The Parkes Museum - Page 2

it would be exactly the kind of thing that is popular in
literature now, as literature goes. And yet excepting ourselves and the
sleeping porter--if he was sleeping--and the indistinct and motionless
outline, visible through a glass door, of a human body sitting over a
book, there was not a suggestion or memory of living humanity about the
place.

The exhibits of food are especially remarkable. We cleaned the glass
case with our sleeves and peered at the most appetising revelations.
There are dozens of little bottles hermetically sealed, containing such
curios as a sample of "Bacon Common (Gammon) Uncooked," and then the
same cooked--it looked no nicer cooked--Irish sausage, pork sausage,
black pudding, Welsh mutton, and all kinds of rare and exquisite
feeding. There are ever so many cases of this kind of thing. We saw, for
instance, further along, several good specimens of the common oyster
shell (_Ostrea edulis_), cockle shells, and whelks, both "almonds" and
"whites," and then came breadstuffs. The breadstuffs are particularly
impressive, of a grey, scientific aspect, a hard, hoary antiquity. We
always knew that stale bread was good for one, but yet the Parkes Museum
startled us with the antique pattern it recommended. There was a muffin,
too, identified and labelled, but without any Latin name, a captured
crumpet, a collection of buns, a dinner-roll, and a something novel to
us, called Pumpernickel, that we had rather be without, or rather--for
the expression is ambiguous--that we had rather not be without, but
altogether remote from. And all these things have been tested by an
analyst, with the most painful results. Nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, and
the like nasty chemical things seem indeed to have occurred in
everything he touched. Those sturdy mendicants who go about complaining
that they cannot get food should visit this Parkes Museum and see what
food is really like, and learn contentment with their lot.

There were no real vegetables, but only the ideals of a firm of
seedsmen, made of wax and splendidly coloured, with something of the
boldness and vigour of Michael Angelo about the modelling of them. And
among other food stuffs were sweetmeats and yellow capers, liver flukes,
British wines, and snuff. At last we felt replete with food stuffs, and
went on to see the models to illustrate ventilation, and the exhibits of
hygienic glazed tiles arranged around a desert lecture-theatre. Hygienic
tiles stimulate the eye vigorously rather than relax it by any æsthetic
weakness; and the crematory appliances are so attractive as they are,
and must have such an added charm of neatness and brightness when
alight, that one longs to lose a relative or so forthwith, for the