The dish is a survival of the rigid Puritanism which was the affliction and at the same time the making of New England; it is a fast, an aggravated fast, a scourge to indulgence, a reproach to gluttony; it comes Saturday night, and is followed Sunday morning by the dry, spongy, antiseptic, absorbent fish-ball as a castigation of nature and as a preparation for the austere observance of the Sabbath; it is the harsh, but no doubt deserved, punishment of the stomach for its worldliness during the week; inured to suffering, the native accepts the dose as a matter of course; to the stranger it seems unduly severe.

To be sent to bed supperless is one of the terrors of childhood; to be sent to bed on pork and beans with the certainty of fishballs in the morning is a refinement of torture that could have been devised only by Puritan ingenuity.
At the very crisis of the trouble in China, when the whole world was anxiously awaiting news from Pekin, the papers said that Boston was perturbed by the reported discovery in Africa of a new and edible bean.
To New England the bean is an obsession; it is rapidly becoming a superstition.

To the stranger it is an infliction; but, bad as the bean is to the uninitiated, it is a luscious morsel compared with the flavorless cod-fish ball which lodges in the throat and stays there--a second Adam's apple--for lack of something to wash it down.
If pork and beans is the device of the Puritans, the cod-fish ball is the invention of the devil.

It is as if Satan looked on enviously while his foes prepared their powder of beans, and then, retiring to his bottomless pit, went them one better by casting his ball of cod-fish.
"But from the parlor of the inn A pleasant murmur smote the ear, Like water rushing through a weir; Oft interrupted by the din Of laughter and of loud applause "The firelight, shedding over all The splendor of its ruddy glow, Filled the whole parlor large and low." The room remains, but of all that jolly company which gathered in Longfellow's days and constituted the imaginary weavers of tales and romances, but one is alive to-day,--the "Young Sicilian." "A young Sicilian, too, was there; In sight of Etna born and bred, Some breath of its volcanic air Was glowing in his heart and brain, And, being rebellious to his liege, After Palermo's fatal siege, Across the western seas he fled, In good king Bomba's happy reign.
His face was like a summer night, All flooded with a dusky light; His hands were small; his teeth shone white As sea-shells, when he smiled or spoke." To the present proprietor of the inn the "Young Sicilian" wrote the following letter: Rome, July 4, 1898.
Dear Sir,--In answer to your letter of June 8, I am delighted to learn that you have purchased the dear old house and carefully restored and put it back in its old-time condition.

I sincerely hope that it may remain thus for a long, long time as a memento of the days and customs gone by.