"Why, if there ain't that plate a going the rounds, that you gave me!" says my next neighbor, to whom I had first given the "currency."
"That plate? Oh, yes, so it is; well," says I, with feigned astonishment, "this is the first time I ever saw a good supper so universally discarded!"
The plate was off again. It reached the foot of the table. An elderly lady looked up, looked around, removed a large sweet potato from the pile—then passed it along. An old salty-looking captain, just then took a vacant seat, and the plate reached him just in the nick of time. He looked voracious—
"Ah," said he, with a savage growl, "that's your sort; thunder and oakum, I'm as peckish as a shark, and here's the duff for me!"
That ended the peregrinations of the plate, and I and my friend—yelled right out!
A Hint to Soyer.
Magrundy says, in his work on Grub, that a Frenchman will "frigazee" a pair of old boots and make a respectable soup out of an ancient chapeau; but our friend Perriwinkle affirms that the French ain't "nowhere," after a feat he saw in the kitchen arrangement of a "cheap boarding house" in the North End:—the landlady made a chowder out of an old broom mixed with sinders, and after all the boarders had dined upon it scrumptiously, the remains made broth for the whole family, next day, besides plenty of fragments left for a poor family! That landlady is bound—to make Rome howl!