P.S. "À la carte" is originally a French expression--like "menu" and "restaurant." It means a menu in which each item is priced and ordered separately, as opposed to "prix fixe," a price for an entire meal. Dandelions are pretty yellow flowers. In the United States they grow as weeds in grassy lawns. Dandelion greens are edible, and people sometimes use them in salads, but it is rare. Hard-boiled eggs are common. However, the combined dish of "dandelion with hard-boiled egg" is a mystery to me, I've never eaten it or heard of it mentioned--except in this story. This is difficult English! O. Henry deliberately plays around with intentionally difficult words. "The dish of dandelions with its crowning ovarious accompaniment" instead of "dandelions with egg on top." Similarly, after mentioning "the world is my oyster" he then refers to "the terrestrial bivalve." "Bivalve" here means "oyster," and "terrestrial bivalve" means "the world itself, thought of as an oyster." Oysters were once an extremely common food in New York City, almost a signature dish. They were fished right from the waters of the city itself. They were killed off the 1920s by pollution, overfishing, and some bad cases of disease transmitted by polluted oysters. "The gentleman who announced that the world was an oyster which he with his sword would open made a larger hit than he deserved" is a reference to Shakespeare, "The Merry Wives of Windsor," in which a character named Pistol says "Why, then the world's mine oyster. Which I with sword will open." "I'd know that cranky capital W 'way above the line that your typewriter makes anywhere in the world" is a reference to old-fashioned manual typewriters. Of course you may not even know what a typewriter is, but before about 1970, each letter was on the end of a long thin bar. With old typewriters, it was common for one or two typebars to get slightly bent and type letters that were misaligned with the others.

"Springtime à la Carte" was written in 1906, and in those days they wrote more "literary," complicated English. This is not easy English. And because it was written for entertainment and not as serious literature, it contains cultural references that are not easy, even for native English speakers. "Gross" means coarse or down-to-earth. Nowadays it has come to mean really repulsive or disgusting. I think O. Henry just means everyday, down-to-earth. I think the key here is that buckwheat and oysters are things to eat, and are not high-class foods. (Oysters are expensive now, but they were cheap, ordinary food in New York in 1906). I think he is making fun of flowery writing. You'll notice that he makes fun of writers and writing in several other places--he opens the story "It was a day in March. Never, never begin a story this way when you write one." He is talking about "harbingers of Spring," things that tell us that spring is on the way. First, he talks about nice, pretty, sweet, refined, conventional signs of spring: "the flowering crocus, the wood-starring dogwood, the voice of bluebird." He then talks of "the farewell handshake of the retiring buckwheat and oyster." Oysters were available in months whose names contain the letter R. The first months of spring, March and April, would have been the end of the oyster season. I don't know about buckwheat, I'm guessing it is the same. "Spring is the season of the year when we have to say goodbye to buckwheat and oysters." A modern equivalent might be "the Christmas season, when we have to say farewell to Pumpkin Spice lattes." Notice, too, that the food reference sort of foreshadows other food-related elements in the story. In other words: artistic, lovely, sweet, refined flowers and birds, versus "gross," plain old everyday, low-class food.

I have no idea. I try to avoid ridiculous flowery prose like that.