Roundabout Papers - Penn State University

Roundabout PapersPauline Leroux, and a host more! One much-admiredbeing of those days I confess I never cared for, and thatwas the chief male dancer—a very important personagethen, with a bare neck, bare arms, a tunic, and ahat and feathers, who used to divide the applause withthe ladies, and who has now sunk down a trap-door forever. And this frank admission ought to show that I amnot your mere twaddling laudator temporis acti—yourold fogy who can see no good except in his own time.They say that claret is better now-a-days, and cookerymuch improved since the days of MY monarch—of GeorgeIV. Pastry Cookery is certainly not so good. I have ofteneaten half a crown’s worth (including, I trust, gingerbeer)at our school pastry-cook’s, and that is a proof thatthe pastry must have been very good, for could I do asmuch now? I passed by the pastry-cook’s shop lately,having occasion to visit my old school. It looked a verydingy old baker’s; misfortunes may have come over him—those penny tarts certainly did not look so nice as I rememberthem: but he may have grown careless as he hasgrown old (I should judge him to be now about ninetysixyears of age), and his hand may have lost its cunning.Not that we were not great epicures. I remember howwe constantly grumbled at the quantity of the food inour master’s house—which on my conscience I believewas excellent and plentiful—and how we tried once ortwice to eat him out of house and home. At the pastrycook’swe may have over-eaten ourselves (I have admittedhalf a crown’s worth for my own part, but I don’tlike to mention the real figure for fear of perverting thepresent generation of boys by my monstrous confession)—wemay have eaten too much, I say. We did; butwhat then? The school apothecary was sent for: a coupleof small globules at night, a trifling preparation of sennain the morning, and we had not to go to school, so thatthe draught was an actual pleasure.For our amusements, besides the games in vogue, whichwere pretty much in old times as they are now (exceptcricket, par exemple—and I wish the present youth joyof their bowling, and suppose Armstrong and Whitworthwill bowl at them with light field-pieces next), there72