Sometimes we take luncheon with us and sometimes we don’t. If we do, we see nice, clean-looking places on the road, such as the Parmly at Plainsville between Erie and Cleveland and the Avelon at Norwalk between Cleveland and Toledo; if we don’t we find nothing but hotels of the saloon-front and ladies’-entrance-in-the-back variety.

Between South Bend and Chicago we had not intended to stop, but found ourselves rather hungry and unwilling to wait until about three o’clock to lunch in Chicago. We looked in the Blue Book and saw the advertisement of a restaurant a few miles ahead. “Mrs. Seth Brown. Chicken dinners a specialty.” That is not her real name.

The very words “chicken dinner” made us suddenly conscious that we were ravenous.

“Do you remember the chicken dinners at the different places near Bar Harbor?” reminisced the lady-who-was-traveling-with-us. I am not going to call her that any more! It is too long to say. I will call her “Celia” instead. It is not her name, but it is an anagram of it, which will do as well. Also a repetition of our “chauffeur” sounds tiresome, and his own initials of E. M. would be much simpler.

Anyway, all three of us conjured up visions of the chicken that was in a little while going to be set before us.

“Country chickens are so much better than town ones!” said Celia. “They are never the same after they have been packed in ice and shipped, and I do wonder whether it will be broiled, with crisp fried potatoes, or whether it will be fried with corn fritters and bacon!”

“—And pop-overs,” suggested E. M.

“Couldn’t we drive a little faster?” I asked. For by now my imagination had conjured up not only the actual aroma of deliciously broiled chicken, but I was already putting fresh country butter on crisp hot pop-overs. But in my greediness for the delectable dinner that was awaiting us, I lost my place in the Blue Book. Nothing that I could find any longer tallied with the road we were on, and it took us at least half an hour to find ourselves again. By the time we finally reached the little town of delectable dinners we were so hungry we would have thought any kind of old fowl good. But search as we might we could not discover any place that looked even remotely like a restaurant. There was a saloon, and a factory, and some small frame tenements. Nothing else in the place. Inquiring of some men standing on a corner, one of them answered, “The ladies’ entrance of the saloon is Mrs. Seth Brown’s place, and the eating’s all right.” We were very hungry and the lure of chicken being strong, also feeling that perhaps the interior might prove better than the entrance promised, we went in. In the rear of a bar was a dingy room smelling of fried fat and stale beer. There were three groups of perfectly respectable-looking people sitting at three tables. A barkeeper with a collarless shirt, ragged apron, and a cigar in his mouth, sat us at a fourth table with a coffee-stained cloth on it, rusty black-handled cutlery, and plates that were a little dusty.

“What y’want!”

“Do you serve chicken dinners?” I asked.

“D’ye see it advertised?”

“Yes, in the Blue Book.”

“Y’ c’n have dinner,” he said as though he was obliged against his inclination to live up to his advertisement.

E. M. was drawing water out of the well to fill the radiator tank. Celia and I began wiping off the plates and forks on the corners of the tablecloth.

At the table nearest us were four men and a woman. One of the men kept hugging the woman, who paid no attention to him. Two of the others went continually back and forth to the bar, while the fourth was occupied solely with his food. At another table was a family motoring party, and at the third, a second family, with a baby that cried without stopping and a little child who screamed from time to time in chorus.

Our chicken dinner proved to be some greasy fried fish, cold bluish potatoes, sliced raw onions, pickled gherkins, bread and coffee.

We ate some bread and drank the coffee. If we had been blindfolded it wouldn’t have been so bad.

There is one consoling feature in such an incident, that although it is not especially enjoyable at the time, it is just such experiences and disappointments, of course, that make the high spots of a whole motor trip in looking back upon it. It is your troubles on the road, your bad meals in queer places, your unexpected stops at people’s houses; in short, your misadventures that afterwards become your most treasured memories. In fact, after years of touring, I have in a vague, ragged sort of way tried to hold to what might be called a motor philosophy. Anyway, I have found it a splendid idea when things go very uncomfortably to remember—if I can—what a very charming diplomat, who was also a great traveler, once told me: that in motoring, as in life, since trouble gives character, obstacles and misadventures are really necessary to give the trip character! The peaceful motorist who has no motor trouble or weather trouble or road trouble has a pleasant enough time, but after all he gets the least out of it in the way of recollections. Not that our one disappointment about our chicken dinner is meant to serve as a backbone of character for this trip, neither do I hope we shall run into any serious misadventure, but I really quite honestly hope that everything will not be so easy as to be entirely colorless.

I was turning these thoughts over in my mind as we sped on to Chicago and they suggested a most discouraging possibility, which I immediately confided to Celia:

“Suppose so little happens that there will be nothing to write about? No one wants descriptions of scenery or too many details of directions as to roads or hotels, and supposing that is all we know?”

“You could make some up, couldn’t you?” said she sympathetically.

“Do you think that I could tell you a lot of things that never happened and that you would believe me?” I asked.

She answered positively: “Of course you couldn’t.”

“Then I’m certain nobody else would believe me either.”

“No, I don’t suppose they would,” she agreed, but suddenly she suggested: “I tell you what we could do. We could stop over in little places and pass those where we mean to stop—and we can in many ways make ourselves uncomfortable, if you think it necessary for interesting material.”

But our conversation turned at that point into admiration of our surroundings; for we had come into a long drive through a park on the very edge of the Lake that is the beautiful, welcoming entrance to Chicago.