food is prepared you’d lose your appetite quick enough.” His parsimony had resulted in a compensating food mania: he declared that “in his young days” he “ruined his digestion by eating in restaurants,” he painted the most revolting pictures of the filth of these establishments, laughing scornfully down his nose as he declared: “I suppose you think it tastes better after some dirty, nasty, stinking nigger has wiped his old hands all over it” (phuh-phuh-phuh-phuh-phuh!)—here he would contort his face and snuffle scornfully down his nose; and he was bitter in his denunciation of “rich foods,” declaring they had “destroyed more lives than all the wars and all the armies since the beginning of time.”
As he had grown older he had become more and more convinced of the healthy purity of “raw foods,” and he prepared for himself at home raw revolting messes of chopped-up carrots, onions, turnips, even raw potatoes, which he devoured at table, smacking his lips with an air of keen relish, and declaring to his wife: “You may poison yourself on your old roasts and oysters and turkeys if you please: you wouldn’t catch me eating that stuff. No, sir! Not on your life! I think too much of my stomach!” But his use of the pronoun “you” was here universal rather than particular, because if that lady’s longevity had depended on her abstinence from “roasts and oysters and turkeys” there was no reason why she should not have lived for ever.
Or again, if it were a matter of clothing, a matter of fencing in his bones and tallows against the frozen nail of Boston winter, he would howl derisively: “An overcoat! Not on your life! I wouldn’t give two cents for all the old overcoats in the world! The only thing they’re good for is to gather up germs and give you colds and pneumonia. I haven’t worn an overcoat in thirty years, and I’ve never had the vestige—no! not the semblance—of a cold during all that time!”—an assertion that was not strictly accurate, since he always complained bitterly of at least two or three during the course of a single winter, declaring at those times that no more hateful, treacherous, damnable climate than that of Boston had ever been known.
Similarly, if it were a question of laundries he would scornfully declare that he would not send “his shirts and collars to let some dirty old Chinaman spit and hock upon them—yes!” he would gleefully howl, as some new abomination of nastiness suggested itself to his teeming brain—“yes! and iron it in, too, so you can walk around done up in old Chinaman’s spit!”—(Phuh-phuh-phuh-phuh-phuh!)—here he would grimace,
