Presently we heard motors arriving in the drive, beneath our windows. When we descended, the living room was filled with men in dinner suits. (Oh, yes; they wear them in those Mississippi River towns, and they fit as well as yours does!)
When we had been introduced we all moved to the dining room.
At each place was a printed menu with the heading "At Home Abroad"--a hospitable inversion of the general title of these chapters--and with details as follows:
Old Pike County ham, Pike County capons and other Pike County essentials, with Pike County Colonels.
At the bottom of the card was this--shall I call it warning?
Senator Warner once said to Colonel Roosevelt: "_Pike County babies cut their teeth on poker chips_."
I have already said that Pike is a county with a Southern savor, but I had not realized how fully that was true until I dined there. I will not say that I have never tasted such a dinner, for truth I hold even above politeness. All I will say is that if ever before I had met with such a meal the memory of it has departed--and, I may add, my memory for famous meals is considered good to the point of irritation.
The dinner (save for the "essentials") was entirely made up of products of the county. More, it was even supervised and cooked by county products, for two particularly sweet young ladies, members of the family, were flying around the kitchen in their pretty evening gowns, helping and directing Molly.
Molly is a pretty mulatto girl. Her skin is like a smooth, light-colored bronze, her eye is dark and gentle, like that of some domesticated animal, her voice drawls in melodious cadences, and she has a sort of shyness which is very fetching.
"Ah cain't cook lak they used to cook in the ole days," she smiled in response to my tribute to the dinner, later. "The Kuhnel was askin' jus' th' othah day if ah could make 'im some ash cake, but ah haid to tell 'im ah couldn't. Ah've seen ma gran'fatha make it lots o' times, but folks cain't make it no mo', now-a-days."
Poor benighted Northerner that I am, I had to ask what ash cake was. It is a kind of corn cake, Molly told me, the parent, so to speak, of the corn dodger, and the grandparent of hoecake. It has to be prepared carefully and then cooked in the hot ashes--cooked "jes so," as Molly said.