d it keeps very reticent at my end. The follow-through is
poor. Is your end alight still?"

"Burning beautifully."

"It's a pity that I should be missing all that. How would it be if we
were to make a knitting-needle red-hot and bore a tunnel from this end?
We might establish a draught that way. Only there's always the danger,
of course, of coming out at the side."

I took the cigar up and put it to my ear.

"I can't hear anything wrong," I said. "I expect what it really wants is
massage."

Charles filled his pipe again and got up. "Let's go for a stroll," he
said. "It's a beautiful night. Bring your cigar with you."

"It may prefer the open air," I said. "There's always that. You know we
mustn't lose sight of the fact that the Portuguese climate is different
from ours. The thing's pores may have acted more readily in the South.
On the other hand, the unfastened end may have been more adhesive. I
gather that though you have never actually met anybody who has smoked a
cigar like this, yet you understand that the experiment is a practicable
one. As far as you know this had no brothers. No, no, Charles, I'm going
on with it, but I should like to know all that you can tell me of its
parentage. It had a Portuguese father and an American mother, I should
say, and there has been a good deal of trouble in the family. One
moment"--and as we went outside I stopped and cracked it in the door.

It was an inspiration. At the very next application of the match I found
that I had established a connection with the lighted end. Not a long and
steady connection, but one that came in gusts. After two gusts I decided
that it was perhaps safer to blow from my end, and for a little while we
had in this way as much smoke around us as the most fastidious
cigar-smoker could want. Then I accidentally dropped it; something in
the middle of it shifted, I suppose--and for the rest of my stay behind
it only one end was at work.

"Well," said Charles, when we were back in the smoking-room and I was
giving the cigar a short breather, "it's not a bad one, is it?"

"I have enjoyed it," I said truthfully, for I like trying to get the
mastery over a thing that defies me.

"You'll never guess what it cost," he chuckled.

"Tell me," I said. "I daren't guess."

"Well, in English money it works out at exactly three farthings."

I looked at him for a long time and then shook my head sadly.

"Charles, old friend," I said, "you've been done."