own the back of the show-case. There were the churchwarden pipes; he
selected one and took it out. It tasted cold and clammy when he put it
in his mouth, and he wondered what it would taste like with tobacco in
it. He brought the little ladder and got up on it, facing the shelves,
and to his surprise he found himself looking directly into the slanting
eyes of the porcelain Chinaman's head. He stood there gazing
thoughtfully into those eyes, and singing to himself the verse which was
always such a help to him:

"Yield not to temptation,
For yielding is sin,
Each vict'ry will help you
Some other to win."

It was growing a little darker now, and he could not examine the
Chinaman's head very well without bringing it closer. He took the head
in his hands, lifted it from the shelf, got down off the ladder, and sat
down on the floor with his back against the counter; and while he was
doing this he hummed to himself the next part of his tune:

"Fight manfully onward,
Dark passions subdue."

He put the head on his knees, and took off the Chinaman's little round
cap, which proved to be in fact a lid. He put his hand inside and drew
out a good fistful of absolutely black tobacco, fine and powdery like
coal-dust; he held it to his nose, and it smelt very sweet, in fact much
like brown sugar. He wondered if it would taste like brown sugar through
the pipe-stem; and humming quietly to himself, "Each vict'ry will help
you," he poured the tobacco into the bowl of the pipe. He was
disappointed, on sucking in through the pipe-stem, to find that there
was no brown-sugar taste at all. Of course, the only way to give tobacco
any taste was to light it; he reached up and got a match off the counter
behind him, and sitting down again struck the match on the floor. It
made a very pretty glow in the twilight, and he watched it as it burned
away in his fingers; it would be burnt out in another second, so,
humming to himself those ever-helpful words, "Yield not to temptation,"
he put the pipe in his mouth and touched the lighted match to the
tobacco.

It is painful to have to tell these things, but it can't be helped; for
the consequences were so strange, and so important to Freddie and his
friends, that----

Anyway, he lit the pipe and drew in a long breath through the stem. He
nearly choked to death. Smoke got into his nose and his eyes and his
throat, and he coughed and coughed; but he remembered the words