I inquired of the melancholy
clerk.

He shook his head sadly.

"There is no grill room," he answered. "What would you like?"

"Oh, some sort of eggs," I said, "and--"

The clerk reached down below his desk and handed me a hard-boiled egg
with the shell off.

"Here's your egg," he said. "And there's ice water there at the end of
the desk."

He sat back in his chair and went on reading.

"You don't understand," said Mr Narrowpath, who still stood at my elbow.
"All that elaborate grill room breakfast business was just a mere relic
of the drinking days--sheer waste of time and loss of efficiency. Go on
and eat your egg. Eaten it? Now, don't you feel efficient? What more do
you want? Comfort, you say? My dear sir! more men have been ruined by
comfort--Great heavens, comfort! The most dangerous, deadly drug that
ever undermined the human race. But, here, drink your water. Now you're
ready to go and do your business, if you have any."

"But," I protested, "it's still only half-past seven in the morning--no
offices will be open--"

"Open!" exclaimed Mr. Narrowpath. "Why! they all open at daybreak now."

I had, it is true, a certain amount of business before me, though of
no very intricate or elaborate kind--a few simple arrangements with the
head of a publishing house such as it falls to my lot to make every now
and then. Yet in the old and unregenerate days it used to take all day
to do it: the wicked thing that we used to call a comfortable breakfast
in the hotel grill room somehow carried one on to about ten o'clock
in the morning. Breakfast brought with it the need of a cigar for
digestion's sake and with that, for very restfulness, a certain perusal
of the _Toronto Globe_, properly corrected and rectified by a look
through the _Toronto Mail_. After that it had been my practice to stroll
along to my publishers' office at about eleven-thirty, transact my
business, over a cigar, with the genial gentleman at the head of it, and
then accept his invitation to lunch, with the feeling that a man who has
put in a hard and strenuous morning's work is entitled to a few hours of
relaxation.

I am inclined to think that in those reprehensible bygone times, many
other people did their business in this same way.

"I don't think," I said to Mr. Narrowpath musingly, "that my publisher
will be up as early as this. He's a comfortable sort of man."

"Nonsense!" said Mr. Narrowpath. "Not at work at half-past seven! In
Toronto!