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“‘That ain’t his fault,’ she says. ‘I’ll call him,’ she says, looking like it wont be no trouble whatsoever to show goods.

“But we don’t wait. ‘Sweet Caps,’ I says to him as we hikes round the first turn in the road, ‘this district ain’t making no pronounced hit with me. Every time you ast ’em for bread they give you a dog. The next time,’ I says,’ anybody offers me a canine, I’m going to take him,’ I says. ‘If he can eat me any faster than I can eat him,’ I says, ‘he’ll have to work fast. And,’ I says, ‘if I should meet a nice little clean boy with fat legs–Heaven help him!’

“And just as I’m speaking them words we comes to a lovely glade in the woods and stops with our mouths ajar and our eyes bulged out like push buttons. ‘Do I sleep,’ I says to myself, ‘or am I just plain delirious?’

“For right there, out in the middle of the woods, is a table with a white cloth on it, and it’s all covered over with the most lucivicious looking viands you ever see in your life, including a ham and a couple of chickens and a pie and some cool-looking bottles with long necks on ’em and gilt-foil crowns upon their regal heads. And a couple of flunkies in long-tailed coats and knee breeches and white wigs are mooning round, fixing things up ship shape. And just then a tall lady comes sauntering out of the bushes, and she strolls up close and the flunkies bow and fall back and she says something about everything being now ready for Lady Gwyndolin’s garden party and departs the same way she came. And the second she’s out of sight, me and Sweet Caps can’t hold in no longer. We busts through the roadside thicket and tear acrost that open place, licketty-split. It seems too good to be true. And it is. When we gets up close we realizes the horrible truth.

“The ham is wood and the chickens is pasteboard and the pie is a prop pie and the bottles aint got nothing in ’em but the corks. As we pauses, stupefied with disappointment, a cheerful voice calls out: ‘That’s the ticket! Hold the spot and register grief–we can work the scene in and it’ll be a knock-out!’

“And right over yonder at the other side of the clearing stands a guy in a checked suit grinding the handle of a moving-picture machine. We has inadvertently busted right into the drammer. So we kicks over his table and departs on the run, with a whole troupe of them cheap fillum troopers chasing after us, calling hard names and throwing sticks and rocks and things.

“After while, by superior footwork, we loses ’em and resumes our journey. Well, unless you’ve got a morbid mind you wont be interested in hearing about our continued sufferings. I will merely state that by the time five o’clock comes we have traveled upwards of nine hundred miles, running sometimes but mostly walking, and my feet is so full of water blisters I’ve got riparian rights. Nearly everything has happened to us except something to eat. So we comes to the edge of a green field alongside the road and I falls in a heap, and Sweet Caps he falls in another heap alongside of me, making two heaps in all.

“‘Kiddo,’ I says, ‘let us recline here and enjoy the beauties of Nature,’ I says.

“‘Dern the beauties of Nature!’ says Sweet Caps. ‘I’ve had enough Nature since this morning to last me eleven thousand years. Nature,’ he says, ‘has been overdone, anyway.’

“‘Ain’t you got no soul?’ I says.

“‘Oh yes,’ he says, ‘I’ve got a soul, but the trouble is,’ he says, ‘I’ve got a lot of other vital organs, too. When I ponder,’ he says, ‘and remember how many times I’ve got up from the table and gone away leaving bones and potato peels and clam shells and lobster claws on the plate–when I think,’ he says, ‘of them old care-free, prodigal days, I could bust right out crying.’