ive who likes his pie better than
I do he's the king of the pie likers, that's all. And I am desolated at
being compelled to bar out the rice--not the gummy, glued-together,
sticky, messy stuff which Northerners eat with milk and sugar on it, but
real orthodox rice such as only Southerners and Chinamen and East Indians
know how to prepare; white and fluffy and washed free of all the lurking
library paste; with every grain standing up separate and distinct like
well-popped corn and treated only with salt, pepper and butter, or with
salt, pepper and gravy before being consumed.

And as for white potatoes--well, it distresses me deeply to think that
hereafter the Irish potato, except when I'm camping out, will be to me
merely something to stopper the spout of a coal-oil can with, or to stab
the office pen in on the clerk's desk in an American-plan hotel. For I
have ever cherished the Irish potato as one of Nature's most succulent
gifts to mankind. I like potatoes all styles and every style, French
fried, lyonnaise, O'Brien, shoestring shape, pants-button design, hashed
brown, creamed, mashed, stewed, souffle--if only I knew who blew 'em
up--and most of all, baked _au naturel_ in the union suit. And I miss them
and shall keep on missing them. But no longer do I yearn for cream in my
coffee, now that it is out of it, and I am getting reconciled to dry toast
for breakfast, where once upon a time only members of the justly famous
Flap Jackson family seemed to satisfy.

Of course I imbibe alcoholic stimulant when and where procurable. From the
standpoint of one intent upon cutting a few running feet off the waistline
measurements this distinctly is wrong, as full well I know. But what would
you? I do not wish to pose as an eccentric. I have no desire to be pointed
out as a person aiming to make himself conspicuously erratic by behaving
differently from the run of his fellows. Since the advent of Prohibition
nearly everybody I meet is drinking with an unbridled enthusiasm; and when
not engaged in the act of drinking is discussing the latest and most
approved methods of evading, circumventing and defying the Federal and
State statutes against drinking. Therefore I drink, too. Even so, I have
not yet succeeded in accustoming my palate to strong waters
indiscriminately swallowed. I confess to a fear that I shall never make a
complete success of the undertaking.

I suppose the trouble with me is lack of desire. Prior to the attempt