Seeing the houses of the players next day as I drove about the county, I suspected that even these had been built around the game of poker, for each house has ample accommodations for the "gang" in case the game lasts until too late to go home. In the winter the games occur at the houses of the different Colonels, and there is always a dinner first. But it is in summer that the greatest games occur, for then it is the immemorial custom for the Colonels (and Major Wald and Mr. Matson, too, of course) to charter a steamer and go out on the river. These excursions sometimes last for the better part of a week. Sometimes they cruise. Sometimes they go ashore upon an island and camp. "We take a tribe of cooks and a few cases of 'essentials,'" one of the Colonels explained to me, "and the game never stops at all." My companion and I were tired. The mental strain had told upon us. Soon after the Colonels, the Major, and Mr. Matson went, we retired. It seemed to me that I had hardly closed my eyes when I heard a faint rap at my bedroom door. But I must have slept, for there was sunlight streaming through the window. "What is it?" I called. The voice of our host replied. "Breakfast will be ready any time you want it," he declared. "Will you have your toddy now?" Ah! Pike is a great county! And what do you suppose we had for breakfast? At the center of the table was a pile of the most beautiful and enormous red apples--fragrant apples, giving a sweet, appetizing scent which filled the room. I had thought before that I knew something about apples, but when I tasted these I became aware that no merely good apple, no merely fine apple, would ever satisfy my taste again. These apples, which are known as the "Delicious," are to all other apples that I know as Missouri poker is to all other poker. They are in a class absolutely alone, and, in case you get some on a lucky day, I want to tell you how to eat them with your breakfast. Don't eat them as you eat an ordinary apple, but either fry them, with a slice of bacon, or cut them up and take them as you do peaches--that is, with cream and sugar. Did you ever see an apple with flesh white and firm, yet tender as a pear at the exact point of perfect ripeness? Did you ever taste an apple that seemed actually to melt upon your tongue? That is the sort of apple we had for breakfast. CHAPTER XXI OLD RIVER DAYS Later we motored to the town of Clarksville, some miles down the river--a town which huddles along the bank, as St. Louis must have in her early days. Being a small, straggling village which has not, if one may judge from appearances, progressed or even changed in fifty years, Clarksville out-Hannibals Hannibal. Or, perhaps, it is to-day the kind of town that Hannibal was when Mark Twain was a boy. In its decay it is theatrically perfect. Our motor stopped before the bank, and we were introduced to the editor of the local paper, which is called "The Piker."