f 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
subject of food, but it kept flopping back again before I could fasten
it. I thought of everything good to eat I had ever heard of. I went
away back to my kidhood and remembered the hot biscuit sopped in
sorghum and bacon gravy with partiality and respect. Then I trailed
along up the years, pausing at green apples and salt, flapjacks and
maple, lye hominy, fried chicken Old Virginia style, corn on the cob,
spareribs and sweet potato pie, and wound up with Georgia Brunswick
stew, which is the top notch of good things to eat, because it
comprises 'em all.

"They say a drowning man sees a panorama of his whole life pass before
him. Well, when a man's starving he sees the ghost of every meal he
ever ate set out before him, and he invents new dishes that would make
the fortune of a chef. If somebody would collect the last words of men
who starved to death, they'd have to sift 'em mighty fine to discover
the sentiment, but they'd compile into a cook book that would sell
into the millions.

"I guess I must have had my conscience pretty well inflicted with
culinary meditations, for, without