Smoking was not permitted in the Scribner offices, and, of course, Mark Twain was always smoking.  He generally smoked a granulated tobacco which he kept in a long check bag made of silk and rubber.  When he sauntered to the back of the Scribner store, he would generally knock the residue from the bowl of the pipe, take out the stem, place it in his vest pocket, like a pencil, and drop the bowl into the bag containing the granulated tobacco.  When he wanted to smoke again (which was usually five minutes later) he would fish out the bowl, now automatically filled with tobacco, insert the stem, and strike a light.  One afternoon as he wandered into Bok’s office, he was just putting his pipe away.  The pipe, of the corncob variety, was very aged and black.  Bok asked him whether it was the only pipe he had.

“Oh, no,” Mark answered, “I have several.  But they’re all like this.  I never smoke a new corncob pipe.  A new pipe irritates the throat.  No corncob pipe is fit for anything until it has been used at least a fortnight.”

“How do you break in a pipe, then?” asked Bok.

“That’s the trick,” answered Mark Twain.  “I get a cheap man—­a man who doesn’t amount to much, anyhow:  who would be as well, or better, dead—­and pay him a dollar to break in the pipe for me.  I get him to smoke the pipe for a couple of weeks, then put in a new stem, and continue operations as long as the pipe holds together.”

Bok’s newspaper syndicate work had brought him into contact with Fanny Davenport, then at the zenith of her career as an actress.  Miss Davenport, or Mrs. Melbourne McDowell as she was in private life, had never written for print; but Bok, seeing that she had something to say about her art and the ability to say it, induced her to write for the newspapers through his syndicate.  The actress was overjoyed to have revealed to her a hitherto unsuspected gift; Bok published her articles successfully, and gave her a publicity that her press agent had never dreamed of.  Miss Davenport became interested in the young publisher, and after watching the methods which he employed in successfully publishing her writings, decided to try to obtain his services as her assistant manager.  She broached the subject, offered him a five years’ contract for forty weeks’ service, with a minimum of fifteen weeks each year to spend in or near New York, at a salary, for the first year, of three thousand dollars, increasing annually until the fifth year, when he was to receive sixty-four hundred dollars.

Bok was attracted to the work:  he had never seen the United States, was anxious to do so, and looked upon the chance as a good opportunity.  Miss Davenport had the contract made out, executed it, and then, in high glee, Bok took it home to show it to his mother.  He had reckoned without question upon her approval, only to meet with an immediate and decided negative to the proposition as a whole, general and specific.