“So that is not the pipe he really smokes?” I said, perceiving I was on the verge of a grand discovery.  “I suppose he actually smokes an ordinary small pipe.”

Again Brown hesitated, but again truth prevailed.

“He does not smoke any pipe,” he said, “nor cigars, nor cigarettes; he never smokes at all; he just puts that one in his mouth to help the interviewers.”

“It has the appearance of having been smoked,” I pointed out.

“I blackened it for him,” the faithful fellow replied.

“But he has written a book in praise of My Lady Nicotine.”

“So I have heard,” Brown said guardedly.  “I think that was when he was hard up and had to write what people wanted; but he never could abide smoking himself.  Years after he wrote the book he read it; he had quite forgotten it, and he was so attracted by what it said about the delights of tobacco that he tried a cigarette.  But it was no good; the mere smell disgusted him.”

Strange Forgetfulness.

“Odd that he should forget his own book,” I said.

“He forgets them all,” said Brown.  “There is this Peter Pan foolishness, for instance.  I have heard people talking to him about that play and mentioning parts in it they liked, and he tried to edge them off the subject; they think it is his shyness, but I know it is because he has forgotten the bits they are speaking about.  Before strangers call on him I have seen him reading one of his own books hurriedly, so as to be able to talk about it if that is their wish.  But he gets mixed up, and thinks that the little minister was married to Wendy.”

“Almost looks as if he hadn’t written his own works,” I said.

“Almost,” Brown admitted uncomfortably.

I asked a leading question.  “You don’t suppose,” I said, “that any one writes them for him?  Such things have been.  You don’t write them for him by any chance, just as you blackened the pipe, you know?”

Brown assured me stolidly that he did not.  Suddenly, whether to get away from a troublesome subject I cannot say, he vouchsafed me a startling piece of information.  “The German Kaiser was on our boat coming across,” he said.

“Sure?” I asked, wetting my pencil.

He told me he had Sir James’s word for it.  There was on board, it seems, a very small, shrunken gentleman with a pronounced waist and tiny, turned-up mustache, who strutted along the deck trying to look fierce and got in the other passengers’ way to their annoyance until Sir James discovered that he was the Kaiser Reduced to Life Size.  After that Sir James liked to sit with him and talk to him.

Sir James is a great admirer of the Kaiser, though he has not, like Mr. Carnegie, had the pleasure of meeting him in society.  When he read in the papers on arriving here that the Kaiser had wept over the destruction of Louvain, he told Brown a story.  It was of a friend who had gone to an oculist to be cured of some disease in one eye.  Years afterward he heard that the oculist’s son had been killed in some Indian war, and he called on the oculist to commiserate with him.