THE STORY OF AN ENTOMOLOGIST 



began to bring newspapers and magazines to the table. This was 

 distinctly not companionable, and I cudgelled my brains for a 

 topic so interesting that it would overcome the influence of the 

 weather. I thought a bit about the other seven men, and found 

 that they were all of New England birth or education. And so 

 I proposed this thesis: All of the New England eccentricities, the 

 running after strange gods from Theosophy to Babbism, the 

 great vogue of Christian Science, the interest in Spiritualism and 

 in strange quackeries of other kinds, and even the New England 

 conscience (which I contended was rather pathological than 

 ethical)— were due to a chronic racial dyspepsia, produced by 

 generations of bad cooking. The warm weather was forgotten, 

 newspapers and magazines were discarded, and for six nights 

 there was intensely animated conversation, accompanied by ham- 

 mering on the table. I told them, for example, that Boston was 

 the only city in the country in which they did not know how 

 to cook beans, and I also mentioned the famous New England 

 breakfast of doughnuts and pie. They grew greatly excited, and 

 of course, disputed the latter point. I told them that only a few 

 weeks previously, at a private house near Newburyport, I had 

 been given stewed clams and seven kinds of pie for breakfast. 



This was long ago, and I have forgotten just who the men 

 were, but I seem to remember that Frank Wigglesworth Clark 

 and Charles S. Munroe, both Harvard men; Carroll D. Wright, 

 then President of Clark University; and Henry S. Pritchard, 

 then President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 

 were four of them, and I am not quite sure but that Herbert 

 Putnam, an overseer of Harvard, was there. 



It is difficult to stop talking about the dear old Cosmos Club. 

 I must add some more. 



I have met a number of Arctic explorers at the Club. General 

 Greely, the leader of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition, has long 



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