These little things are great to little man.

GOLDSMITH: _The Traveller_.





The insistent habit of mind is nowhere more noticeable than in connection
with the food. I have seen a hotel _habitue_, apparently sane, who
invariably cut, or broke, his bread into minute particles, and minutely
inspected each before placing it in his mouth. If this were a book of
confessions, I should have myself to plead guilty, among worse things,
to having avoided mince pie for weeks after encountering among other
ingredients of this delicacy, a piece of broken glass.

Not infrequently the obsessive diner so long hesitates before giving his
final order that the waiter brings the wrong dish. The insistent thought
now replaces the doubting folly, and the diner would as soon think of
eating grass as the article offered. I have known him impatiently to leave
the table under these circumstances, and to play the ostentatious martyr,
rather than partake of the food he had at the outset given weighty
consideration. I have seen another omit his lunch because water had been
spilled upon the cloth, and still another leave the dining-car, with
the announcement that he would forego his meal because informed by the
conductor that men's shirt waists without coats were taboo.

The obsessive of this type may by training even reach the point of seeing
the amusing instead of the pathetic side of the picture when, in the course
of his travels, his request for "a nice bit of chicken, cut thin," is