The very words “chicken dinner” made us suddenly conscious that we were ravenous.
“Do you remember the chicken dinners at the different places near Bar Harbor?” reminisced the lady-who-was-traveling-with-us. I am not going to call her that any more! It is too long to say. I will call her “Celia” instead. It is not her name, but it is an anagram of it, which will do as well. Also a repetition of our “chauffeur” sounds tiresome, and his own initials of E. M. would be much simpler.
Anyway, all three of us conjured up visions of the chicken that was in a little while going to be set before us.
“Country chickens are so much better than town ones!” said Celia. “They are never the same after they have been packed in ice and shipped, and I do wonder whether it will be broiled, with crisp fried potatoes, or whether it will be fried with corn fritters and bacon!”
“—And pop-overs,” suggested E. M.
“Couldn’t we drive a little faster?” I asked. For by now my imagination had conjured up not only the actual aroma of deliciously broiled chicken, but I was already putting fresh country butter on crisp hot pop-overs. But in my greediness for the delectable dinner that was awaiting us, I lost my place in the Blue Book. Nothing that I could find any longer tallied with the road we were on, and it took us at least half an hour to find ourselves again. By the time we finally reached the little town of delectable dinners we were so hungry we would have thought any kind of old fowl good. But search as we might we could not discover any place that looked even remotely like a restaurant. There was a saloon, and a factory, and some small frame tenements. Nothing else in the place. Inquiring of some men standing on a corner, one of them answered, “The ladies’ entrance of the saloon is Mrs. Seth Brown’s place, and the eating’s all right.” We were very hungry and the lure of chicken being strong, also feeling that perhaps the interior might prove better than the entrance promised, we went in. In the rear of a bar was a dingy room smelling of fried fat and stale beer. There were three groups of perfectly respectable-looking people sitting at three tables. A barkeeper with a collarless shirt, ragged apron, and a cigar in his mouth, sat us at a fourth table with a coffee-stained cloth on it, rusty black-handled cutlery, and plates that were a little dusty.
“What y’want!”
“Do you serve chicken dinners?” I asked.
“D’ye see it advertised?”
“Yes, in the Blue Book.”