command, the lady has really a full habit of speech.

I told you about whales, didn't I? Whales started it--whales for table
use. It come in the Sunday paper--with the picture of a handsome whale
and the picture of a French cook kissing his fingers over the way he has
cooked some of it; and the picture of a pleased young couple eating whale
in a swell restaurant; and the picture of a fair young bride in her
kitchenette cutting up three cents' worth of whale meat into a chafing
dish and saying how glad she was to have something tasty and cheap for
dearie's lunch; and the picture of a poor labouring man being told by
someone down in Washington, D.C., that's making a dollar a year, that
a nickel's worth of prime whale meat has more actual nourishment than a
dollar's worth of porterhouse steak; and so on, till you'd think the
world's food troubles was going to be settled in jig time; all people
had to do was to go out and get a good eating whale and salt down the
side meat and smoke the shoulders and grind up some sausage and be fixed
for the winter, with plenty to send a mess round to the neighbours now
and then.

And knocking beef, you understand, till you'd think no one but criminals
and idiots would ever touch a real steak again, on account of its being
so poor in food values, like this Washington scientist says that gets a
dollar a year salary and earns every cent of it. It made me mad, the
slanderous things they said about beef; but I read the piece over pretty
carefully and I really couldn't see where the whale was going to put me
out of business, at least for a couple years yet. It looked like I'd have
time, anyway, to make a clean-up before you'd be able to go into any
butcher shop and get a rib roast of young whale for six cents, with a
bushel or two of scraps thrown in for the dog.

Then this Sunday paper goes out to the bunk house and the boys find the
whale piece and get excited about it. Looks like if it's true that most
of 'em will be driving ice wagons or something for a living. They want
me to send down for a mess of whale meat so they can see if it tastes
like regular food. They don't hardly believe these pictures where people
dressed up like they had money are going into spasms of delight about it.
Still, they don't know--poor credulous dubs! They think things you see in
a Sunday paper might be true now and then, even if it is most always a
pack of lies thought up by dissipated newspaper men.

I tell