time when I had helped cover the teamsters' strike. I
peered into the dining room.

The thunder of conversation went on as before. But
there was no bloodshed. Nothing but men and women
sitting at small tables, eating and talking. When I say
eating and talking I do not mean that those acts were
carried on separately. Not at all. The eating and the
talking went on simultaneously, neither interrupting the
other. A fork full of food and a mouthful of
ten-syllabled German words met, wrestled, and passed one
another, unscathed. I stood in the doorway, fascinated,
until Herr Knapf spied me, took a nimble skip in my
direction, twisted the discouraged mustaches into
temporary sprightliness, and waved me toward a table in
the center of the room.

Then a frightful thing happened. When I think of it
now I turn cold. The battery was not that of women's
eyes, but of men's. And conversation ceased! The uproar
and the booming of vowels was hushed. The silence was
appalling. I looked up in horror to find that what
seemed to be millions of staring blue eyes were fixed on
me. The stillness was so thick that you could cut it
with a knife. Such men! Immediately I dubbed them the
aborigines, and prayed that I might find adjectives with
which to describe their foreheads.

It appeared that the aborigines were especially
favored in that they were all placed at one long, untidy