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SHOWMAN
ness for dining in the public eye, and this was a regular show-case. Every evening at six o'clock he made his entrance majestically, sat down and ordered and read the paper while his order was preparing— he was very careful indeed to ignore the sight of his actors who, fascinated by his effrontery, were standing outside on the sidewalk peering in at him with the expressions appropriate to wolves round a camp-fire.
Tension began to mount when we sighted the waiter staggering out from the kitchen under a heavy tray. It grew to dangerous heights as the waiter unloaded on the manager's table— he was a portly man and took a lot of refreshment. A thick, juicy steak was his customary order, crowned with half a pound or so of fried onions, half hidden under a heap of fried potatoes, washed down by a pint of coffee and followed along by a piece of pie so wide and thick that the plate it rested on was hardly visible. You could fairly smell it through the plate glass. And he made no effort to spare us the agony of watching him work. He would bend his nose over the platter, sniff up an odor so rich that it would have been a meal in itself, tuck up his cuffs with gloating deliberation and dive in with a gusto that made the spectators writhe and moan.
The restaurant management used bad judgment in planting him so conspicuously in the window— it's a wonder one of us famine-victims outside didn't heave a cobblestone through the glass and follow in after it with a club. After that had been going on for some
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