He was what you
might call a human hazard--a golf-player would probably have
thought of him in that connection. He was eating flour dumplings,
using his knife for a niblick all the way round; and he lost every
other shot in a concealed bunker on the edge of the rough; and he
could make more noise sucking his teeth than some people could
make playing on a fife.
There is a popular belief to the effect that the Neapolitan eats
his spaghetti by a deft process of wrapping thirty or forty inches
round the tines of his fork and then lifting it inboard, an ell
at a time. This is not correct. The true Neapolitan does not eat
his spaghetti at all--he inhales it. He gathers up a loose strand
and starts it down his throat. He then respires from the diaphragm,
and like a troupe of trained angleworms that entire mass of spaghetti
uncoils itself, gets up off the plate and disappears inside him--en
masse, as it were--and making him look like a man who is chinning
himself over a set of bead portieres. I fear we in America will
never learn to siphon our spaghetti into us thus. It takes a
nation that has practiced deep breathing for centuries.
Chapter IX
The Deadly Poulet Routine
Under the head of European disillusionments I would rate, along
with the vin ordinaire of the French vineyard and inkworks, the
barmaid of Britain.
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