there were times when he turned against the saving spirit of parsimony.  Readers deep in Greek dramatic writings will see the fatal Sisters behind the chair of a man who gives frequent and bigger dinners, that he may become important in his neighbourhood, while decreasing the price he pays for his wine, that he may miserably indemnify himself for the outlay.  A sip of his wine fetched the breath, as when men are in the presence of the tremendous elements of nature.  It sounded the constitution more darkly-awful, and with a profounder testimony to stubborn health, than the physician’s instruments.  Most of the guests at Mr. Tinman’s table were so constructed that they admired him for its powerful quality the more at his announcement of the price of it; the combined strength and cheapness probably flattering them, as by another mystic instance of the national energy.  It must have been so, since his townsmen rejoiced to hail him as head of their town.  Here and there a solitary esquire, fished out of the bathing season to dine at the house on the beach, was guilty of raising one of those clamours concerning subsequent headaches, which spread an evil reputation as a pall.  A resident esquire or two, in whom a reminiscence of Tinman’s table may be likened to the hook which some old trout has borne away from the angler as the most vivid of warnings to him to beware for the future, caught up the black report and propagated it.

The Lieutenant of the Coastguard, hearing the latest conscious victim, or hearing of him, would nod his head and say he had never dined at Tinman’s table without a headache ensuing and a visit to the chemist’s shop; which, he was assured, was good for trade, and he acquiesced, as it was right to do in a man devoted to his country.  He dined with Tinman again.  We try our best to be social.  For eight months in our year he had little choice but to dine with Tinman or be a hermit attached to a telescope.

“Where are you going, Lieutenant?” His frank reply to the question was, “I am going to be killed;” and it grew notorious that this meant Tinman’s table.  We get on together as well as we can.  Perhaps if we were an acutely calculating people we should find it preferable both for trade and our physical prosperity to turn and kill Tinman, in contempt of consequences.  But we are not, and so he does the business gradually for us.  A generous people we must be, for Tinman was not detested.  The recollection of “next morning” caused him to be dimly feared.

Tinman, meanwhile, was awake only to the Circumstance that he made no progress as an esquire, except on the envelopes of letters, and in his own esteem.  That broad region he began to occupy to the exclusion of other inhabitants; and the result of such a state of princely isolation was a plunge of his whole being into deep thoughts.  From the hour of his investiture as the town’s chief man, thoughts which were long shots took possession of him.  He had his wits about him; he was alive to ridicule; he knew he was not popular below, or on easy terms with people above him, and he meditated a surpassing stroke as one of the Band of Esq., that had nothing original about it to perplex and annoy the native mind, yet was dazzling.  Few members of the privileged Band dare even imagine the thing.