If my wife is present, however, she comes forward smiling, and remarks, with a fond look in my direction, that they are her birthday present to her Jack.

Then they start back and say they always smoke a pipe.

These Celebros were making me a bad name among my friends, so I have given a few of them to understand--I don't care to put it more plainly--that if they will take a cigar from the top layer they will find it all right.

One of them, however, has a personal ill-will to me because my wife told his wife that I preferred Celebro cigars at twelve and six a hundred to any other.

Now he is expected to smoke the same; and he takes his revenge by ostentatiously offering me a Celebro when I call on him." [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER XII.
GILRAY'S FLOWER-POT.
I charge Gilray's unreasonableness to his ignoble passion for cigarettes; and the story of his flower-pot has therefore an obvious moral.