party's
provisions.

Food there was, without stint, for three times the men who were fated
to live upon it. But the most of it was the kind which built up brawn
and sinew, but did not tickle the palate.

True, there was sugar in plenty for two ordinary men; but these two
were little else than children. They early discovered the virtues of
hot water judiciously saturated with sugar, and they prodigally swam
their flapjacks and soaked their crusts in the rich, white syrup.

Then coffee and tea, and especially the dried fruits, made disastrous
inroads upon it. The first words they had were over the sugar question.
And it is a really serious thing when two men, wholly dependent upon
each other for company, begin to quarrel.

Weatherbee loved to discourse blatantly on politics, while Cuthfert,
who had been prone to clip his coupons and let the commonwealth jog on
as best it might, either ignored the subject or delivered himself of
startling epigrams. But the clerk was too obtuse to appreciate the
clever shaping of thought, and this waste of ammunition irritated
Cuthfert.

He had been used to blinding people by his brilliancy, and it worked
him quite a hardship, this loss of an audience. He felt personally
aggrieved and unconsciously held his muttonhead companion responsible
for it.

Save existence, they had nothing in common--came in touch on no single
point.

Weatherbee was a clerk who had known naught but clerking all his life;
Cuthfert was a master of arts, a dabbler in oils, and had written not a
little. The one was a lower-class man who considered himself a
gentleman, and the other was a gentleman who knew himself to be such.
From this it may be remarked that a man can be a gentleman without
possessing the first instinct of true comradeship. The clerk was as
sensuous as the other was aesthetic, and his love adventures, told at
great length and chiefly coined from his imagination, affected the
supersensitive master of arts in the same way as so many whiffs of
sewer gas. He deemed the clerk a filthy, uncultured brute, whose place
was in the muck with the swine, and told him so; and he was
reciprocally informed that he was a milk-and-water sissy and a cad.
Weatherbee could not have defined 'cad' for his life; but it satisfied
its purpose, which after all seems the main point in life.

Weatherbee flatted every third note and sang such songs as 'The Boston
Burglar' and 'the Handsome Cabin Boy,' for hours at a time