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,,
a matter of common acceptance that even the most :firmly
established usages are subject to the mutations of time, and that
what was yesterday a practice confined to the far side of the railroad
tracks (a part of town often frequented by the best people but always
in closed hacks) is today definitely au fait in Mayfair. The concern
of men of intelligence is not so much with what may.be fashionable
as with what is reasonable, and, while..the notion of drinking cock–
tails directly after breakfast may seem at first consideration an
eminently unchristian practice, this ·has not always been the case.
Disregarding as impertinent to the important matter
in
hand all
learned controversy over the origin of the word cocktail, whether
it sprung from the Aztec Xochitl or from the custom of com–
pounding the arrangement with a chicken's feather for ornamental
panache, the cocktail as it is known today first achieved widespread
acceptance, so far as diligent research c.an establish, in the middle
years of the nineteenth century.
It gained favorable mention in the fifties and sixties as the mid–
morning slug of the captains of industry and finance on whose
waistcoats it was practicable to play games and who rode downtown
from Murray Hill to Wall Street after a breakfast which woulcil
I
founder today's fragile souls who face the day fortified by an eye–
dropper filled with orange juice and a slice of Melba toast.
In
the
President-Grant-and-Erie-common age drinking was a notably
masculine occupation and it went hand
in
hand with chewing
tobacco and owning large stables. Everything was big; the whisky
17: Morning