No words can describe the glory of the California scenery when you get up into these hills, which are covered with woods, and nothing can give you any idea of the sweetness and the freshness of the air there. The next night I left San Francisco for Chicago. Before leaving San Francisco, I had dinner at a restaurant called the “New Franks.” It is a small restaurant, and it provides the best food I have ever eaten anywhere. When people speak in this way of a restaurant, they often mean that they happened on that day to be hungry and to have a good appetite. I was not hungry the night I went to the New Franks. I was not inclined to eat, but the sheer excellence of the cooking there excited my greed, and bade my appetite rise from the dead. The cooking was perfect. There is no other word for it. When I say the cooking was perfect, I mean the food was perfectly cooked. I don’t mean that there were dozens of messy entrées and highly spiced sauces. The food was of the simplest. I had soup (soup _à l’oignon_, a dream!), fish, and chicken, and I never tasted anything so good in my life. Anatole France tells somewhere the story of a king, who, powerful as he was (or rather just because he was all-powerful), was condemned to the luxury of a huge kitchen and a huge staff of cooks, who served him up elaborate tasteless dishes which meant nothing to him. And this was sad, adds Anatole France, for he liked good food (Car il aimait la bonne chère). He would have found it at the New Franks, which is under the direction of Mr. Peter Kochely, a Dalmatian. His cook, or cooks, are Frenchmen, and I| think a part of the success which his restaurant enjoys and the greater part of the excellence which it reaches are due to his eagle eye, which detects from a distance the likes and dislikes of every customer. The trouble about small restaurants, when they are excellent, is, that they become well known, and are then so largely patronized that they become large and ultimately bad. Once I was walking in Normandy with a friend, and we stopped in a very small town to have luncheon at a hotel. We asked if there was any wine. Yes, there was some wine, some Burgundy, some Beaune. We tried a bottle, and it surprised us. Surprise is, in fact, a mild word to describe the sharpness of our ecstasy. “Is not this wine very good?” we asked of the host. “Yes, sirs,” he answered, “it is very good. It is very old, but there is not much of it left.” Now, my friend was a journalist, who writes about French towns and French wines in the English press. “Whatever happens,” I said to him, “if you write about this town and about this wine, which I know you will do, you must not divulge the name of the town.” He agreed. He wrote an article about the town, he grew lyric over the wine, and looted all the poets of the world from Homer downwards for epithets and comparisons fit for it. And he did not mention the name of the place.