"The inscrutable smile of a saleslady would make
Mona Lisa seem a mere amateur." 93
"A person who for reasons best known to the police
has not been locked up." 97
"Collision between two heavenly bodies or premature
explosion of a custard pie." 103
"Everything you catch is second-hand." 119
"He could beat me climbing, but at panting I had
him licked to a whisper." 125
"She was not much larger than a soapdish." 137
"Think of being laid face downward firmly across
a sinewy knee and beaten forty-love with one of
those hard catgut rackets!" 143
_VITTLES_
[Illustration]
Upon a certain gladsome occasion a certain man went into a certain
restaurant in a certain large city, being imbued with the idea that he
desired a certain kind of food. Expense was with him no object. The
coming of the holidays had turned his thoughts backward to the care-free
days of boyhood and he longed for the holidaying provender of his youth
with a longing that was as wide as a river and as deep as a well.
"Me, I have tried it all," he said to himself. "I have been down the
line on this eating proposition from alphabet soup to animal crackers. I
know the whole thing, from the nine-dollar, nine-course banquet, with
every course bathed freely in the same kind of sauce and tasting exactly
like all the other courses, to the quick lunch, where the only
difference between clear soup and beef broth is that if you want the
beef broth the waiter sticks his thumb into the clear soup and brings it
along.
"I have feasted copiously at grand hotels where they charge you corkage
on your own hot-water bottle, and I have dallied frugally with the
forty-cent table d'hote with wine, when the victuals were the product of
the well-known Sam Brothers--Flot and Jet--and the wine tasted like the
stuff that was left over from graining the woodwork for a mahogany
finish.
[Illustration: "I NOW GREATLY DESIRE TO EAT SOME REGULAR FOOD."]
"I now greatly desire to eat some regular food, and if such a thing be
humanly possible I should also prefer to eat it in silence unbroken
except by the noises I make myself. I have eaten meals backed up so
close to the orchestra that the leader and I were practically wearing
the same pair of suspenders. I have been h
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