I began my business career on the following Monday morning.  At breakfast, held earlier than usual on my account, my mother’s sympathy was the more eloquent for being unspoken, while my father wore an air of unwonted cheerfulness; charging me, when I departed, to give his kindest remembrances to my Cousin Robert Breck.  With a sense of martyrdom somehow deepened by this attitude of my parents I boarded a horse-car and went down town.  Early though it was, the narrow streets of the wholesale district reverberated with the rattle of trucks and echoed with the shouts of drivers.  The day promised to be scorching.  At the door of the warehouse of Breck and Company I was greeted by the ineffable smell of groceries in which the suggestion of parched coffee prevailed.  This is the sharpest remembrance of all, and even to-day that odour affects me somewhat in the manner that the interior of a ship affects a person prone to seasickness.  My Cousin Robert, in his well-worn alpaca coat, was already seated at his desk behind the clouded glass partition next the alley at the back of the store, and as I entered he gazed at me over his steel-rimmed spectacles with that same disturbing look of clairvoyance I have already mentioned as one of his characteristics.  The grey eyes were quizzical, and yet seemed to express a little commiseration.

“Well, Hugh, you’ve decided to honour us, have you?” he asked.

“I’m much obliged for giving me the place, Cousin Robert,” I replied.

But he had no use for that sort of politeness, and he saw through me, as always.

“So you’re not too tony for the grocery business, eh?”

“Oh, no, sir.”

“It was good enough for old Benjamin Breck,” he said.  “Well, I’ll give you a fair trial, my boy, and no favouritism on account of relationship, any more than to Willie.”

His strong voice resounded through the store, and presently my cousin Willie appeared in answer to his summons, the same Willie who used to lead me, on mischief bent, through the barns and woods and fields of Claremore.  He was barefoot no longer, though freckled still, grown lanky and tall; he wore a coarse blue apron that fell below his knees, and a pencil was stuck behind his ear.

“Get an apron for Hugh,” said his father.

Willie’s grin grew wider.

“I’ll fit him out,” he said.

“Start him in the shipping department,” directed Cousin Robert, and turned to his letters.

I was forthwith provided with an apron, and introduced to the slim and anaemic but cheerful Johnny Hedges, the shipping clerk, hard at work in the alley.  Secretly I looked down on my fellow-clerks, as one destined for a higher mission, made out of better stuff,—­finer stuff.  Despite my attempt to hide this sense of superiority they were swift to discover it; and perhaps it is to my credit as well as theirs that they did not resent it.  Curiously enough, they seemed to acknowledge it.  Before the week was out I had earned the nickname of Beau Brummel.