A Servant of Satan: Romantic Career of Prado the Assassin — page 204: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

196 A SERVANT OF SATAN. had never in his life been farther away from Paris than Fon tainebleau. Shortly after they passed Melun the alleged grocer opened his lunch-basket and began to feast on some cold chicken, wine, and a box of sardines, which probably came from his shop in the Faubourg Montmartre. Suddenly he appeared to remember the fact that his fellow-traveler might possibly be hungry, too, and rather shyly asked if monsieur would do him the honor of joining him in his repast. This invita- tion was readily accepted, and a bottle of excellent Bur- gundy followed by a dram of old cognac, put the two men in such good humor that they began to grow more and more confidential. The man in gray imparted to his companion all kinds of little tricks in the grocery trade, such as mingling sand w:th brown sugar, oleomargarine with fresh table butter, and he even acknowledged, to the great amusement of the other, that he had a Japanese in his employ to carefully open the boxes of prime tea received from China and Japan, who after having mixed the contents with some tea of very inferior quality, recanted them in such an adept manner that it was impossible for the retail grocers to detect the fact that they had ever been opened or their contents adulterated. On the other hand Lord Wolseley’s alleged staff officer _ horrified his grocer friend by a detailed description of the Soudanese method of killing their enemies, namely, by a swift, sweeping stroke across the throat with an exceedingly sharp knife, and which is invariably yielded from behind,” so that the slayer escapes being deluged by the blood of his victim. «When one has the knack,” added he, with asignificant sweep of his hand, ‘‘onecan almost sever the head with such a stroke.” Meanwhile both of the men had been smoking some ex- comicbooks.co nr