Nevertheless, there occurred to me one other thing to be done.
Remembering old Moodie, and his relationship with Priscilla, I
determined to seek an interview, for the purpose of ascertaining
whether the knot of affairs was as inextricable on that side as I
found it on all others. Being tolerably well acquainted with the old
man's haunts, I went, the next day, to the saloon of a certain
establishment about which he often lurked. It was a reputable place
enough, affording good entertainment in the way of meat, drink, and
fumigation; and there, in my young and idle days and nights, when I
was neither nice nor wise, I had often amused myself with watching
the staid humors and sober jollities of the thirsty souls around me.
At my first entrance, old Moodie was not there. The more patiently
to await him, I lighted a cigar, and establishing myself in a corner,
took a quiet, and, by sympathy, a boozy kind of pleasure in the
customary life that was going forward. The saloon was fitted up with
a good deal of taste. There were pictures on the walls, and among
them an oil-painting of a beefsteak, with such an admirable show of
juicy tenderness, that the beholder sighed to think it merely
visionary, and incapable of ever being put upon a gridiron. Another
work of high art was the lifelike representation of a noble sirloin;
another, the hindquarters of a deer, retaining the hoofs and tawny
fur; another, the head and shoulders of a salmon; and, still more
exquisitely finished, a brace of canvasback ducks, in which the
mottled feathers were depicted with the accuracy of a daguerreotype.
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