Thus in sudden compassion I mused.  To the waiter, though, I said: 

“There has been a mistake here, alumnus.  This egg never was meant to be dropped—­it was meant to be thrown.  Kindly remove the melancholy evidences.”

He offered to provide a substitute, but the edge of my zest seemed dulled.  I made dry toast the climax of my chastely simple repast.  It was simple and it was chaste, but otherwise not altogether what I should characterize as a successful repast.  It lacked, as it were.

Let us pass along to noontime.  Ere noontime came I was consumed with gnawing pains of emptiness.  As nearly as I might judge, I contained naught save vast hollow spaces and acoustics and vacuums and empty, echoing, neglected convolutions.  Sorely was I tempted to relax the rigors of the just-inaugurated regime; nobly, though, I resisted the impulse.

As I look back now on that day I find the memory of my suffering has dimmed slightly.  The passage of weeks and months has served to soften the harsh outlines of poignant recollection.  What now in retrospect most impresses me is the heroism I displayed, the stark fortitude, the grandeur of will power, the triumph for character.  Sheer gallantry, I call it.

For my midday meal I had more dry toast, a reduced portion of boiled tongue and a raw apple—­satisfying enough to some, I grant you, but to me no more than a tease to my palate.  Long before three o’clock I knew exactly how a tapeworm feels when its landlord goes on a hunger strike.  Every salivary gland I owned was standing on tiptoe screaming for help; every little mucous membrane had a sorrow all its own.  Each separate fiber of my innermost being cried out for greases and for sugars and for the wonted starchy compounds for to stay it and for to comfort it.

I underwent pangs such as had not been mine since away back yonder in August of 1914, in the time of the sack of Belgium, when the Germans locked up five of us for a day and a night in a cow stable where no self-respecting cow would voluntarily have stayed, and, then sent us by train under guard on a three-day journey into Germany, yet all the while kept right on telling us we were not prisoners but guests of the German Army.  And at the end of the third day we reached the unanimous conclusion among ourselves that the only outstanding distinction we could see, from where we sat, between being prisoners of the German Army and guests of the German Army was that from time to time they did feed the prisoners.  For throughout the journey the eight of us—­since by now our little party had grown—­lived rather simply and frugally and, I might say, sketchily on rations consisting of one loaf of soldiers’ bread, one bottle of mineral water and a one-pound pot of sour and rancid honey which must have emanated in the first place from a lot of very morbid, low-minded bees.