He supposed it was Chateau Lafitte--that is, he had instructed Parkins to serve that particular wine and vintage.
"Either '61 or '63," replied Breen with the air of positive certainty.
(How that boy in the white apron, who had watched the boss paste on the labels, would have laughed had he been under the table.) Further down the cloth Hodges, the epicure, was giving his views as to the proper way of serving truffles.

A dish had just passed, with an underpinning of crust.

Hodges's early life had qualified him as an expert in cooking, as well as in wines: Ten years in a country store swapping sugar for sausages and tea for butter and eggs; five more clerk in a Broadway cloth house, with varied boarding-house experiences (boiled mutton twice a week, with pudding on Sundays); three years junior partner, with a room over Delmonico's; then a rich wife and a directorship in a bank (his father-in-law was the heaviest depositor); next, one year in Europe and home, as vice-president, and at the present writing president of one of the certify-as-early-as-ten-o' clock-in-the-morning kind of banks, at which Peter would so often laugh.
With these experiences there came the usual blooming and expanding--all the earlier life for gotten, really ignored.

Soon the food of the country became unbearable.

Even the canvasbacks must feed on a certain kind of wild celery; the oysters be dredged from a particular cove, and the terrapin drawn from their beds with the Hodges' coat of arms cut in their backs before they would be allowed a place on the ex-clerk's table.
It is no wonder, then, that everybody listened when the distinguished epicure launched out on the proper way to both acquire and serve so rare and toothsome a morsel as a truffle.
"Mine come by every steamer," Hodges asserted in a positive tone--not to anybody in particular, but with a sweep of the table to attract enough listeners to make it worthwhile for him to proceed.