he was so attracted by what it said about the delights
of tobacco that he tried a cigarette. But it was no good; the mere smell
disgusted him."

*Strange Forgetfulness.*

"Odd that he should forget his own book," I said.

"He forgets them all," said Brown. "There is this Peter Pan foolishness,
for instance. I have heard people talking to him about that play and
mentioning parts in it they liked, and he tried to edge them off the
subject; they think it is his shyness, but I know it is because he has
forgotten the bits they are speaking about. Before strangers call on him
I have seen him reading one of his own books hurriedly, so as to be able
to talk about it if that is their wish. But he gets mixed up, and thinks
that the little minister was married to Wendy."

"Almost looks as if he hadn't written his own works," I said.

"Almost," Brown admitted uncomfortably.

I asked a leading question. "You don't suppose," I said, "that any one
writes them for him? Such things have been. You don't write them for him
by any chance, just as you blackened the pipe, you know?"

Brown assured me stolidly that he did not. Suddenly, whether to get away
from a troublesome subject I cannot say, he vouchsafed me a startling
piece of information. "The German Kaiser was on our boat coming across,"
he said.

"Sure?" I asked, wetting my pencil.

He told me he had Sir James's word for it. There was on board, it seems,
a very small, shrunken gentleman with a pronounced waist and tiny,
turned-up mustache, who strutted along the deck trying to look fierce
and got in the other passengers' way to their annoyance until Sir James
discovered that he was the Kaiser Reduced to Life Size. After that Sir
James liked to sit with him and talk to him.

Sir James is a great admirer of the Kaiser, though he has not, like Mr.
Carnegie, had the pleasure of meeting him in society. When he read in
the papers on arriving here that the Kaiser had wept over the
destruction of Louvain, he told Brown a story. It was of a friend who
had gone to an oculist to be cured of some disease in one eye. Years
afterward he heard that the oculist's son had been killed in some Indian
war, and he called on the oculist to commiserate with him.

"You cured my eye," he said to him, "and when I read of your loss I wept
for you, Sir; I wept for you with that eye."

"Sir James," Brown explained, "is of a very sympathetic nature, and he
wondered which eye it was that the Kais