The bachelor and the chafing dish

he could. It was a nickel-plated affair, resembling somewhat an old cider-press that I was once very intimate with when I used to spend my summers on Calvin Ely’s farm. This counterfeit presentment, with its hydraulic screws, jacks, and levers, was a combination of ingenuity, so the clerk informed me, for the purpose of squeezing the marrow out of a duck’s bones, and the price was forty dollars ! It seemed to us this was rather an expensive method of getting out marrow. There were so many simpler ways ! George suggested, for instance, that any old thing would do. “ What’s the matter with pushing it out with a lead-pencil ? ” said he. “Or a hairpin ?” I added. Then continuing : “Although either one of those plans is good, George, yet it seems to me that the subject under consideration is whether this machine is not only superior, but if it has not some fine points that may have escaped us.” “ No doubt,” he answered half apologetically, “ we have given it but a cursory examination.” So the clerk then exhibited to us the working of the machine, to his infinite satisfaction. It was certainly admirably adapted for the purpose. “No bachelor who possesses a chafing-dish should be without one,” said the clerk. Boiling Things. George was now convinced, and was about to buy it. He’s the most amiably extravagant fellow you ever met. He would hesitate at nothing, as a general rule, if you could impress it upon his mind that it was really a good thing — and the clerk was getting in his work. It was becoming a moment of intense anxiety on my part, and I was almost afraid I might offend the clerk lest he should think me hypercritical concerning my friend’s luxurious desires. Finally I spoke up: “Why can’t we take the marrow out of our next duck — ourselves? You have never particularly cared about marrow, and why should you pay forty dollars for it now ? ” “I am surprised at you,” he answered, with certainly a look of it. “ Don’t you see how much more perfectly it could be done by machinery?” “ But we may not have another duck this year ! ” “Oh, but we would; this would positively be an incentive.” Just then George’s eye lighted upon another machine, less complex perhaps, but only about twothirds the size. The clerk told us that it was for the proper boiling of an egg. I asked him why an old tin pail wouldn’t do in case of an emergency. Then he showed us how superior this would be. It was about the size of a Vermont maple-syrup can, 50 The Bachelor and the Chafing-dish. With a door in it and mounted over a spirit-lamp. Inside the first cylinder was another just large enough to hold an egg, and the egg was nicely adjusted between wire springs. “ That’s splendid,” said George; “nothing could be more perfect/’ The price was seven dollars, I think, and he would have had it then and there, besides the marrow-squeezer, if I hadn’t rushed him out into the open air. I finally compromised matters by accompanying him to a florist’s, where he bought a bunch of violets as big as a cart-wheel, and dispatched it uptown with an expression of serene happiness.