it. It's the
funny way you've done up your hair. If you could only see it!'

"'You needn't tell stories, sir,' said Mame, cool and advised. 'My
hair is all right. I know what you were laughing about. Why, Jeff,
look outside,' she winds up, peeping through a chink between the logs.
I opened the little wooden window and looked out. The entire river
bottom was flooded, and the knob of land on which the house stood was
an island in the middle of a rushing stream of yellow water a hundred
yards wide. And it was still raining hard. All we could do was to stay
there till the doves brought in the olive branch.

"I am bound to admit that conversations and amusements languished
during that day. I was aware that Mame was getting a too prolonged
one-sided view of things again, but I had no way to change it.
Personally, I was wrapped up in the desire to eat. I had
hallucinations of hash and visions of ham, and I kept saying to myself
all the time, 'What'll you have to eat, Jeff?--what'll you order now,
old man, when the waiter comes?' I picks out to myself all sorts of
favourites from the bill of fare, and imagines them coming. I guess
it's that way with all hungry men. They can't get their cogitations
trained on anything but something to eat. It shows that the little
table with the broken-legged caster and the imitation Worcester sauce
and the napkin covering up the coffee stains is the paramount issue,
after all, instead of the question of immortality or peace between
nations.

"I sat there, musing along, arguing with myself quite heated as to how
I'd have my steak--with mushrooms, or _a la creole_. Mame was on the
other seat, pensive, her head leaning on her hand. 'Let the potatoes
come home-fried,' I states in my mind, 'and brown the hash in the
pan, with nine poached eggs on the side.' I felt, careful, in my own
pockets to see if I could find a peanut or a grain or two of popcorn.

"Night came on again with the river still rising and the rain still
falling. I looked at Mame and I noticed that desperate look on her
face that a girl always wears when she passes an ice-cream lair. I
knew that poor girl was hungry--maybe for the first time in her life.
There was that anxious look in her eye that a woman has only when she
has missed a meal or feels her skirt coming unfastened in the back.

"It was about eleven o'clock or so on the second night when we sat,
gloomy, in our shipwrecked cabin. I kept jerking my mind away from the