Читать книгу The Observations of Professor Maturin онлайн
3 страница из 38
William H. Carpenter
Columbia University February 14, 1916
The Observations of Professor Maturin
I
The Staff of Life
ssss1
MY friend Professor Bedelar Maturin exercises the right of a bachelor and a man of fifty to a considerable number of eccentricities. All of these are harmless, since he is by nature a gentleman; and, his habit being that of a scholar, some of them are of more than ordinary interest. I very well remember my first learning of that one I am about to describe. My family having left town for the summer, I found him dining at the Athenaeum, as I knew him frequently to do for the sake of detachment from the bachelor ménage he maintains—as much for his books as for himself—in a house near the river, not far from the university.
He beckoned me to take my already ordered dinner at the particular corner table for which his preference is always respected by his fellow Athenians, and, after a smile of greeting, he passed over to me the book he had been reading—“The Physiology of Taste,” by Brillat-Savarin—with the quiet comment, “The standard and gauge of modern civilization.”