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THE BON VIVANT's COMPANION
of which would make a Prohibition agent burst into tears
and tear up his bootlegging contracts, he added,"then
smile." Again, when he had described a favorite beverage
in great and glamorous detail, he concluded with the simple
injunction, "Imbibe!" Occasionally he soared into the
more rarefied strata of literary endeavor and brought down
a poem; it is to one of these inspired moments, when the
mantle of Omar lay caressingly across his shoulders, that
we are indebted for the proper method of preparing mulled
wine, a not so mild beverage which in those simple and
lawless days was usually consumed amid the tender intima
cies of the home.
The Encyclopedia Brittanica and other standard works
of reference, to their shame be it said, contain no accounts
of Professor Thomas's life, and extensive research has failed
to unearth any information about the period of his early
youth. It seems fair to assume, however, that he did not
attend Yale College or otherwise employ his time in dissipa
tion, for at the age of twenty we find him a very eager but
humble Assistant to the Principal Bartender of a New
Haven saloon,where he soon attracted favorable attention by
his indefatigable quest of knowledge and his lush inventive
ness. He remained in New Haven for two years, constantly
adding to his store of wisdom, and conducting a series of
experiments by which he definitely disproved the theory,
then widely held, and in recent years revived, that the
capacity of the American college boy was (and is) prac
tically unlimited. In 1847, having exhausted New Haven
as well as a majority of the Yale lads, Professor Thomas
decided to seek hardier subjects for his tests, and so shipped
before the mast and sailed out of New York aboard the bark
Annie Smith.The skipper of the Annie Smith was a notorious
martinet, but he served excellent grog, and Professor
Thomas hoped that with this as a basis he might invent
something which would relieve the sailor's life of much
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