Page:I, Mary MacLane (1917).pdf/174

 I liked Cold Boiled Potato at four-and twentyfour-and-twenty [sic]. I liked it at seventeen. I liked it at twelve. At three I climbed on cake-boxes in search of one. And now in the deep bloom of being myself I am made roundly replete at midnight with a Cold Boiled Potato.

A Cold Boiled Potato—it tastes of chestnuts at midnight, the first frost-kissed chestnuts in the woods: and it tastes of rain-water and of salt and of roses: it tastes of young willow-bark and of earth and of grass-stems: it tastes of the sun and the wind and of some nameless relishingness born of the summer hillside that grew it: it tastes at midnight so like a Cold Boiled Potato.

A precious peach-colored orchid, an antique spider-web-like lace handkerchief, a delicate purple butterfly, an emerald bracelet: I'd strive for each of those in an eagerly casual way. But it's like an ogre at midnight I pounce on a Cold Boiled Potato.

A Cold Boiled Potato reminds me of the Dickens books in which so much food is eaten cold and tastes so savory—even the 'wilderness of cold potatoes' portioned to the Marchioness by Sally Brass. And it reminds me of the Rip Van Winkle play—'give this fellow a cold potato and let him go.' And it reminds me of Hamlet—funeral baked meats might include it. And it reminds me of Robin Hood's merry men, and Huckleberry Finn, and the Canter-