subject of food, but it kept flopping back again before I could fasten
it. I thought of everything good to eat I had ever heard of. I went
away back to my kidhood and remembered the hot biscuit sopped in
sorghum and bacon gravy with partiality and respect. Then I trailed
along up the years, pausing at green apples and salt, flapjacks and
maple, lye hominy, fried chicken Old Virginia style, corn on the cob,
spareribs and sweet potato pie, and wound up with Georgia Brunswick
stew, which is the top notch of good things to eat, because it
comprises 'em all.

"They say a drowning man sees a panorama of his whole life pass before
him. Well, when a man's starving he sees the ghost of every meal he
ever ate set out before him, and he invents new dishes that would make
the fortune of a chef. If somebody would collect the last words of men
who starved to death, they'd have to sift 'em mighty fine to discover
the sentiment, but they'd compile into a cook book that would sell
into the millions.

"I guess I must have had my conscience pretty well inflicted with
culinary meditations, for, without intending to do so, I says, out
loud, to the imaginary waiter, 'Cut it thick and have it rare, with
the French fried, and six, soft-scrambled, on toast.'

"Mame turned her head quick as a wing. Her eyes were sparkling and she
smiled sudden.

"'Medium for me,' she rattles out, 'with the Juliennes, and three,
straight up. Draw one, and brown the wheats, double order to come. Oh,
Jeff, wouldn't it be glorious! And then I'd like to have a half fry,
and a little chicken curried with rice, and a cup custard with ice
cream, and--'

"'Go easy,' I interrupts; 'where's the chicken liver pie, and the
kidney _saute_ on toast, and the roast lamb, and--'

"'Oh,' cuts in Mame, all excited, 'with mint sauce, and the turkey
salad, and stuffed olives, and raspberry tarts, and--'

"'Keep it going,' says I. 'Hurry up with the fried squash, and the hot
corn pone with sweet milk, and don't forget the apple dumpling with
hard sauce, and the cross-barred dew-berry pie--'

"Yes, for ten minutes we kept up that kind of restaurant repartee. We
ranges up and down and backward and forward over the main trunk lines
and the branches of the victual subject, and Mame leads the game,
for she is apprised in the ramifications of grub, and the dishes she
nominates aggravates my yearnings. It seems that there is a feeling
that Mame will line up friendly again with foo