“Sorry you won’t take a drink, young fellow. The whisky in that bottle is sixteen years old. I want to give you a little of my experience—some heavy work I did in New Orleans. I took three hundred and thirty- one messages in two hours and a half—”

Again, when the car disturbed my nap, I caught:

“Sorry you won’t take a drink, young fellow. The whisky in that bottle is eighteen years old. I want to give you a little of my experience—some heavy work I did in Corinne. Business had been accumulating in Omaha twelve days, Old Jim Lawless was working there then; fastest sender ever lived. I just told him to leave out everything and go in. Received from him seventeen hours and thirty seconds, and took sixteen hundred messages without a—”

“Why, that is nearly a hundred an hour,” ejaculated the youngster, amazed.

“I don’t know anything about that. We never counted ’em to see what time we made,” said Posie, in return; and then I fell asleep again. I couldn’t pretend to tell you how many times I came to the surface, as it were, and heard the story about that aged whisky and the heavy work. The more he talked about them the older the whisky got, until its one hundred and fourteenth year was reached, and I don’t know how many more, and the work became heavier as the dust and cobwebs gathered upon that inspiring flask of spirits. Finally, I fell into a deep slumber, which lasted until the train went crashing through Hyde Park and Jamaica Plains. I looked behind me for Van Dusen as we came in sight of Boston’s domes, but he was gone, whither I knew not. It was a beautiful morning, and the birds were singing sweetly in the trees as I staggered across the Common more asleep than awake. Somehow there seemed to me to be a story of whisky and heavy work permeating the tones of the feathered songsters; but from away over on a hillside, where the branches were waving in the summer wind of the early morning, there came the tones of a sweeter singer than all the rest. Above the din of the many its blithe notes rang out sharp and clear, and it seemed to sing—possiby I dreamed all this, but I remember it as a reality—it seemed to sing those lines of Young’s: