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Show CINCINNATI AS BOSTON SEES IT.<br><br> A correspondent of the Boston Herald thus writes of "the Queen City of the West:"<br><br> This is the self entitled "Paris of America," and it does resemble Paris-viewed through a smoked glass. Then, too, the inhabitants strongly resemble Parisians in their devotion to beer. Out of the 70,000 adult male citizens, 60,000 are engaged daily in carrying around 60,000 over-developed abdomens. You meet Falstaff's brother every three yards. When the big-bellied Cincinnatian gets overheated, he doesn't betake himself to an ice cream saloon, but to the nearest beer-garden, of which there is one to every 1,000 inhabitants. The beer momentarily cools him, while the low table at which he sits serves as a rest or brace to his forty-pound abdomen. After having rested this peculiarly Cincinnatian malformation of the human form divine, the respected citizen goes out on the street and shouts "Oh, boy!" two or three times. Up runs a gamin, carrying a sort of German silver arrangement, containing boiled sausages. The respected citizen takes a boiled sausage and a bit of bread and slowly munches the delicious lunch. This is truly Parisian, and reminds one of the boulevards. Boiled sausages are eaten in Cincinnati when the mercury registers ninety degrees in the shade, and to the young man thinking of visiting the Paris of America, I would suggest that he should never escort a Cincinnati girl out of an evening without treating her to beer and boiled sausages. She would resent an ice as an insult to the native fruit of the Porkopolitan vine. When you are in Paris, you will, of course, do what the Parissiennes wish you to do.<br><br> The Cincinnati women, as in fact the women of the great corn-fed West in general, are well developed and look fully capable of nursing their own children, or of leading a hungry tramp by the ear down the front door steps. The women of the West are carnivorous animals, consuming much ham, pork and boiled sausage. I strolled through several of the large Cincinnati markets so as to get an idea of the popular subsistence. The market stalls were frequently kept by great sturdy women, who sharpened their knives with strength and unction. The purchasers were, perhaps, two thirds of them women, all carrying their market-baskets. They were all buying pig-pig in the van, cooked pig, smoked pig, ground, chewed and packed pig. Bologna sausages, hog's-head cheese, pork chops, bacon, etc., filled the baskets of these Cincinnati matrons and boarding-house keepers. The roasting beef is left for the Hebrew residents and such hotels as are patronized by fastidious Easterners. The people eat a great variety of vegetables, which, in part, counteract the grossness of the pig diet. In Cincinnati, however, I saw more hungry people than in Chicago, where even the tramps and beggars are well fed.<br><br> The smoke is another annoyance. Except for a few hours on Sunday, or after a thunder-shower or rain-storm, the air is filled with soot and smoke from the bituminous or soft coal universally used. A clean collar at 9 a. m. is unfit for an unclean tramp at noon.<br><br> Don't get out of bed in your stocking feet for the soles of your hose will look as if you had been walking on the bottom of a charcoal wagon instead of upon a chamber carpet. Near the windows the carpet is always stained, as if by the upsetting of an ink bottle. Still the ladies wear white, stiffly-starched skirts, as they do in even smokier Pittsburg. In Cincinnati you should never scratch or put your finger to your face. If you do, you will leave streaks of white, and disturb the somber monotony of your complexion. New England ladies who keep house in Cincinnati get desperately mad the first month, the second they meditate suicide, but the third they make up two dozen white skirts and go out on the promenade and help keep up the delusion (dear to the feminine heart) that they are clean people in a clean world. Up on the bluffs, and beyond in the noble suburbs, the air is clear, and cleanly housekeeping is as easy as in New England. |