ins had just passed down the table with a dust covered bottle which
he handled with the care of a collector fingering a peachblow vase.
The precious fluid had been poured into that gentleman's glass and its
contents were now within an inch of his nose.

The moment was too grave for instant reply; Mr. Crossbin was allowing
the aroma to mount to the innermost recesses of his nostrils. It had
only been a few years since he had performed this same trick with a
gourd suspended from a nail in his father's back kitchen, overlooking a
field of growing corn; but that fact was not public property--not here
in New York.

"Yes--smooth, and with something of the hills in it. Chateau Lamont, is
it not, of '61?" It was Chateau of something-or-other, and of some
year, but Breen was too wise to correct him. He supposed it was Chateau
Lafitte--that is, he had instructed Parkins to serve that particular
wine and vintage.

"Either '61 or '63," replied Breen with the air of positive certainty.
(How that boy in the white apron, who had watched the boss paste on the
labels, would have laughed had he been under the table.)

Further down the cloth Hodges, the epicure, was giving his views as
to the proper way of serving truffles. A dish had just passed, with
an underpinning of crust. Hodges's early life had qualified him as an
expert in cooking, as well as in wines: Ten years in a country store
swapping sugar for sausages and tea for butter and eggs; five more
clerk in a Broadway cloth house, with varied boarding-house experiences
(boiled mutton twice a week, with pudding on Sundays); three years
junior partner, with a room over Delmonico's; then a rich wife and a
directorship in a bank (his father-in-law was the heaviest depositor);
next, one year in Europe and home, as vice-president, and at the
present writing president of one of the certify-as-early-as-ten-o'
clock-in-the-morning kind of banks, at which Peter would so often laugh.
With these experiences there came the usual blooming and expanding--all
the earlier life for gotten, really ignored. Soon the food of the
country became unbearable. Even the canvasbacks must feed on a certain
kind of wild celery; the oysters be dredged from a particular cove, and
the terrapin drawn from their beds with the Hodges' coat of arms cut
in their backs before they would be allowed a place on the ex-clerk's
table.

It is no wonder, then, that everybody listened when the distinguished
epicure launche