Just then the head waiter peeped in at the door to say,
“Brother Priddy, are you coming across to the dining-room? I’m going over.”
Eager to face my responsibilities of the day in the leadership of somebody I accompanied the tall German across the road and into the dining-room.
“Black for breakfast and supper. White for dinner,” announced Brock. “I mean the kind of coats that are to be worn,” he explained.
While I arranged my two tables for twenty people with plates, knives and forks, milk in granite-ware pitchers, sliced bread, corn bread left over from the previous night’s meal, tomato butter, and dishes of crisp, browned, fried potatoes, the other waiters came in and greeted me with hearty,
“Morning’s!” “Howdy’s!” and “Hello, Priddy’s!” which had the effect of making me feel in strong fellowship with them, although our acquaintance was but a day and a night old, at the utmost. Brock smiled at all these evidences of friendship, and whispered, as he showed me how to arrange the breakfast things,
“Things are going well, eh?”
“Yes,” I muttered, “if I can manage not to drop another tray!”
Then the breakfast bell brought the hurried, chattering, hungry crowd of young men and women into the room again, though, at this meal, they were less formidable in their every-day clothes. Some brought books, others writing pads. Fountain pens and pencils projected from the outer pockets of the men, and were stabbed in the hair of the women.
My tables were soon lined with students. They, too, seemed to have met me, long ago, in the remote past and to some of them I must have been at least a third cousin or present at a family party, so freely and lavishly did the greetings come: greetings that put me at my ease because I felt that they came from sincere hearts.