And what do you suppose we had for breakfast? At the center of the table was a pile of the most beautiful and enormous red apples—fragrant apples, giving a sweet, appetizing scent which filled the room. I had thought before that I knew something about apples, but when I tasted these I became aware that no merely good apple, no merely fine apple, would ever satisfy my taste again. These apples, which are known as the "Delicious," are to all other apples that I know as Missouri poker is to all other poker. They are in a class absolutely alone, and, in case you get some on a lucky day, I want to tell you how to eat them with your breakfast. Don't eat them as you eat an ordinary apple, but either fry them, with a slice of bacon, or cut them up and take them as you do peaches—that is, with cream and sugar. Did you ever see an apple with flesh white and firm, yet tender as a pear at the exact point of perfect ripeness? Did you ever taste an apple that seemed actually to melt upon your tongue? That is the sort of apple we had for breakfast.
CHAPTER XXI
OLD RIVER DAYS
Later we motored to the town of Clarksville, some miles down the river—a town which huddles along the bank, as St. Louis must have in her early days. Being a small, straggling village which has not, if one may judge from appearances, progressed or even changed in fifty years, Clarksville out-Hannibals Hannibal. Or, perhaps, it is to-day the kind of town that Hannibal was when Mark Twain was a boy. In its decay it is theatrically perfect.
Our motor stopped before the bank, and we were introduced to the editor of the local paper, which is called "The Piker."
The bank is, in appearance, contemporary with the town. The fittings are of the period of the Civil War—walnut, as I recall them. And there are red glass signs over the little window grilles bearing the legends "Cashier" and "President."
In the back room we met the president, Mr. John O. Roberts, a gentleman over eighty years of age, who can sit back, with his feet upon his desk, smoke cigars, and, from a cloud of smoke, exude the most delightful stories of old days on the Mississippi. For Mr. Roberts was clerk on river boats more than sixty years ago, in the golden days of the great stream. There, too, we had the good fortune to meet Professor M. S. Goodman, who was born in Missouri in 1837, and founded the Clarksville High School in 1865. The professor has written the history of Pike County—but that is a big story all by itself.
In the old days Pike County embraced many of the other present counties, and, running all the way from the Mississippi to the Missouri River, was as large as a good-sized State. Pike has colonized more Western country than any other county in Missouri; or, as Professor Goodman put it, "The west used to be full of Pike County men who had pushed out there with their guns and bottles."
"Yes," added Mr. Roberts in his dry, crackling tone, "and wherever they went they always wanted office."