the anticipation rather outshone the realisation. Already I detect
myself, in a retrospective mood, hankering for the savoury _ragoûts_
we used to get in peasant homes in obscure French villages, and for
the meals they gave us at the regimental messes of our own forces,
where the cooking was the home sort and good honest American slang
abounded.

They called the corned beef Canned Willie; and the stew was known
affectionately as Slum, and the doughnuts were Fried Holes. When the
adjutant, who had been taking French lessons, remarked "What the _la_
hell does that _sacré-blew_ cook mean by serving forty-fours at every
meal?" you gathered he was getting a mite tired of baked army beans.
And if the lieutenant colonel asked you to pass him the Native Sons
you knew he meant he wanted prunes. It was a great life, if you
didn't weaken--and nobody did.

But, so far as the joys of the table are concerned, I think I shall be
able to wait for quite a spell before I yearn for another whack at
English eating. I opine Charles Dickens would be a most unhappy man
could he but return to the scenes he loved and wrote about.

Dickens, as will be recalled, specialised in mouth-watering
descriptions of good things and typically British things to eat--roast
sucking pigs, with apples in their snouts; and baked goose; and suety
plum puddings like speckled cannon balls; and cold game pies as big
round as barrel tops--and all such. He wouldn't find these things
prevailing to any noticeable extent in his native island now. Even the
kidney, the same being the thing for which an Englishman mainly raises
a sheep and which he always did know how to serve up better than any
one else on earth, somehow doesn't seem to be the kidney it once upon