The solid food on the table consisted of waterlogged potatoes, half-baked salt-rising bread, and salt-pork.

Now, young Charlton was a reader of the _Water-Cure Journal_ of that day, and despised meat of all things, and of all meat despised swine's flesh, as not even fit for Jews; and of all forms of hog, hated fat salt-pork as poisonously indigestible.

So with a dyspeptic self-consciousness he rejected the pork, picked off the periphery of the bread near the crust, cautiously avoiding the dough-bogs in the middle; but then he revenged himself by falling furiously upon the aquatic potatoes, out of which most of the nutriment had been soaked.
Jim, who sat alongside him, doing cordial justice to the badness of the meal, muttered that it wouldn't do to eat by idees in Minnesoty.

And with the freedom that belongs to the frontier, the company begun to discuss dietetics, the fat gentleman roundly abusing the food for the express purpose, as Charlton thought, of diverting attention from his voracious eating of it.
"Simply despicable," grunted the fat man, as he took a third slice of the greasy pork.

"I do despise such food." "Eats it _like_ he was mad at it," said Driver Jim in an undertone.
But as Charlton's vegetarianism was noticed, all fell to denouncing it.
Couldn't live in a cold climate without meat.