CHAPTER XIX.
_Mine Host on the Avenue_ Mine Host on the Avenue--A Gentleman of Brussels--Poulard's--Some Old New York Hotels--High Prices of 1836--The American--The Metropolitan--Holt's--The Brevoort and the Steamship Captains--Delmonico's--Famous Menus--The Glory of the Fifth Avenue--The Logerot--A Bohemian Chop-house--The Great Mince Pie Contest--About Madison Square--Lost Youth.
Is there anything that civilized man recalls more poignantly than the menus of yesterday?
Of the Brussels of the winter of 1917, the last winter that the Americans of the Commission for Relief were allowed to remain, I have many vivid memories.

One of them is of a crowd gathered before a shop-window in the Rue de Namur, a street that winds down from the circle of boulevards to the Place Royale.

Within, the object of hungry curiosity, a fowl, adorned by a placard informing that the price is forty-four francs.

Conspicuous in the crowd, his face pressed against the glass of the _etalage_, a little old gentleman.

The bowl of municipal soup and the loaf of bread are all that he has to look forward to as the day's sustenance.