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Old Waldorf Bar Days
then among college and university men all over the
United States, and in many parts of the world. Harvard,
Yale, Princeton and Cornell men, for example, in large
numbers, either there supplemented their collegiate cur–
ricula, or else went to it for post-graduate courses. Other
institutions of learning were represented among its stu–
dents, but at least the names of those four have been
perpetuated in its annals by having cocktails named
after them-if there can be such a thing as perpetuity
when one is dealing with something dead and gone. For
the American School of Drinking is a thing of the past.
You, perhaps, may reason that it survives in every
other corner of the world save ours, and point trium–
phantly to the unchallengeable fact that the sign, "Amer–
ican Bar," has started more foreigners trying to read
English than all our missionaries and exported Standard
Oil cans, tied together.
Brother, you are a mere theorist. Practice will make
you a pessimist.
If
you think otherwise, be your own
tester. Take a steamer for Shanghai, or Yokohama, or
Singapore, or Bombay, or Cairo, taste what comes when
you order, and find yourself gazing at the hole of a
doughnut.
Faint traces still exist, it is true, of that once potent
school of bibulous instruction that in its day and in its
own peculiar way influenced more thought than the cis–
soid of Diodes, or the screw of Archimedes, rivaled the
reputation of Socrates for making the worse appear the
better reason, and ta.ogled up
~million
times more brains
than have ever tried to make out what Einstein has been
driving at. You may be so lucky as to find those reminders
['6]