portion in that house would have been in the old days.

   There had been a time when a sincere but careless diner from up Scotland way, down in London on a visit, would have carried away more than that much on his necktie; which did not matter particularly then, when food was plentiful; and, besides, usually he wore a pattern of necktie which was improved by almost anything that was spilled upon it. But it did matter to me that I had to dine on this hangnail pared from a sheep.

   A few days later I partook of a fast at what was supposed to be a luncheon, which the Lord Mayor of London attended, in company with sundry other notables. Earlier readings had led me to expect an endless array of spicy and succulent viands at any table a Lord Mayor might grace with his presence. Such, though, was not the case here. We had eggs for an

    entrée

   ; and after that we had plain boiled turbot, which to my mind is no great shakes of a fish, even when tuckered up with sauces; and after that we had coffee and cigars; and finally we had several cracking good speeches by members of a race whose men are erroneously believed by some Americans to be practically inarticulate when they get up on their feet and try to talk.

   There was a touch of tragedy mingled in with the comedy of the situation in the spectacle of these Englishmen, belonging to a nation of proverbially generous feeders, stinting themselves and cutting the lardings and the sweetenings and the garnishments down to the limit that there might be a

   greater abundance of solid sustenance forthcoming for their fighting forces.

   I do not mean by this that there was any real lack of nourishing provender in London or anywhere else in England that I went. The long queues of waiting patrons in front of the butcher shops during the first few days of my sojourn very soon disappeared when people learned that they could be sure of getting meat of one sort or another, and at a price fixed by law; which was a good thing too, seeing that thereby the extortioner and the profiteer lost their chances to gain unduly through the necessities of the populace. So far as I was able to ascertain, nobody on the island actually suffered—except the present writer of these lines; and he suffered chiefly because he could not restrain himself from comparing the English foods of pre-war periods with the English foods of the hour.

   If things were thus in 

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