And, finally, they were teaching him to smoke. After much urging, he
had consented to try it, and had accomplished part of a cigar. Then he
had suddenly become silent, looked at it intently for a few moments,
and then, murmuring an indistinct excuse, had retired with
precipitation. He appeared at breakfast the next morning,
good-naturedly accepted all the chaffing he got, and bravely essayed
another that evening.

That had been a week or more before. On this particular night he had
successfully smoked a whole Chancellor without growing pale or letting
it go out, treating them meanwhile to a vivacious narrative of a
drunken gambler who had been run out of a little mining camp one
stormy winter night, and had taken refuge with a friend of the Goat,
also caught out in the blizzard, in a cave which proved to be the
domicile of a big hibernating grizzly not thoroughly hibernated; at
the close, he had, as usual, protested but not denied when they
politely insisted on identifying his friend with himself. Then he had
torn himself away to study common-law pleading in the suspicious
manner previously described.

There was, however, no sign of resentment or of injured feelings in
his face as he lit the gas in his own room. On the contrary, he
grinned cheerfully at his reflection in the glass, and, pulling open
his top drawer, took from the remote corner an unmistakably
sophisticated brier and a package of Yale Mixture, and proceeded to
light up. He grinned again as his teeth clamped on the stem, and
jerked it into the corner of his mouth with a practiced twist of his
tongue. Then he picked up a small and well-thumbed book lying half
hidden among his law books and papers, and glanced over a few pages.

"I did that pretty well," he said, approvingly. "Pity those babes
don't know their Bret Harte any better. Guess I'll ring in some of
Teddy's '97 trip on 'em to-morrow night." And then he sat down to
study.

The next day the Lamb from Boston announced that his cousin and her
mother, who were passing through town on their way home from three
years of wandering abroad, were coming to call on him at four.
Therefore, at two, he and his brother Lambs began to prepare his room,
and the only other one that was visible from the front door of their
apartment, for the fitting reception of his relatives. This
preparation consisted largely in moving all presentable articles in
all the rooms into these two, and banishing all unpresentable