Stoked on cup after cup of tea (I drank it by the gallon when I wrote … unless I was drinking beer, that is) , I filled sixteen pages of a steno notebook.
But that need has dramatically dropped along with the price of oil. Americans are now paying less than 2 dollars a gallon for fuel in many parts of the US.
In today's English, Harvey's poetic sentiment loosely translates to this one: “And then to reciprocate your gallon of goodbyes, I give you back a half-gallon of howdies.”