"Vegetable, animal or mineral," said Butterfield, "I knew it was."

"No, it isn't," said Hubbard. "The man who has gone out and has come
in says to you, What food does the person you've chosen remind you of?
and you say tapioca pudding or beef-steak and kidney pie."

"But," I said, "there's nobody in the whole wide world who reminds me
of either of those things."

"Well, you can choose your own food," said Hubbard. "If you don't like
tapioca pudding you can answer scrambled eggs. Only scrambled eggs
must remind you of the person you have in your mind. Then you go on
to the next man, and you ask him what cloth he reminds you of, and he
answers tweed or Irish frieze or best Angola."

"Can anybody," said Butterfield, "tell me what 'best Angola' means?
I've seen it often in my tailor's bills; mostly, I think, as
waistcoats, but I've never known what it really is. If I had to guess
now I should say it is something composed in equal parts of fancy
waistcoats, tapioca pudding and scrambled eggs."

"Well, you'd be wrong," said Hubbard; "it's nothing of the sort. When
you have got as far as scrambled eggs your man ought to begin to have
a faint glimmering--"

"But," I said, "there's the tapioca pudding. What are you going to do
with that? You can't be allowed to play fast and loose with that."

"Don't you see," said Hubbard, "that that's a mere example and now