"
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.
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