Of butter and of cheese and of nuts I eat perhaps one-third the amount I used to eat, and of meats, roughly, one-half as much as before the dawn of reason came.  Of everything except the items I just have enumerated I eat as freely as I please.  And when a person begins to reckon up everything else among the edibles—­flesh, fowl, fish, berries, fruits, vegetables and the rest he finds quite a sizable list.

I shall not pretend that I do not pine often for sundry tabooed things.  Take pies, now—­if there is any person alive who likes his pie better than I do he’s the king of the pie likers, that’s all.  And I am desolated at being compelled to bar out the rice—­not the gummy, glued-together, sticky, messy stuff which Northerners eat with milk and sugar on it, but real orthodox rice such as only Southerners and Chinamen and East Indians know how to prepare; white and fluffy and washed free of all the lurking library paste; with every grain standing up separate and distinct like well-popped corn and treated only with salt, pepper and butter, or with salt, pepper and gravy before being consumed.

And as for white potatoes—­well, it distresses me deeply to think that hereafter the Irish potato, except when I’m camping out, will be to me merely something to stopper the spout of a coal-oil can with, or to stab the office pen in on the clerk’s desk in an American-plan hotel.  For I have ever cherished the Irish potato as one of Nature’s most succulent gifts to mankind.  I like potatoes all styles and every style, French fried, lyonnaise, O’Brien, shoestring shape, pants-button design, hashed brown, creamed, mashed, stewed, souffle—­if only I knew who blew ’em up—­and most of all, baked au naturel in the union suit.  And I miss them and shall keep on missing them.  But no longer do I yearn for cream in my coffee, now that it is out of it, and I am getting reconciled to dry toast for breakfast, where once upon a time only members of the justly famous Flap Jackson family seemed to satisfy.

Of course I imbibe alcoholic stimulant when and where procurable.  From the standpoint of one intent upon cutting a few running feet off the waistline measurements this distinctly is wrong, as full well I know.  But what would you?  I do not wish to pose as an eccentric.  I have no desire to be pointed out as a person aiming to make himself conspicuously erratic by behaving differently from the run of his fellows.  Since the advent of Prohibition nearly everybody I meet is drinking with an unbridled enthusiasm; and when not engaged in the act of drinking is discussing the latest and most approved methods of evading, circumventing and defying the Federal and State statutes against drinking.  Therefore I drink, too.  Even so, I have not yet succeeded in accustoming my palate to strong waters indiscriminately swallowed.  I confess to a fear that I shall never make a complete success of the undertaking.