ured out, and steaming under his nose. He hated coffee
because he liked it; and the look of disgust with which he shoved it away
was the exact measure of his physical craving for it. The solid food on
the table consisted of waterlogged potatoes, half-baked salt-rising
bread, and salt-pork. Now, young Charlton was a reader of the _Water-Cure
Journal_ of that day, and despised meat of all things, and of all meat
despised swine's flesh, as not even fit for Jews; and of all forms of
hog, hated fat salt-pork as poisonously indigestible. So with a dyspeptic
self-consciousness he rejected the pork, picked off the periphery of the
bread near the crust, cautiously avoiding the dough-bogs in the middle;
but then he revenged himself by falling furiously upon the aquatic
potatoes, out of which most of the nutriment had been soaked.

Jim, who sat alongside him, doing cordial justice to the badness of the
meal, muttered that it wouldn't do to eat by idees in Minnesoty. And with
the freedom that belongs to the frontier, the company begun to discuss
dietetics, the fat gentleman roundly abusing the food for the express
purpose, as Charlton thought, of diverting attention from his voracious
eating of it.

"Simply despicable," grunted the fat man, as he took a third slice of the
greasy pork. "I do despise such food."

"Eats it _like_ he was mad at it," said Driver Jim in an undertone.

But as Charlton's vegetarianism was noticed, all fell to denouncing it.
Couldn't live in a cold climate without meat. Cadaverous Mr. Minorkey,
the broad-shouldered, sad-looking man with side-whiskers, who complained
incessantly of a complication of disorders, which included dyspepsia,
consumption, liver-disease, organic disease of the heart, rheumatism,
neuralgia, and entire nervous prostration, and who was never entirely
happy except in telling over the oft-repeated catalogue of his disgusting
symptoms--Mr. Minorkey, as he sat by his daughter, inveighed, in an
earnest crab-apple voice, against Grahamism. He would have been in his
grave twenty years ago if it hadn't been for good meat. And then he
recited in detail the many desperate attacks from which he had been saved
by beefsteak. But this pork he felt sure would make him sick. It might
kill him. And he evidently meant to sell his life as dearly as possible,
for, as Jim muttered to Charlton, he was "goin' the whole hog anyhow."

"Miss Minorkey," said the fat gentleman checking a piece of pork in the