"With all your talk about necessary house-hold implements," said Sooner Dave, "none of 'em is in it with the frying pan,—just the common, ordinary, every-day frying pan, that you chuck under your buck-board or tie to your saddle-horn. These parlor ornaments, side-boards, new-fangled stoves, potato-mashers, coffee-strainers and all the everlasting tribe of culinary jim-cracks have to turn out of the trail for the frying pan and give it the right of way.

"With the frying pan for his companion, the civilized idiot is at home any where,—prairie or woods, creek bank or deer-lick or prairie-chicken trysting place. With a frying pan and some bacon fat, home is never far away, and a full meal is so near that heaven comes close to the hungry man. It has fought more battles, made more forced marches and won more victories than Napoleon. It has surveyed lands, bunched cattle and soonered claims. It has done all the pioneering for the frontiers-man. In this one divine utensil, the wanderer fries his meat, bakes his flap-jacks and brews his coffee; and as they all come steaming from its exalted circumference of life-sustaining food, what chafing-dish or modern steam-cooker was ever waited on by such a willing appetite?

"When I die," continued Sooner Dave, "I want a frying pan chiseled on my tomb-stone; for it has been the sole companion of the truest happiness I have known in this world. And if over in the next world there is a chance to choose one's crown after the style and finish the wearer may desire, I am going to take my faithful old frying pan along and wear it for a few thousand years just to show the angels how much a man can appreciate good things!"