you consider that if your parents and your grandparents had not eaten, your race would have perished, and you would never have been born. I would have you consider that if you and your wife had not eaten, again your race would have perished, and neither of you would ever have lived to have the children for whose protection, as men tell me, you of Philistia avoid all mention of eating."

"Yes, for the object of this most righteous law," declares the lawman, "is to protect those whose character is not so completely formed as to be proof against the effect of meat market reports and grocery advertisements and menu folders and other such provocatives to gluttony."

"—Yet I would have you consider how little is to be gained by attempting to conceal even from the young the inevitability of this natural function, so long as dogs eat publicly in the streets, and the poultry regale themselves just as candidly, and the house-flies also. Instead, the knowledge that this function is not to be talked about induces furtive and misleading discussion among these children, and, though lack of proper instruction in the approved etiquette of eating, they often commit deplorable errors—"

To which the man of law replied, still with a bewildering effect of talking very wisely and patiently: "Ah, but it does not matter at all whether or not the function of eating is practised and is inevitable to the nature and laws of our being. The law merely considers that any mention of eating is apt to inflame an improper and lewd appetite, particularly in the young, who are always ready to eat: and therefore any such mention is an obscene libel."

4—How There Was Babbling in Philistia

Now Horvendile, yet in bewilderment, lamented, and he fled from the man of law. Thereafter, in order to learn what manner of writing was most honored by the Philistines, this Horvendile goes into an academy where the faded old books of Philistia were stored, along with yesterday's other leavings.

And as he perturbedly inspected these old books, one of the fifty mummies which were installed in this Academy of Starch and Fetters, with a hundred lackeys to attend them, spoke vexedly to Horvendile, saying, as it was the custom of these mummies to say, before this could be said to them, "I never heard of you before."

"Ah, sir, it is not that which is troubling me," then answered Horvendile: "but rather, I am troubled because the book of my journeying has been suspected of encroachment upon gastronomy. Now I notice your most sacred volume here begins with a very remarkable myth about the fruit of a tree in the middle of a garden, and goes on to speak of the supper which Lot shared with two angels and with his daughters also, and of the cakes which Tamar served to Amnon, and to speak over and over again of eating—"

"Of course," replies the mummy, yawning, because he had heard this silly sort of talking before.

"I notice that your most honored poet, here where the dust is thickest, from the moment he began by writing about certain painted berries which mocked the appetite of Dame Venus, and about a repast from which luxurious Tarquin retired like a full-fed hound or a gorged hawk, speaks continually of eating. And I notice that everybody, but particularly the young person, is encouraged to read these books, and other ancient books which speak very explicitly indeed of eating—"

"Of course," again replies the mummy (who had been for many years an exponent of dormitive literacy)—"of course, young persons ought to read them: for all these books are classics, and we who were more obviously the heirs of the ages, and the inheritors of European culture, used frequently to discuss these books in Paff's beer-cellar."

"Well, but does the indecency of