When tea was over, the Colonel bowed the ladies out of the room with punctilious courtesy, and motioned to Hugh to follow them; then he turned to the two Merryweather boys.

“May I offer you cigars, young gentlemen?” he asked; and he took a couple of cheroots from the mantel-piece.

The boys blushed bravely, but Phil said, quietly, “No, thank you, sir.  We are not going to smoke till we are twenty-one.  Father thinks that is soon enough.”

The Colonel nodded approvingly.  “Your father is right!” he said.  “Very right, indeed, my young friend.  I beg you to take notice that, though obliged by the laws of hospitality to offer you cigars, I should have thought it unsuitable if you had accepted them.  Thirty years ago I should have been obliged to offer you wine, also, but happily that is no longer necessary.  Forty years ago,—­hum, ha!  If you will permit me, I will smoke a cheroot for the party.  Your father prefers a pipe, I believe, but give me a Manilla cheroot, and I am satisfied.”

“Excuse me, sir,” said Gerald, “but weren’t you going to say something else?”

Colonel Ferrers smiled.  “You are quick, my boy,” he said.  “I was indeed thinking of something that happened forty years ago,—­of my first smoke.  Possibly you might be amused to hear about it?”

The boys seemed to think there was no doubt about their being amused; they drew up two ottomans beside the Colonel’s armchair, and prepared to listen, open-mouthed.

“Forty years ago, then,” said the Colonel, “or, to be more exact, forty-five years, I was a lad of fifteen.”

He paused, and smoked in silence for some minutes.  Gerald could not help thinking of Alice and the Mock Turtle, and wondered what would happen if he should get up and say, “Thank you, sir, for your interesting story.”  But he held his peace, and waited.

“Fifteen years old, young gentlemen, and a sad scapegrace, I am sorry to say.  My poor mother had an anxious time of it with me.  I was in the water, or in the fire, or in the clouds from morning till night, as it seems on looking back.  But with all my vagaries, I had one great desire which had never been gratified,—­that was, to smoke a cigar.  My father was a clergyman, and though he had never forbidden my smoking, I should never have dared to suggest such a thing to him, for he was strict in his notions, in many ways.  Not too strict, sir, not too strict, by any means, though he may have seemed so to me then.

“To make a long story short, I fell in with some lads of my own way of thinking, and we determined to have a smoke.  We gathered sweet fern and dried it, and rolled cigars for ourselves; odd-looking things they were, but we were vastly proud of them.  When all was ready, we chose a dry, warm spot behind a dyke (for it was the fall of the year, and the days growing cold), and there we lighted our cigars and fell to work, puffing away in mighty fine style.  Well, sir, they were horrible things, as you may well imagine; not one of us, I’ll go bail, liked them in his heart, but we all pretended our best, and praised the cigars, and said what a fine thing it was to smoke, and thought ourselves men, as sure as if we had felt our beards pushing.