And if I had the money of a Carnegie or a Rockefeller I would do it, too, for it would be a greater act of charity than building public libraries or endowing public baths.  I would include in my party a few delegates from England, where every day is All Soles’ Day; and a few sausage-surfeited Teutons; and some Gauls, wearied and worn by the deadly poulet routine of their daily life, and a scattering representation from all the other countries over there.

In especial I would direct the Englishman’s attention to the broiled pompano of New Orleans; the kingfish filet of New York; the sanddab of Los Angeles; the Boston scrod of the Massachusetts coast; and that noblest of all pan fish—­the fried crappie of Southern Indiana.  To these and to many another delectable fishling, would I introduce the poor fellow; and to him and his fellows I fain would offer a dozen apiece of Smith Island oysters on the half shell.

And I would take all of them to New England for baked beans and brown bread and codfish balls; but on the way we would visit the shores of Long Island for a kind of soft clam which first is steamed and then is esteemed.  At Portsmouth, New Hampshire, they should each have a broiled lobster measuring thirty inches from tip to tip, fresh caught out of the Piscataqua River.

Vermont should come to them in hospitality and in pity, offering buckwheat cakes and maple sirup.  But Rhode Island would bring a genuine Yankee blueberry pie and directions for the proper consumption of it, namely—­discarding knife and fork, to raise a crusty, dripping wedge of blueberry pie in your hand to your mouth, and to take a first bite, which instantly changes the ground-floor plan of that pie from a triangle to a crescent; and then to take a second bite, and then to lick your fingers—­and then there isn’t any more pie.

Down in Kentucky I should engage Mandy Berry, colored, to fry for them some spring chickens and make for them a few pones of real cornbread.  In Creole Louisiana they should sample crawfish gumbo; and in Georgia they should have ’possum baked with sweet potatoes; and in Tidewater Maryland, terrapin and canvasback; and in Illinois, young gray squirrels on toast; and in South Carolina, boiled rice with black-eyed peas; and in Colorado, cantaloupes; and in Kansas, young sweet corn; and in Virginia, country hams, not cured with chemicals but with hickory smoke and loving hands; and in Tennessee, jowl and greens.

And elsewhere they should have their whacking fill of prairie hen and suckling pig and barbecued shote, and sure-enough beefsteak, and goobers hot from the parching box; and scrapple, and yams roasted in hot wood-ashes; and hotbiscuit and waffles and Parker house rolls—­and the thousand and one other good things that may be found in this our country, and which are distinctively and uniquely of this country.

Finally I would bring them back by way of Richmond, and there I would give them each an eggnog compounded with fresh cream and made according to a recipe older than the Revolution.  If I had my way about it no living creature should be denied the right to bury his face in a brimming tumbler of that eggnog—­except a man with a drooping red mustache.