor is the cheeriest sight in the world.
Who is so extravagantly, gloriously, and irresponsibly gay?
Dove's eyes beaconed as the cider went its way. The sweet lingering
tang filled the arch of his palate with a soft mellow cheer. His gaze fell
upon us as his head tilted gently backward. We wish there had been a
painter there--someone like F. Walter Taylor--to rush onto canvas the

gorgeous benignity of his aspect. It would have been a portrait of the
rich Flemish school. Dove's eyes were full of a tender emotion,
mingled with a charmed and wistful surprise. It was as though the poet
was saying he had not realized there was anything so good left on earth.
His bearing was devout, religious, mystical. In one moment of
revelation (so it appeared to us as we watched) Dove looked upon all
the profiles and aspects of life, and found them of noble outline. Not
since the grandest of Grand Old Parties went out of power has Dove
looked less as though he felt the world were on the verge of an abyss.
For several moments revolution and anarchy receded, profiteers were
tamed, capital and labour purred together on a mattress of catnip, and
the cosmos became a free verse poem. He did not even utter the
customary and ungracious remark of those to whom cider potations are
given: "That'll be at its best in about a week." We apologized for the
cider being a little warmish from standing (discreetly hidden) under our
desk. Douce man, he said: "I think cider, like ale, ought not to be drunk
too cold. I like it just this way." He stood for a moment, filled with
theology and metaphysics. "By gracious," he said, "it makes all the
other stuff taste like poison." Still he stood for a brief instant, transfixed
with complete bliss. It was apparent to us that his mind was busy with
apple orchards and autumn sunshine. Perhaps he was wondering
whether he could make a poem out of it. Then he turned softly and
went back to his job in a life insurance office.
As for ourself, we then poured out another tumbler, lit a corncob pipe,
and meditated. Falstaff once said that he had forgotten what the inside
of a church looked like. There will come a time when many of us will
perhaps have forgotten what the inside of a saloon looked like, but
there will still be the consolation of the cider jug. Like the smell of
roasting chestnuts and the comfortable equatorial warmth of an oyster
stew, it is a consolation hard to put into words. It calls irresistibly for
tobacco; in fact the true cider toper always pulls a long puff at his pipe
before each drink, and blows some of the smoke into the glass so that
he gulps down some of the blue reek with his draught. Just why this
should be, we know not. Also some enthusiasts insist on having small
sugared cookies with their cider; others cry loudly for Reading pretzels.
Some have ingenious theories about letting the jug stand, either tightly

stoppered or else unstoppered, until it becomes "hard." In our
experience hard cider is distressingly like drinking vinegar. We prefer it
soft, with all its sweetness and the transfusing savour of the fruit
animating it. At the peak of its deliciousness it has a small, airy sparkle
against the roof of the mouth, a delicate tactile sensation like the feet of
dancing flies. This, we presume, is the 4-1/2 to 7 per cent of sin with
which fermented cider is credited by works of reference. There are
pedants and bigots who insist that the jug must be stoppered with a
corncob. For our own part, the stopper does not stay in the neck long
enough after the demijohn reaches us to make it worth while worrying
about this matter. Yet a nice attention to detail may prove that the cob
has some secret affinity with cider, for a Missouri meerschaum never
tastes so well as after three glasses of this rustic elixir.
That ingenious student of social niceties, John Mistletoe, in his famous
Dictionary of Deplorable Facts--a book which we heartily commend to
the curious, for he includes a long and most informing article