lluring than attar of roses!... It was a
long, low room, with pasted pictures on the walls, a row of dingy cases
at one side, the press at the farther end, the stones near it, and a
cutting machine with its arm raised aloft as though to command
attention. The editor's desk in the corner was heaped so high with books
and papers and magazines and pamphlets that another single one added to
the pile would certainly have produced an avalanche--and ended
ignominiously in the capacious wastebasket.

For all its dinginess and its picturesque disorder there was something
infinitely beguiling about the room. In the front window stood a row of
potted geraniums, very thrifty, and there was a yellow canary in a cage,
and the editor's ancient chair (one lame leg bandaged with string) was
occupied by an old fat gray cat, curled up on a cushion and comfortably
asleep. A light breeze came in at one of the windows, fingered a leaf of
the calendar to make sure that it was really spring again, and went out
blithely at the other window.

I liked it: I liked it all.

"There is a fine woman around this shop somewhere," I said to myself,
"or else a very fine man."

My vision of the daring paragrapher who could say "Fudge" with such
virgin enthusiasm instantly shifted. I saw him now as something of a
poet--still old, but with a pleasing beard (none of your common chin
whiskers) and rarely fine eyes, a man who could care for flowers in the
window and keep the cat from the canary.

At that instant my eyes were smitten with stark reality, my imagination
wrecked upon the reef of fact. I saw Fergus MacGregor.

Fergus is one of those men who should always be seen for the first time:
after you begin to know him, you can't rightly appreciate him.

He was sitting away back in the corner of the room, by his favourite
window, tipped back in his chair, with one heel hooked over a rung, the
other leg playing loose in space, sadly reading the "Adventures of Tom
Sawyer" which he considers the greatest book in the world--next to
Robert Burns's poems.

Fergus has always been good for me. He is all facts, like roast beef, or
asparagus, or a wheel in a rut. It is almost impossible to idealize
Fergus: he has freckles and red hair on his hands. When Fergus first
came to Hempfield, one of our good old Yankee citizens, who had never
seen much of foreigners and therefore considered them all immoral, said
he never had liked Frenchmen.

Whenever I am soaring