"Myself," said he. "Truly so. Odd, isn't it? Wait a few minutes, old man, and I'll read it to you. Light a cigar and sit down just a minute and I'll be through."

I lit one of Chetwood's cigars. They are excellent. I have heard one expert pronounce them "bully." They are, and of course while I smoked I was happy.

At the end of a half-hour's waiting, the silence broken only by the scratching of Chetwood's pen and by my own puffings upon the weed, he wheeled about in his chair.

"Well, that's finished," he said, and he glanced affectionately and, I thought, wistfully about his charming workshop.

"Good," said I. "You promised to read it to me."

"All right," said he. "Here goes."

And he kept his word. I reproduce the letter from memory. Like all copy-mongers, he began it with a title double underscored, and I reproduce it as I heard it:

"LETTER TO MYSELF

"On Christmas Giving: A Hint

"My Dear John,—As the Christmas holidays approach it has seemed to me to be somewhat in the line of my duty to write to you not only to wish you all the good things of the season, but to give you a little fatherly advice which may stand you in good stead when the first of January comes about. I have observed you and your ways with some particularity for some time; in fact, since that very happy day, nearly twenty years ago, when you entered upon the duties of citizenship, with twenty-one years and a birthday gift of $500 from your father to your credit. The twenty-one years had come easily and had gone easily. All you had had to do to acquire and to retain them was to breathe and to keep your feet dry. The $500, which represented so much toil on your father's part, came to you quite as easily. You saw the check, and you realized the possibilities of the sum for which it called, but I do not think you ever realized the effort that produced that $500. I judge from the way you let it filter through your fingers that you thought your generous father picked the money up from a pile of gold lying somewhere in the back yard of his home. I do not know if you recall what it went for, but I do. Some of it went for a half-dozen sporting pictures of some rarity that you had long wished to hang on the walls of your den. More of it went for rare first editions of books whose possession you had envied others for no little time. A portion of it was spent on sundry trinkets which should adorn your person, such as studs, scarf-pins, a snake ring, with ruby eyes—a disgusting-looking thing, by the way—to encircle your little finger. There were also certain small things in the line of bronzes, silver writing implements, a jug or two of some value that you had cast your eyes upon, and which you were quick to acquire. Do you remember, my dear Jack, how delighted you were with all that you were able to buy with that $500, until the bills came in and you found that the consciousness of a $500 backing had led you into an expenditure of a trifle over $900? You were painfully surprised that day, Jacky, my boy, but, as I have watched you since you let it go at that, you never learned anything from those bills. Indeed, what you call your cheerful philosophy, which led you to console yourself then with the thought that the stuff you had bought on credit if sold at auction would bring in enough to pay the deficit, has clung to you ever since, and has served you ill—very ill—unless I am wholly mistaken. You would strike any other man than myself were he to venture to call you a second Mr. Micawber, but Johnnie, dear, that is what you are—and you are even worse than that, John. Let me assure you of the fact. You are something worse. You are a modern Dick Turpin! Don't be angry at my saying so. Merely understand that I am telling you the truth, and for your own good, and I'll explain the analogy. I cannot call a man a modern Dick Turpin without explaining why I do so.