This excited the old man's nostrils, and he looked down in surprise.
His mood immediately changed to one of joy, and he sniffed, murmured, and mumbled. These sounds were like a hymn of delight he had sung before he began to eat. The boys paid little attention to this, as it was a familiar sight to them. Nor did they notice his occasional exclamations of wonder, nor his utterances that made no sense to them. For example, he smacked his lips and bit his gums, muttering, "Mayonnaise! Just imagine... mayonnaise! It's been sixty years since the last one was made! For two generations, there was not a trace of its smell! Wonder, in those days it was served in all restaurants with crab."
When the old man had had enough, he sighed, wiped his hands on his bare legs, and looked out to sea. As his stomach felt replenished, memories flooded back.
"Imagine! I saw this beach alive with men, women, and children on peaceful Sundays, and there were no bears to eat them up! And up on this bluff, there was a big restaurant where you could eat anything you wanted. At that time, four million people lived in San Francisco; now the entire city and county have only forty. And far out at sea, many ships were always seen on their way to or from the Golden Gate. And there were the airships—those flying machines that could be piloted and steered. They could fly two hundred miles an hour; "The charters between the owners of these vessels and the New York & San Francisco Limited stipulated this as a minimum. A Frenchman, whose name I forget, succeeded in getting these vessels to a speed of three hundred miles an hour, but it was a little dangerous, and too dangerous for cautious people. However, he was on the right track, and would have found the appropriate arrangement had it not been for the Great Plague. When I was a boy, there were some living people who remembered the appearance of the first airplanes, and I lived to see the last one, and that was sixty years ago."