ences.
The rest was composed of tents, cow ponies, "black-waxy" mud,
and mesquite-trees, all bound round by a horizon. Paloma was an
about-to-be city. The houses represented faith; the tents hope; the
twice-a-day train, by which you might leave, creditably sustained
the role of charity.

The Parisian Restaurant occupied the muddiest spot in the town while
it rained, and the warmest when it shone. It was operated, owned, and
perpetrated by a citizen known as Old Man Hinkle, who had come out
of Indiana to make his fortune in this land of condensed milk and
sorghum.

There was a four-room, unpainted, weather-boarded box house in which
the family lived. From the kitchen extended a "shelter" made of poles
covered with chaparral brush. Under this was a table and two benches,
each twenty feet long, the product of Paloma home carpentry. Here
was set forth the roast mutton, the stewed apples, boiled beans,
soda-biscuits, puddinorpie, and hot coffee of the Parisian menu.

Ma Hinkle and a subordinate known to the ears as "Betty," but denied
to the eyesight, presided at the range. Pa Hinkle himself, with
salamandrous thumbs, served the scalding viands. During rush hours a
Mexican youth, who rolled and smoked cigarettes between courses, aided
him in waiting on the guests. As is customary at Parisian banquets, I
place the sweets at the end of my wordy menu.

Ileen Hinkle!

The spelling is correct, for I have seen her write it. No doubt she
had been named by ear; but she so splendidly bore the orthography
that Tom Moore himself (had he seen her) would have endorsed the
phonography.

Ileen was the daughter of the house, and the first Lady Cashier to
invade the territory south of an east-and-west line drawn through
Galveston and Del Rio. She sat on a high stool in a rough pine
grand-stand--or was it a temple?--under the shelter at the door of
the kitchen. There was a barbed-wire protection in front of her, with
a little arch under which you passed your money. Heaven knows why the
barbed wire; for every man who dined Parisianly there would have died
in her service. Her duties were light; each meal was a dollar; you
put it under the arch, and she took it.

I set out with the intent to describe Ileen Hinkle to you. Instead, I
must refer you to the volume by Edmund Burke entitled: _A Philosophical
Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful_.
It is an exhaustive treatise, dealing first with the primitive
con