Having bought everything else, we repeated our question, was he sure he had no gluten or Swedish bread, no dry, flourless bread of any kind! No, he had only hardtack, and then produced—round packages of brittle bread!
Wonderful! We were so delighted we fairly floundered in it. “Bring us more; we are going to cross the continent; we must have lots of it!” I said greedily. Then we hurried home and waited for our supplies to arrive.
First came a big basket, bulging. Had we really bought all that? But it was only the beginning. Bread, bread, and more bread! Bales of it! It was I who had ordered “lots of it.” Celia looked sorry for me.
“It looks like rain! We could shelter the car under it,” was all I, idiotically, could think of. And in my absent-mindedness I broke open one of the bales. It was certainly Swedish bread, the nicest, crispest imaginable, and then I took a bite. Caraway seeds!
In our family some ancestor must have been done to death on caraway seeds. The strongest of us becomes a queer green at even so much as a whiff of one. Celia ran out into the hall as though I had exclaimed “Snakes!” And I, like the one who had just been bitten, followed unstably after her.
“Is there a bat in your room?” asked the floor clerk, sympathetically.
“N-o,—car-a-way s-seeds,” said Celia, all in a tremble.
“We none of us can bear them—and they are in the bread,” I explained.
“Caraway seeds?” exclaimed the bewildered floor clerk. “Oh, but I like caraway seeds very much!”
“Do you?” we gasped. “Well, then if you will send a staff of porters into Room 2002, you can have enough to last all your life! You can stack a whole mountain of it around your desk and eat your way out.”