The bachelor and the chafing dish

- r— ' ' One day Tom said to me : “I say, old man, it’s all nonsense, don’t you know, spending two or three dollars for our dinners the way we have been doing ? There are the Appleby- Joneses, who are rather high tarts, and they get ever so much more than we do, with wine included, for only fifty , cents apiece ! ” So Tom and I determined to forsake the “ Studio ” or the “ Clifton ” for a while, and see how things worked along on Twenty-fifth Street. There were three places, next door to each other, that held out alluring signs, and canopies down to the sidewalk in case the night was wet. Our first dinner was aston- ishing. How they could do it we didn’t know : half a dozen courses, claret, all the black coffee you wanted, and only ten cents to the waiter. To be sure, the oil on the salad tasted as though it had been made out of old shoes, and the salt was of the quality that hides are preserved in. Yet it wasn’t necessary to gorge ourselves with either, and we considered in the first hour of our enthusiasm that we had struck oil, even if it were of an inferior kind. 42 The Bachelor and the Chafing-dish. With the two successive nights we tried the neigh- bors, and then went on to other streets hard by, with the result we began laying up money in the bank, and declared that one could live more cheaply, and at the same time more luxuriously, in New York than any other town. After a couple of weeks had gone by with this sort of thing, Tom said to me : “ I don’t know how it is, but I’m hungry and still I’m not. Dear old Bradley doctored me yesterday with a dose of pep- sin-flakes, but somehow or other I’m all out of sorts. What do you say to trying something better to- night? I don’t mind going a dollar.” I said : “All right ; let’s go to Spagetti’s ; they say he’s up to Del’s almost.” So we went to Spagetti’s and ate with new zest. It was a novelty, at any rate, and the people there appeared to be enjoying their first meal on earth. It entertained us to see them devour macaroni as a cow would hay. They had an idea that it shouldn’t be cut with even a fork, and sucked it in with a pro- vincial grimace of satisfaction that a stork would have envied in trying to swallow an eel. When we got through and felt like a couple of turkeys with superfluous dressing, I said to Tom : “ Those kid- neys were pretty good, weren’t they ? ” He said : “ Do you mean those things on a stick The Little Table d' Hole. 43 with bacon in between them ? For my part, I feel as if I had a stick through my own. No, old chap, the fact is, I’m going back to a boarding-house. Even pie would be a relief.” The next night we went to Del’s. ‘lTZNOODLE‘5 (HAFINO DiSH I met B. B. Vallentine, formerly editor of Puck , rushing around the Herald building a few days ago. We got to talking about the chafing-dish. Knowing him to be almost wholly responsible for the sanity of Lord Fitznoodle as we knew him in Puck and occasionally since, I asked him to speak to His Lordship on the subject. The next day came Fitz- noodle himself.