rface. It is an alienation brought about by profound and fundamental
differences; for the gulf between them is that gulf which separates
the prosaic, the ordinary, the commonplace, from all that is colored
and enlivened by romance.

The romance of truffles endows the very word itself with a halo, an
aristocratic halo full of mystery and suggestion. One remembers the
hunters who must track their quarry through marshy and treacherous
lands, and one cannot forget their confiding catspaw, that desolated
pig, created only to be betrayed and robbed of the fungi of his
labors. He is one of the pathetic characters of history, born to
secret sorrow, victimized by those superior tastes which do not become
his lowly station. Born to labor and to suffer, but not to eat. To
this day he commands my sympathy; his ghost--lean, bourgeois,
reproachful--looks out at me from every market-place in the world
where the truffle proclaims his faithful service.

But the pancake is a pancake, nothing more. It is without inherent or
artificial glamour; and this unfortunately, when you come right down
to it, is true of food in general. For food, after all, is one of the
lesser considerations; the connoisseur, the gourmet, even the
gourmand, spends no more than four hours out of the day at his table.
From the cycle, he may select four in which to eat; but whether he
will or not, he must set aside seven of the twenty-four in which to
sleep.

Sleeping, then, as opposed to eating, is of almost double importance,
since it consumes nearly twice as much time--and time, in itself, is
the most valuable thing in the world. Considered from this angle, it
seems incredible that we have no connoisseurs of sleep. For we have
none. Therefore it is with some temerity that I declare sleep to be
one of the romances of existence, and not by any chance the simple
necessary it is reputed to be.

However, this romance, in company with whatever is worthy, is not to
be discovered without the proper labor. Life is not all truffles.
Neither do they grow in modest back-yards to be picked of mornings by
the maid-of-all-work. A mere bed, notwithstanding its magic camouflage
of coverings, of canopy, of disguised pillows, of shining brass or
fluted carven posts, is, pancake like, never surrounded by this aura
of romance. No, it is hammock sleep which is the sweetest of all
slumber. Not in the hideous, dyed affairs of our summer porches, with
their miserable curved sticks to