196 EDGE OF THE JUNGLE 
hunters who must track their quarry through 
marshy and treacherous lands, and one cannot 
forget their confiding catspaw, that desolated 
pig, created only to be betrayed and robbed of 
the fungi of his labors. He is one of the pathetic 
characters of history, born to secret sorrow, vic- 
timized by those superior tastes which do not be- 
come his lowly station. Born to labor and to 
suffer, but not to eat. To this day he commands 
my sympathy; his ghost—lean, bourgeois, re- 
proachful—looks out at me from every market- 
place in the world where the truffle proclaims 
his faithful service. 
But the pancake is a pancake, nothing more. 
It is without inherent or artificial glamour; and 
this unfortunately, when you come right down 
to it, is true of food in general. For food, after 
all, is one of the lesser considerations; the con- 
noisseur, the gourmet, even the gourmand, 
spends no more than four hours out of the day 
at his table. From the cycle, he may select four 
in which to eat; but whether he will or not, he 
must set aside seven of the twenty-four in which 
to sleep. 
Sleeping, then, as opposed to eating, is of al- 
most double importance, since it consumes nearly 
