as I remembered, breakfast had been my heartiest meal of the entire day, with perhaps two exceptions—luncheon and dinner. Precedent inclined me toward ordering about as many pieces of sliced banana as would be required to button a fairly tall woman's princess frock all the way down her back, with plenty of sugar and cream, and likewise a large porringer of some standard glutinous cereal, to be followed by sausages with buckwheat cakes and a few odd kickshaws and comfits in the way of strawberry preserves and hot buttered toast and coffee that was half cream, and first one thing and then another. But Spartanlike I put temptation sternly behind me and told the officiating collegian to bring me plain boiled prunes, coffee with hot milk and saccharin tablets, dry toast and one dropped egg.

   The prunes and the coffee were according to specifications, although, lacking the customary cream and three lumps of sugar, the coffee was in the nature of a profound disappointment. But a superficial inquiry convinced me that the egg was not properly a dropped egg at all.

   Here was a fallen egg, if I ever saw one. I was filled with pity for it—poor, forsaken, abandoned thing, with none to speak a kind word for it! And probably more sinned against than sinning, too. Perhaps there was hereditary influences to be reckoned with. Perhaps its producer had been incubator raised, with no mother to guide her and only the Standard Oil Company for a foster parent. And what would a New Jersey corporation know about raising a hen?

   Thus in sudden compassion I mused. To the waiter, though, I said:

   "There has been a mistake here, alumnus. This egg never was meant to be dropped—it was meant to be thrown. Kindly remove the melancholy evidences."

   He offered to provide a substitute, but the edge of my zest seemed dulled. I made dry toast the climax of my chastely simple repast. It was simple and it was chaste, but otherwise not altogether what I should characterize as a successful repast. It lacked, as it were.

   Let us pass along to noontime. Ere noontime came I was consumed with gnawing pains of emptiness. As nearly as I might judge, I contained naught save vast hollow spaces and acoustics and vacuums and empty, echoing, neglected convolutions. Sorely was I tempted to relax the rigors of the just-inaugurated régime; nobly, though, I resisted the impulse.

   As I look back now on that day I find the memory of my suffering has dimmed slightly. 

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