I'm not particularly enraptured with the job, and if you think I deserve further promotion please cable (at my expense).
You will be pleased, I know, to learn that a week ago Thursday I quit smoking. It may sound strange to you when I say that I did it simply and solely because I was argued into it. I met Fred Pennypacker—paying teller in the Michigan National, you know—and offered him a cigar, which he declined, with the information that he had not smoked for five years.
"Heart trouble?" I asked.
"No," he replied, "marriage."
"Oh, wife objected?"
"Not at all," he answered. "Mrs. Pennypacker likes the odor of a good cigar. The fact is, Graham, after little Ernest came"—his boy—"I made up my mind to begin a special bank account for him by denying myself something. So I determined that it should be smoking, which did me no real good and cost a lot, for I cared only for the best cigars. I found it was costing me on an average over a dollar a day for tobacco. So ever since I have placed $30 a month to the young man's credit in the savings bank. In five years, with compound interest and a little extra change, it has amounted to nearly $2,000. When he is twenty-one it will be the nucleus of a fortune. Try it, Graham, it's much better than smoking."
I suggested that I had no son to make it an object. "Well, you may have," was the reply, "and even if you don't you may be glad some day you've got the money."
I fancy that perhaps he was thinking of the rumors that have placed you in a particularly splintery corner on November lard. But I thought of what he said several times and the next day, after trying in vain to smoke a cigar that I found in your desk, I decided to relegate smoking to the list of my banished small vices. That was a week ago last Thursday. Last Friday, day before yesterday, I met Pennypacker in the Palmer House café.
"Hello, Fred," I said, "I want to tell you something. I've followed your advice."
"Advice? What advice?" he asked.