and was getting ready for Yorkshire pudding with it.  It was sweet to hear Henry’s honest bark at spaghetti and fish-salads, bay deep-mouthed welcome to Sam Weller’s “’am and weal pie,” and even Pickwick’s “chops and tomato sauce,” and David Copperfield’s toasted muffins, as we drew near the chalk cliffs of England.  Also he was going to find what an “eel pie” was, and he had a dozen Dickensonian dishes that he proposed to explore, dishes whose very names would make a wooden Indian’s mouth water.  But when he got there the cupboard was bare.  England was going on rations.  Fats were scarce, sugars were rare, starches were controlled by the food board.  And who could make a currant tart without these?  He dropped two bullet-sized brown biscuits with a hazelnut of butter under his vest the first three minutes of our first breakfast and asked for another round, after he had taken mine.

[Illustration:  And we felt like prize boobs suddenly kidnapped from a tacky party and dropped into a grand ball]

“That’s your allowance, sir,” said the waitress, and money would buy no more.

He noticed a cube of sugar by his coffee cup; that was his allowance of sugar.  We went out to lunch.  Henry ordered the roast beef of old England at the best club in London and got a pink shaving, escorted in by two boiled potatoes and a hunk of green cabbage, boiled without salt or pork.  And for dessert we had a sugarless, lardless whole-wheat-flour tart!  It puckered his mouth like a persimmon.  It fell to me to explain to Mr. H. G. Wells, who gave the luncheon, that Henry had just come from the continent, where he had scorned the food, and one could see from the twinkle in Mr. Wells’s eyes that he was going to put Henry in a book.  And he certainly was a hero during those London days—­the hero of a great disillusion.  Of course the British cooking was good.  The English are splendid cooks, and they were doing their best; but Henry’s picture of the great boar’s head triumphantly borne into the hall on the shoulders of four stout butlers, and his notion of the blazing plum pudding as large as a hassock, and his preconceived idea of England as Dickens’s fat boy forever stuffing and going to sleep again, had to be entirely revised.  For if the English are proud of the way they conceal the bitterness of their sorrow in this war, also they have a vast pride in the way they are sacrificing their creature comforts for it.  In Latin countries there is more or less special privilege.  But in England, the law is the law and men glory in its rigours by obeying it in proud self-sacrifice.  If our dinners sometimes were Spartan in simplicity we found the talk ample, refreshing and filling.  We, however, had some trouble with our “Who’s Who.”  One evening they sat me opposite a handsome military man who talked of airships and things most wonderfully and it took me three days to learn that he was the authority on air fighting in Europe!  He was a Lord of somewhere, and Earl