, too--milk, eggs
and baby fodder, three times a day. I was O.K. when I went in there,
but in a couple of weeks I was the prize patient on account of them
meals. They tell me I raved one night and bellered for a rattle, and
Scanlan made the nurse tell him all about Jack the Giant Killer and Old
Mother Hubbard. The place must have been run by a guy who believed in
lettin' the dumb animals live, because you couldn't have got a piece of
meat in there, if you begged 'em for it till you was black in the face.
You could have milk and eggs or eggs and milk--that was the limit!

One mornin' the orderly forgets himself and asks me what I want for
breakfast. I thought they had let down the bars at last, and I all but
jumped out of the bed.

"Gimme a steak, French fried potatoes, coffee and hot rolls," I says.
"Have the potatoes well done and the steak rare."

"Rave on," he answers me. "Do you want the eggs boiled, fried or
scrambled? Ain't there no particular way you like 'em?"

"Not no more!" I groans, and falls back on the sheets.

The only bright spot in the whole thing was Miss Woods, the nurse that
caused me to enter the place. She used to come in every mornin' and
make me play a thermometer was a lollypop and I held the thing in my
mouth while she took my temperature and pulled a clock on my pulse.
Then the orderly would come in and take the fruit friends had left for
me, and I'd be all set for the day. When I kicked about the food, Miss
Woods claimed I ought to be tickled to get eggs to eat, because they
was very expensive on account of the late war. I says I didn't know
they had been fightin' with eggs in Europe, and she laughs and says I'm
delicious. She brought me in a book to read and on the cover it's all
about the nights of Columbus. I didn't even open the thing, because
what kind of nights could Columbus have had--they was nothin' doin' in
them days. She asks me what my occupation was and says maybe she could
arrange so's I could work at it while I was there to keep my mind off
things. I says I _dared_ anything to keep my mind off of her, and she
kinda frowns; so's to brighten things up I says before I come there I
had been a deck steward on a submarine, and it gets a laugh. Then she
says I looked like a bookkeeper, and I didn't know whether that was a
boost or a knock, so I passed it off by sayin' I had a chance to be
that when young, but had to give it up because I couldn't stand the
smell of in