noon
Rather be hunky and healthy than skinny and sick . Have tried both . '' It is impossible to avoid becoming round-cheeked when one is working on a paper that allows one to shut one 's desk and amble comfortably home for dinner at least five days in the week . Everybody is at least plump in this comfortable , gemutlich town , where everybody placidly locks his shop or office and goes home at noon to dine heavily on soup and meat and vegetables and pudding , washed down by the inevitable beer and followed by forty winks on the dining room sofa with the German Zeitung spread comfortably over the head as protection against the flies . There is a fascination about the bright little city . There is about it something quaint and foreign , as though a cross-section of the old world had been dumped bodily into the lap of Wisconsin . It does not seem at all strange to hear German spoken everywhere -- in the streets , in the shops , in the theaters , in the street cars .