HEROES OF THE GULLET

Gus Comstock of Minnesota, has just regained the national coffee-drinking championship downing 85 cupfulls in seven hours and a quarter. The pride of his state, he is not the first to find the alimentary canal a passage to fame. The ability to swallow the unusual has always commanded the admiration of mankind. Probably the interest in this kind of performance arises form the complete universality of its equipment. All of us dabble in the art to some extent, and even a man who has only choked on a fishbone can appreciate the greatness of one who has swallowed a sword.

For some reason in most exhibitions of this sort a premium seems to be placed on quantity rather than on quality. Perhaps this is because the usual diet varies so radically in different parts of the world. For instance a middle westerner who has consumed a meal of bird's nests and caterpillars might think himself entitled to a fairly good niche in the Hall of Fame, while a Chinese coolie commenting on the achievement would be at a loss to understand why a man deserved any praise for eating his Sunday dinner. Quantity, however, in connection with such feats, is universally honorable. The remarkable thing about it is that either of its extremes are short-cuts to glory. A well-known instance of the way a man wrote his name into history by the alternative of excess is that which came to pass one day in the German city of Rotenburg. General Tilly was about to sack the place when he was arrested by the spectacle of a burgher emptying a tall stein of beer in one prodigious gulp. In his admiration the General spared the town and wooden figures in the clock tower re-enact the Meistertrunk each noon to gaping posterity in the square below. Jeremiah, MacSweeney, and a large company of well known hermits, on the other hand, increased their reputations by consuming a perilous minimum. But naturally in both courses the attendant circumstances are of importance. What seems to happen more often than not is that the amateurs end as saints, the professionals as freaks, and both as dyspeptics.