With these words he left the house.

I had little appetite for my dinner that evening.

The Pipe

    “RANDOLPH CRESCENT, N.W.

    “MY DEAR PUGH—­I hope you will like the pipe which I send with
    this.  It is rather a curious example of a certain school of
    Indian carving.  And is a present from

    “Yours truly, Joseph Tress.”

It was really very handsome of Tress—­very handsome!  The more especially as I was aware that to give presents was not exactly in Tress’s line.  The truth is that when I saw what manner of pipe it was I was amazed.  It was contained in a sandalwood box, which was itself illustrated with some remarkable specimens of carving.  I use the word “remarkable” advisedly, because, although the workmanship was undoubtedly, in its way, artistic, the result could not be described as beautiful.  The carver had thought proper to ornament the box with some of the ugliest figures I remember to have seen.  They appeared to me to be devils.  Or perhaps they were intended to represent deities appertaining to some mythological system with which, thank goodness, I am unacquainted.  The pipe itself was worthy of the case in which it was contained.  It was of meerschaum, with an amber mouthpiece.  It was rather too large for ordinary smoking.  But then, of course, one doesn’t smoke a pipe like that.  There are pipes in my collection which I should as soon think of smoking as I should of eating.  Ask a china maniac to let you have afternoon tea out of his Old Chelsea, and you will learn some home truths as to the durability of human friendships.  The glory of the pipe, as Tress had suggested, lay in its carving.  Not that I claim that it was beautiful, any more than I make such a claim for the carving on the box, but, as Tress said in his note, it was curious.

The stem and the bowl were quite plain, but on the edge of the bowl was perched some kind of lizard.  I told myself it was an octopus when I first saw it, but I have since had reason to believe that it was some almost unique member of the lizard tribe.  The creature was represented as climbing over the edge of the bowl down toward the stem, and its legs, or feelers, or tentacula, or whatever the things are called, were, if I may use a vulgarism, sprawling about “all over the place.”  For instance, two or three of them were twined about the bowl, two or three of them were twisted round the stem, and one, a particularly horrible one, was uplifted in the air, so that if you put the pipe in your mouth the thing was pointing straight at your nose.