As for Tommy, the printed word had him in thrall though he knew it not.  When he got back from Liverpool, two months later, I found him a job in the engine room of a big printing press.  He was set to work oiling the dynamos, and at ten dollars a week he had a fine chance to work his way up.  Indeed, he enrolled in a Scranton correspondence course on steam engineering and enchanted his Hempstead landlady by his simple ways.  That lasted just two weeks.  The level ground made Tommy’s feet uneasy.  The last I heard he was on a steam yacht on Long Island Sound.

But wherever steam and tide may carry him, Tommy cherishes in his heart his own private badge of honour:  his friend the engineer has put him in a book!  And there, in one of the noblest and most honest novels of our day, you will find him—­a casual of the sea!

THE LAST PIPE

The last smoker I recollect among those of the old school was a clergyman.  He had seen the best society, and was a man of the most polished behaviour.  This did not hinder him from taking his pipe every evening before he went to bed.  He sat in his armchair, his back gently bending, his knees a little apart, his eyes placidly inclined toward the fire.  The end of his recreation was announced by the tapping of the bowl of his pipe upon the hob, for the purpose of emptying it of its ashes.  Ashes to ashes; head to bed.

    —­LEIGH HUNT.

The sensible man smokes (say) sixteen pipefuls a day, and all differ in value and satisfaction.  In smoking there is, thank heaven, no law of diminishing returns.  I may puff all day long until I nigresce with the fumes and soot, but the joy loses no savour by repetition.  It is true that there is a peculiar blithe rich taste in the first morning puffs, inhaled after breakfast. (Let me posit here the ideal conditions for a morning pipe as I know them.) After your bath, breakfast must be spread in a chamber of eastern exposure; let there be hominy and cream, and if possible, brown sugar.  There follow scrambled eggs, shirred to a lemon-yellow, with toast sliced in triangles, fresh, unsalted butter, and Scotch bitter marmalade.  Let there be without fail a platter of hot bacon, curly, juicy, fried to the debatable point where softness is overlaid with the faintest crepitation of crackle, of crispyness.  If hot Virginia corn pone is handy, so much the better.  And coffee, two-thirds hot milk, also with brown sugar.  It must be permissible to call for a second serving of the scrambled eggs; or, if this is beyond the budget, let there be a round of judiciously grilled kidneys, with mayhap a sprinkle of mushrooms, grown in chalky soil.  That is the kind of breakfast they used to serve in Eden before the fall of man and the invention of innkeepers with their crass formulae.