of" us, as he expressed it. We had no credit; we went in, called
for food and ate it. We paid or we did not pay. We had confidence in
Cypher's sullenness end smouldering ferocity. Deep down in his sunless
soul he was either a prince, a fool or an artist. He sat at a worm-eaten
desk, covered with files of waiters' checks so old that I was sure the
bottomest one was for clams that Hendrik Hudson had eaten and paid for.
Cypher had the power, in common with Napoleon III. and the goggle-eyed
perch, of throwing a film over his eyes, rendering opaque the windows of
his soul. Once when we left him unpaid, with egregious excuses, I looked
back and saw him shaking with inaudible laughter behind his film. Now
and then we paid up back scores.

But the chief thing at Cypher's was Milly. Milly was a waitress. She
was a grand example of Kraft's theory of the artistic adjustment of
nature. She belonged, largely, to waiting, as Minerva did to the art of
scrapping, or Venus to the science of serious flirtation. Pedestalled
and in bronze she might have stood with the noblest of her heroic
sisters as "Liver-and-Bacon Enlivening the World." She belonged to
Cypher's. You expected to see her colossal figure loom through that
reeking blue cloud of smoke from frying fat just as you expect the
Palisades to appear through a drifting Hudson River fog. There amid the
steam of vegetables and the vapours of acres of "ham and," the crash of
crockery, the clatter of steel, the screaming of "short orders," the
cries of the hungering and all the horrid tumult of feeding man,
surrounded by swarms of the buzzing winged beasts bequeathed us by
Pharaoh, Milly steered her magnificent way like some great liner
cleaving among the canoes of howling savages.

Our Goddess of Grub was built on lines so majestic that they could be
followed only with awe. Her sleeves were always rolled above her elbows.
She could have taken us three musketeers in her two hands and dropped
us out of the window. She had seen fewer years than any of us, but she
was of such superb Evehood and simplicity that she mothered us from the
beginning. Cypher's store of eatables she poured out upon us with royal
indifference to price and quantity, as from a cornucopia that knew no
exhaustion. Her voice rang like a great silver bell; her smile was
many-toothed and frequent; she seemed like a yellow sunrise on mountain
tops. I never saw her but I thought of the Yosemite. And yet, somehow, I
could