at was slopping full of its crystal-pure fluid contents,
with a family of goldfish swimming round and round in it, as happy as
you please.

"'So then, all in a flash, the answer came and I knew the secret of
what the provincials in that section of Europe do with water. They
loan it to magicians to keep goldfish in. But I prefer to drink a
little of it while I am eating and to eat a good deal while I am
drinking it; both of which, I may state, I am now doing to the best of
my ability, and without let or hindrance, Herb.'"

To be exactly correct about it, I began mapping out this campaign long
before I took ship for the homeward hike. The suggestion formed in my
mind during those weeks I spent in London, when the resident
population first went on the food-card system. You had to have a meat
card, I think, to buy raw meat in a butcher shop, and you had to have
another kind of meat card, I know, to get cooked meat in a
restaurant; and you had to have a friend who was a smuggler or a
hoarder to get an adequate supply of sugar under any circumstances.
Before I left, every one was carrying round a sheaf of cards. You
didn't dare go fishing if you had mislaid your worm card.

The resolution having formed, it budded and grew in my mind when I was
up near the Front gallantly exposing myself to the sort of
table-d'hote dinners that were available then in some of the lesser
towns immediately behind the firing lines; and it kept right on
growing, so that by the time I was ready to sail it was full sized. En
route, I thought up an interchangeable answer for two of the oldest
conundrums of my childhood, one of them being: "Round as a biscuit,
busy as a bee; busiest thing you ever did see," and the other, "Opens
like a barn door, shuts like a trap; guess all day and you can't guess
that." In the original versions the answer to the first was "A watch,"
and to the second, "A corset"--if I recall aright But the joint
answer I worked out was as follows: "My face!"

Such was the pleasing program I figured out on shipboard. But, as is
so frequently the case with the most pleasing things in life, I found
the anticipation rather outshone the realisation. Already I detect
myself, in a retrospective mood, hankering for the savoury _ragouts_
we used to get in peasant homes in obscure French villages, and for
the meals they gave us at the regimental messes of our own forces,
where the cooking was the home sort and good honest American slang
a