I stand in the pantry door leaning against the jamb, with a tiny glass salt-shaker in one hand and the sweet dark pink Cold Boiled Potato in the other. And I sprinkle it with salt and I nibble, nibble, nibble. And I say aloud, ‘Gee, it’s good!’ I liked Cold Boiled Potato at four-and-twenty. I liked it at seventeen. I liked it at twelve. At three I climbed on cake-boxes in search of one. And now in the deep bloom of being myself I am made roundly replete at midnight with a Cold Boiled Potato. A Cold Boiled Potato--it tastes of chestnuts at midnight, the first frost-kissed chestnuts in the woods: and it tastes of rain-water and of salt and of roses: it tastes of young willow-bark and of earth and of grass-stems: it tastes of the sun and the wind and of some nameless relishingness born of the summer hillside that grew it: it tastes at midnight so _like_ a Cold Boiled Potato. A precious peach-colored orchid, an antique spider-web-like lace handkerchief, a delicate purple butterfly, an emerald bracelet: I’d strive for each of those in an eagerly casual way. But it’s like an ogre at midnight I pounce on a Cold Boiled Potato. A Cold Boiled Potato reminds me of the Dickens books in which so much food is eaten cold and tastes so savory--even the ‘wilderness of cold potatoes’ portioned to the Marchioness by Sally Brass. And it reminds me of the Rip Van Winkle play--‘give this fellow a cold potato and let him go.’ And it reminds me of Hamlet--funeral baked meats might include it. And it reminds me of Robin Hood’s merry men, and Huckleberry Finn, and the Canterbury Pilgrims, and the Prodigal Son, and all the picturesque wayfarers. It reminds me of the poor as a colorful race wrapped around with hungry romance. It reminds me that life is full of life--rich and fruitful and evolutionary and cosmic: few things feel so cosmic as a Cold Boiled Potato at midnight. It makes me want as I nibble to plant a field of potatoes on a southern-exposed hill and hoe them and dig them all by myself: and give all but one to the poor and Boil that to eat Cold at midnight. I have to be very hungry to crave a Cold Boiled Potato, but being hungry no possible morsel of food can so interest me at midnight. The same potato hot is domestic and tasteless. The same potato at ten in the evening lukewarm within and sodden with memories of dinner, is a repellent item. At midnight it is all unexpected magnetism. At midnight my whole being is profoundly courteous, wooingly cordial toward a Cold Boiled Potato. If I had only what I deserved my portion might well be a Cold Boiled Potato. Intrinsically it is rated low and I know me to be a sort of jezebel. But I’d wonder each midnight if whoever metes out the deserts in this surprising universe knew with what gust I rise at it--_would_ I get it.