for he had but two varieties, spruce and ginger. He wheeled his whole stock in a white-roofed hand-cart, ornamented with a sign which displayed two bottles obligingly discharging themselves into tumblers. “The artist,” says the author of the “Biglow Papers,” “had struggled manfully with the difficulties of his subject, but had not succeeded so well that we boys did not often debate in which of the twin bottles Spruce was typified, and in which Ginger.” Lewis himself, though, was believed to be able privately to distinguish between them by long and intimate study. The actual flavor of the respective potations seems to have been equally indeterminate; but the customer, while quaffing the cup that distends but not inebriates, was at any rate soothed by the most unmistakable and gratifying courtesy, three sirs to every glass—Beer, Sir? Yes, Sir. Spruce or ginger, Sir? “T can yet recall,” avers Lowell, “‘the innocent pride with which I walked away after that somewhat risky ceremony (for a bottle sometimes blew up), dilated not alone with carbonic-acid gas, but with the more ethereal fixed air of that titular flattery.”[1]
Next perhaps on the roll comes “Jimmy” O’Neil. Born in County Cork in 1794, he emigrated to this country in middle life. After trying his luck all over New England, he found his most remunerative stand at
- ↑ “Fireside Travels: Cambridge Thirty Years Ago.” Originally published in Putnam’s Monthly for April, 1854.
