Further down the cloth Hodges, the epicure, was giving his views as to the proper way of serving truffles.  A dish had just passed, with an underpinning of crust.  Hodges’s early life had qualified him as an expert in cooking, as well as in wines:  Ten years in a country store swapping sugar for sausages and tea for butter and eggs; five more clerk in a Broadway cloth house, with varied boarding-house experiences (boiled mutton twice a week, with pudding on Sundays); three years junior partner, with a room over Delmonico’s; then a rich wife and a directorship in a bank (his father-in-law was the heaviest depositor); next, one year in Europe and home, as vice-president, and at the present writing president of one of the certify-as-early-as-ten-o’ clock-in-the-morning kind of banks, at which Peter would so often laugh.  With these experiences there came the usual blooming and expanding—­all the earlier life for gotten, really ignored.  Soon the food of the country became unbearable.  Even the canvasbacks must feed on a certain kind of wild celery; the oysters be dredged from a particular cove, and the terrapin drawn from their beds with the Hodges’ coat of arms cut in their backs before they would be allowed a place on the ex-clerk’s table.

It is no wonder, then, that everybody listened when the distinguished epicure launched out on the proper way to both acquire and serve so rare and toothsome a morsel as a truffle.

“Mine come by every steamer,” Hodges asserted in a positive tone—­ not to anybody in particular, but with a sweep of the table to attract enough listeners to make it worthwhile for him to proceed.  “My man is aboard before the gang-plank is secure—­gets my package from the chief steward and is at my house with the truffles within an hour.  Then I at once take proper care of them.  That is why my truffles have that peculiar flavor you spoke of, Mr. Portman, when you last dined at my house.  You remember, don’t you?”

Portman nodded.  He did not remember—­not the truffles.  He recalled some white port—­but that was because he had bought the balance of the lot himself.

“Where do they come from?” inquired Mason, the man from Chicago.  He wanted to know and wasn’t afraid to ask.

“All through France.  Mine are rooted near a little village in the Province of Perigord.”

“What roots’em?”

“Hogs—­trained hogs.  You are familiar, of course, with the way they are secured?”

Mason—­plain man as he was—­wasn’t familiar with anything remotely connected with the coralling of truffles, and said so.  Hodges talked on, his eye resting first on one and then another of the guests, his voice increasing in volume whenever a fresh listener craned his neck, as if the information was directed to him alone—­ a trick of Hodges’ when he wanted an audience.

“And now a word of caution,” he continued; “some thing that most of you may not know—­always root on a rainy day—­sunshine spoils their flavor—­makes them tough and leathery.”