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Mr. Mathers, J. George Watts, and the brother-in-law each took a cigar with that careless yet deferential manner which always distinguishes the treatee from the treator; and then the box was protruded in an offhand way toward Harry Covare, the personal clerk of the Registrar; but this young man declined, saying that he preferred cigarettes, a package of which he drew from his pocket. He had very often seen that cigar-box with a Havana brand, which he himself had brought from the other room after the Registrar had emptied it, passed around with six cigars, no more nor less, and he was wise enough to know that the Shipwreck Clerk did not expect to supply him with smoking-material. If that gentleman had offered to the friends who generally dropped in on him on Wednesday afternoon the paper bag of cigars sold at five cents each when bought singly, but half a dozen for a quarter of a dollar, they would have been quite as thankfully received; but it better pleased his deprecative soul to put them in an empty cigar-box, and thus throw around them the halo of the presumption that ninety-four of their imported companions had been smoked.

The Shipwreck Clerk, having lighted a cigar for himself, sat down in his revolving chair, turned his back to his desk, and threw himself into an easy cross-legged attitude, which showed that he was perfectly at home in that office. Harry Covare mounted a high stool, while the visitors seated themselves in three wooden arm-chairs. But few words had been said, and each man had scarcely tossed his first tobacco-ashes on the floor, when some one wearing heavy boots was heard opening an outside door and entering the Registrar’s room. Harry Covare jumped down from his stool, laid his half-smoked cigarette thereon, and bounced into the next room, closing the door after him. In about a minute he returned, and the Shipwreck Clerk looked at him inquiringly.

“An old cock in a pea-jacket,” said Mr. Covare, taking up his cigarette and mounting his stool. “I told him the Registrar would be here in the morning. He said he had something to report about a shipwreck, and I told him the Registrar would be here in the morning. Had to tell him that three times, and then he went.”

“School don’t keep Wednesday afternoons,” said Mr. J. George Watts, with a knowing smile.

“No, sir,” said the Shipwreck Clerk, emphatically, changing the crossing of his legs. “A man can’t keep grinding on day in and out without breaking down. Outsiders may say what they please about it, but it can’t be done. We’ve got to let up sometimes. People who do the work need the rest just as much as those who do the looking on.”

“And more too, I should say,” observed Mr. Mathers.

“Our little let-up on Wednesday afternoons,” modestly observed Harry Covare, “is like death–it is sure to come; while the let-ups we get other days are more like the diseases which prevail in certain areas–you can’t be sure whether you’re going to get them or not.”

The Shipwreck Clerk smiled benignantly at this remark, and the rest laughed. Mr. Mathers had heard it before, but he would not impair the pleasantness of his relations with a future colleague by hinting that he remembered it.

“He gets such ideas from his beastly statistics,” said the Shipwreck Clerk.

“Which come pretty heavy on him sometimes, I expect,” observed Mr. Mathers.

“They needn’t,” said the Shipwreck Clerk, “if things were managed here as they ought to be. If John J. Laylor”–meaning thereby the Registrar–“was the right kind of a man you’d see things very different here from what they are now. There’d be a larger force.”

“That’s so,” said Mr. Mathers.

“And not only that, but there’d be better buildings and more accommodations. Were any of you ever up to Anster? Well, take a run up there some day, and see what sort of buildings the department has there. William Q. Green is a very different man from John J. Laylor. You don’t see him sitting in his chair and picking his teeth the whole winter, while the Representative from his district never says a word about his department from one end of a session of Congress to the other. Now if I had charge of things here, I’d make such changes that you wouldn’t know the place. I’d throw two rooms off here, and a corridor and entrance-door at that end of the building. I’d close up this door”–pointing toward the Registrar’s room–“and if John J. Laylor wanted to come in here he might go round to the end door like other people.”