"And they want me to do some more on the harbor. They say it's a new field. Never been touched."
"Then touch it," he said gruffly. "Leave me alone. I'm busy."
But coming in late after luncheon that day, I found him reading the editor's letter.
"Boy," he said that evening, "you ought to read Thackeray for style, and Washington Irving, and see what a whippersnapper you are. Work—work! If your mother were only alive she could help you!"
And just before bedtime, taking a bottle of beer with my pipe, I caught his disapproving eye.
"Worst thing you can put in your stomach," he growled. He said this regularly each night, and added, "Why can't you keep up your health for your work?"
His own health had improved astonishingly.
"It's the winter air that has done it," he said.