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The occupants of the room on the evening in question were four in number. One, a German, known as the Professor Heinrich von Schalckenberg, was half buried in the recesses of a huge arm-chair, from the depths of which he perused the pages of the Science Monthly, smoking meanwhile a pipe with a huge elaborately carved meerschaum bowl and a long cherry-wood stem.
His reputation as a man of figures stood as I have just said very high, but, whilst I was at Derby, and before he moved to the Great Eastern, he was prominent also as the happy possessor of the best coloured meerschaum pipes in the county, and this, in those days, was no small distinction. But a man does not achieve greatness by his own unaided efforts.
His nerves have never been corrugated with alcohol; his thinking-marrow is not brown with tobacco-fumes, like a meerschaum, as are the brains of so many unfortunate Americans; he is the same lusty, warm-blooded, strong-fibred, brave-hearted, bright-souled, clear-eyed creature that he was when the college boys at Amherst acknowledged him as the chiefest among their football-kickers.
During the following years we catch glimpses of him, flitting mysteriously over Germany and Switzerland, at Berlin, at Baden, at Giessen, a strange solitary figure, with tangled hair and meerschaum pipe, scribbling lampoons upon the King of Prussia, translating Grainger's Spinal Cord into German, and Schoenlein's Diseases of Europeans into English, exploring Pilatus and the Titlis, evolving now and then some ghostly lyric or some rabelaisian tale, or brooding over the scenes of his 'Gothic-styled tragedy, wondering if it were worthless or inspired, and giving it as had been his wont for the last twenty years just one more touch before he sent it to the press.
"Ridiculous, indeed monstrous," agreed Winter, rather heatedly, "but nevertheless a candidate for the lady's hand." Then he laughed. Peters's keen eyes were watching him, and Wally Hart was giving more heed to the conversation than was revealed by a fixed stare at the negro's head in meerschaum. "You've bothered me," he went on. "I thought you had more sense.
My very black hair, ever inclined to run riot, was encircled by a craftily conceived band of crochet-work, such as only a fond mother's hand could devise, and I was doubtless colouring some meerschaum of eccentric design. My fellow-student, the now famous Matthew Maris, immortalised that blouse and that piece of crochet-work in the admirable oil-sketch here reproduced.
The pipe was a superb meerschaum, admirably colored, black as the teeth of its owner, but fragrant, curved, shining familiar to his hand, and the natural complement to his physiognomy.
What! a pater-familias who, when he is half-tipsy, on Sunday afternoons preaches moral sermons to daughters, who are laughing in their sleeves at him all the time, and who brags about the meerschaum pipe which the seducer of his own daughter gives him as a birthday present!
"Nope," said the boy, as he looked in the mirror to see how his eye was coloring, with all the pride of a man who is coloring a meerschaum; "I just had a fight. Licked a boy, that's all," and he put his hand to his head, where a lock of his red hair had been pulled out. "You look as though you had licked a boy," said the old man taking a good look at the blue spot around the boy's eye.
She almost lost her breath when her brother knocked the ashes from his meerschaum and curtly told her of the proposed change in his business relations. "I don't know what I shall do yet," he said, "whether I shall set up for myself in a small way or take a position in another concern, that is, if I can get one my stock of popularity seems to be pretty low just now in Farnham.
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