Show Something About Ices anti Iced Drinks Ices and iced drinks are now so coin mon in hot weatherfrom the iced champagne with which the dinerout j i accompanies and the iced pudding with j which he unwisely concludes the dinner I to the delicious haporth with which the street boy delights to cool his tongue I that we habitually forget the insult which a sudden lump or draught of freezing matter offers to the muchenduring btomach Dr Muter adds to his report on cheap ices a rider which though often I forgotten now was a truism thirty years I ago The mere fact of the hasty consumption I con-sumption of ice on a hot day and an i empty stomach would in itself frequently i cause unpleasant results Unpleasant I results is a euphemism for which our grandmothers and great aunts used plainly to call sudden deaths We do I n6t believe that in the case with which Dr Muter was concerned the sufferers f 1 were injured merely by the internal chill 1 for it is almost iiicredible that so many i persons should have been thus simultaneously I simultane-ously affected by ices from a particular barrow It is also clear that in threatening 1 threaten-ing us with death as the penalty for drinking cold waterice was a rare i luxury when we were hot our grandmothers grand-mothers grossly exaggerated the truth I for since their time the use of chilled I drinks and foods has become almost universaleven in England but absolutely i so in the United States Nevertheless there was truth in what they said People Peo-ple in America pay very heavily in digestion di-gestion and vitality for the hasty joy 1 which they are perpetually snatching from draughts of water at the freezing point nor do we who follow them at avery a-very respectful distance by any mean I escape the penalties of imprudence And the odd thing is that cold drinks are after all a very indifferent remedy for heat I The poor Fijian in the fever of measles rushes to the shore and lies down in the cool clear waves His bliss for five minutes must be exquisite but it is fatal So the man addicted to iced drinks feels for a minuteand only for a minute that what an Irishman calls the sensi i tive thirst is hunted out of every square inch of his body But the evil spirit returns re-turns bringing with it several others more clamorous than itself For a really cooling drink if one will but wait for five minutes for the effect hot tea is better than most things and as AngloIn dians know the wrist held under a tap of running water cools more than any sort of drink London Standard |