bounded.

They called the corned beef Canned Willie; and the stew was known
affectionately as Slum, and the doughnuts were Fried Holes. When the
adjutant, who had been taking French lessons, remarked "What the _la_
hell does that _sacre-blew_ cook mean by serving forty-fours at every
meal?" you gathered he was getting a mite tired of baked army beans.
And if the lieutenant colonel asked you to pass him the Native Sons
you knew he meant he wanted prunes. It was a great life, if you
didn't weaken--and nobody did.

But, so far as the joys of the table are concerned, I think I shall be
able to wait for quite a spell before I yearn for another whack at
English eating. I opine Charles Dickens would be a most unhappy man
could he but return to the scenes he loved and wrote about.

Dickens, as will be recalled, specialised in mouth-watering
descriptions of good things and typically British things to eat--roast
sucking pigs, with apples in their snouts; and baked goose; and suety
plum puddings like speckled cannon balls; and cold game pies as big
round as barrel tops--and all such. He wouldn't find these things
prevailing to any noticeable extent in his native island now. Even the
kidney, the same being the thing for which an Englishman mainly raises
a sheep and which he always did know how to serve up better than any
one else on earth, somehow doesn't seem to be the kidney it once upon
a time was when it had the proper sorts of trimmings and sauces to go
with it.

At this time England is no place for the epicure. In peacetime English
cooks, as a rule, were not what you would call versatile; their range,
as it were, was limited. Once, seeking to be blithesome and light of
heart, I wrote an article in which I said there were only three
dependable vegetables on the average Englishman's everyday
menu--boiled potatoes, boiled cabbage, and a second helping of the
boiled potatoes.

That was an error on my part; I was unintentionally guilty of the
crime of underestimation. I should have added a fourth to the list of
stand-bys--to wit: the vegetable marrow. For some reason, possibly
because they are a stubborn and tenacious race, the English persist in
looking upon the vegetable marrow as an object designed for human
consumption, which is altogether the wrong view to take of it. As a
foodstuff this article hasn't even the merit that attaches to stringy
celery. You do not derive much nourishment from stale celery, but
eating at it