ed a baser one. You have only to look about you to know the truth of
the situation, which is, that the person with the least digestion is the
one who always does the most for it, and that those who eat the most
have the least trouble. Where do you find the percentage of dyspeptics
running highest, in the country or the city? Where do you find the
stout woman who is banting as she pants and panting as she bants? Again,
the city. Where do you encounter the unhappy male creature who has been
told that the only cure for his dyspepsia is to be a Rebecca at the Well
and drink a gallon of water before each meal and then go without the
meal, thus compelling him to double in both roles and first be Rebecca
and then be the Well? Where do you see so many of those miserable ones
who have the feeling, after eating, that rude hands are tearing the
tapestries of the walls of their respective dining rooms?

Not in the country, where, happily, food is perhaps yet food. In the
city, that's where--in the cities, where they have learned to cook food
and to serve it and to eat it after a fashion different from the
fashions their grandsires followed.

That's a noble slogan which has lately been promulgated--See America
First. But while we're doing so wouldn't it be a fine idea to try to see
some American cooking?

_MUSIC_

[Illustration]

If you, the reader, are anything like me, the writer, it happens to you
about every once in so long that some well-meaning but semi-witted
friend rigs a dead-fall for you, and traps you and carries you off, a
helpless captive, for an evening among the real music-lovers.

Catching you, so to speak, with your defense leveled and your
breastworks unmanned, he speaks to you substantially as follows: "Old
man, we're going to have a few people up to the house tonight--just a
little informal affair, you understand, with a song or two and some
music--and the missus and I would appreciate it mightily if you'd put on
your Young Prince Charmings and drop in on us along toward eight. How
about it--can we count on you to be among those prominently present?"

Forewarned is forearmed, and you know all about this person already. You
know him to be one of the elect in the most exclusive musical coterie of
your fair city, wherever your fair city may be. You know him to be on
terms of the utmost intimacy with the works of all the great composers.
Bill Opus and Jeremiah Fugue have no secrets from him--none
what