"No--for Lonnegan. Orders for country houses come high." "Serves him right!" ventured Marny. "No business eating such messes; ought to get back to----" "Hog and hominy," interrupted Lonnegan, still with the same grave face. "Both. That's what most of your millionnaires were brought up on." Pitkin sprang from his seat, and, thrusting both hands into his pockets, burst out with-- "Gentlemen, you really don't know what good eating is! The taste for terrapin and canvas-back is part of the degeneration of the age; so is it for truffles, mushrooms, caviare, and a lot of such messes. The French, whose cuisine we imitate, turn out a lot of flat-chested, spindle-shanks on sauces and ragouts. We'll go to the devil in the same way if we follow their cooks. The English raise the highest standard of man on tough bread and the most insipid boiled mutton in the world. What we have got to do is to get back to our plain old-fashioned kitchens. The best dinner I ever had in my life was when I was sixteen years old, and even now, whenever I get a whiff from a shop where they are cooking the same combination, I can no more pass it than a drunkard can pass a rum-mill." "Drunk on pork and beans!" growled Boggs in a low voice to Marny. "I knew you'd come to no good end, Pitkin. You ought to sign a pledge and join a non-adulterated food society." "Something better than pork and beans, you beggar!" retorted Pitkin--"something that makes my mouth water every time I think of it. And hungry! the prodigal son was an over-fed alderman to me; real gnawing, empty kind of hunger." Ford stood up and faced the circle. "The great sculptor, gentlemen, is about to tell us what he knows of biblical history. Silence!" "I had been out gunning all day----" "I didn't know you were a sportsman," interpolated Boggs. "I had been gunning all day," Pitkin repeated firmly, ignoring the Chronic Interrupter, "and had lost my way over the mountains. Just about dark I reached the valley and made for a small cabin with a curl of smoke coming out of the chimney. As I came nearer I got a whiff from a fry-pan that made me ravenous--one of those smells you never forget to your dying day. As I opened the gate I could see the glow of a fire in the stove, the smell getting stronger every minute. Inside, I found a man sitting in his shirt-sleeves by a table. The table had two plates on it, two knives, two forks, and two big china cups. Bending over the hot stove was his wife. She was stirring a large bowl filled to the brim with buckwheat batter. On the stove was a hot griddle and a fry-pan, and coiled in the fry-pan, trim as a rope coiled flat on a yacht's deck, lay a string of link sausages, with the bight of the line sticking up in the centre, like Mac's thumb. "'Are you Pitkin's boy?' the man said, after I had explained. "'Yes.' "'Sit down and eat'