at he was---every inch a man though still a
boy in years.

"Do you think you look as healthy as I do?" Tom repeated.

"No-o-o-o," admitted Alf. "But you're older'n me."

"Not so much, as years go," Tom rejoined. "For that matter, if
you go on with your cigarettes you'll be an old man before I get
through with being a young man. Fill up your chest, Alf; expand
it---like this."

As he expanded his chest Reade looked a good deal more like some
Greek god of old than a twentieth century civil engineer.

Alf puffed and squirmed in his efforts to show "some chest."

"That isn't the right way," Tom informed him. "Breathe deeply
and steadily. Draw in your stomach and expand your chest. Fill
up the upper part of your lungs with air. Watch! Right here
at the top of the chest."

Alf watched. For that matter he seemed unable to remove his gaze
from the splendid chest development that young Reade displayed
so easily. Then the boy tried to fill the upper portions of his
own lungs in the same manner. The attempt ended in a spasm of
coughing.

"Fine, isn't it?" queried Tom Reade, scornfully. "The upper parts
of your lungs are affected already, and you'll carry the work
of destruction on rapidly. Alf, if you ever live to be twenty you'll
be a wreck at best. Don't you know that?"

"I---I have heard folks say so," nodded the boy.

"And you didn't believe them?"

"I---I don't know."

"Why did you ever take up smoking?"

"All men smoke," argued Alf Drew.

"Lie number one. All men _don't_ smoke," Tom corrected him.
"But I think I catch the drift of your idea. If you smoke you
think men will look upon you as being more manly. That's it, it?"

"It must be manly, if men do it," Alf argued.

"You funny little shaver," laughed Tom, good-humoredly. "So you
think that, when men see you smoking cigarettes, they immediately
imagine you to be one of them? Cigarette-smoking, for a boy of
fourteen, is the short cut to manhood, I suppose."

Tom laughed long, heartily, and with intense enjoyment. At last
he paused, to remark, soberly:

"Answering your first question, Drew, I haven't the 'makings.'
I never did carry them and never expect to."

"What do you smoke then?" queried Alf, in some wonder. "A pipe?"

"No; I never had that vice, either. I don't use tobacco. For
your own sake I'm sorry that you do."

"But a lot of men do smoke," argued Alf. "Jim Ferrers, for instance."

"Ferrers is a grown man, and