Page:A child of the Orient (IA childoforient00vakarich).pdf/283

 I was almost starved before I could learn to eat American food. It seemed to me painfully tasteless: the beef and mutton were so tough, compared to the meat in Turkey, and all the vegetables were cooked in water—while as for the potatoes I had never seen such quantities in my life. We had them for breakfast, for luncheon, and for dinner, in some form or other. Just before we sat down to table the principal said grace, in which were the words, "Bless that of which we are about to partake." To my untrained ear "partake" and "potatoes" sounded exactly alike, and I wrote home that the Americans not only ate potatoes morning, noon, and night, but that they even prayed to the Lord to keep them supplied with potatoes, instead of daily bread.

My Greek pupil and his wife, and also my first American friend of the Normal College found me pupils, so that I now earned considerable money. My outside pupils, mostly married women, were very nice to me; but I felt that they did not quite know how to take me. I had a terribly direct way of speaking; and, being still under the impression that as a nation they were my inferiors, my attitude must have displayed something of that feeling.

I began to be asked out to luncheons and dinners—partly as a freak, I am afraid—and at one of these dinners I became the victim of