ams.’  I prohibit cigarette-smoking, not because I think it’s literally going to kill anybody but because I think it looks bad here, sets a bad example to a lot of young wasters who come here and who ought to be broken of the vice, and besides, because I don’t like cigarette-smoking here—­don’t want it and won’t have it.  What happens?  A lot of sissies and mamma’s boys and pet heirs, whose fathers haven’t got enough brains to cut ’em off and make ’em get out and work, come up here, sneak in cigarettes or get the servants to, and then hide out behind the barn or a tree down in the lot and sneak and smoke like a lot of cheap schoolboys.  God, it makes me sick!  What’s the use of a man working out a fact during a lifetime and letting other people have the benefit of it—­not because he needs their money, but that they need his help—­if all the time he is going to have such cattle to deal with?  Not one out of twenty or forty men that come here really wants me to help him or to help himself.  What he wants is to have some one drive him in the way he ought to go, kick him into it, instead of his buckling down and helping himself.  What’s the good of bothering with such damned fools?  A man ought to take the whole pack and run ’em off the place with a dog-whip.”  He waved his hand in the air.  “It’s sickening.  It’s impossible.

“As for you two,” he added, turning to us, but suddenly stopped.  “Hell, what’s the use!  Why should I bother with you?  Do as you damned well please, and stay sick or die!”

He turned on his heel and walked out of the dining-room, leaving us to sit there.  I was so dumbfounded by the harangue our pseudo-cleverness had released that I could scarcely speak.  My appetite was gone and I felt wretched.  To think of having been the cause of this unnecessary tongue-lashing to the others!  And I felt that we were, and justly, the target for their rather censorious eyes.

“My God!” moaned my companion most dolefully.  “That’s always the way with me.  Nothing that I ever do comes out right.  All my life I’ve been unlucky.  My mother died when I was seven, and my father’s never had any use for me.  I started in three or four businesses four or five years ago, but none of them ever came out right.  My yacht burned last summer, and I’ve had neurasthenia for two years.”  He catalogued a list of ills that would have done honor to Job himself, and he was worth nine millions, so I heard!

Two or three additional and amusing incidents, and I am done.

One of the most outre things in connection with our rides about the countryside was Culhane’s attitude toward life and the natives and passing strangers as representing life.  Thus one day, as I recall very well, we were riding along a backwoods country road, very shadowy and branch-covered, a great company of us four abreast, when suddenly and after his very military fashion there came a “Halt!  Right by fours!  Right dress!  Face!” and presently we were all lined up in a row facing a greensward