Tobin nodded.
"Queer enough," he answered, "and the members was as queer in some ways. Nothing would do them, but they must spend their time underground, sitting at tables shaped like coffins, and drinking their liquor out of mugs shaped like skulls. I was steward there a long time, and got good pay; but I never approved of the notion. It always seemed like divilment to me, did that."
"Some very well known people frequented it, did they not?"
"Many's the time I've seen the governor of the state himself, sitting there with a mug in his fist. The liquors was of the best, do you see," with a pleased light in his eyes. "I know that, for it were meself that selected them. And a good sup of drink is a great attraction, so it is."
"I don't think that can be successfully denied," admitted the investigator. "Some very brilliant men have proved it to their sorrow."
"True for ye," said Tobin. "Don't I know it? We had actors and writers and editors—the cream of their professions—and every one of them a devotee, so to speak, of Bacchus. Sure, the finer the intellect, the greater the sup of drink appeals to them, if it does at all. One of the greatest frequenters of the club was a man whose inventions," with a grandiloquent gesture, "revolutionized the industries of the world. And when he was mellow with it, boys o' boys, but he could discourse! His name was Morris," added the speaker, "and he was the father of the young man whose name has been mixed up with this Hume affair which is so occupying the public mind just now."
"Indeed."
There was a pause: Tobin's mobile face looked back upon the past; his eyes had an introspective light in them.
"To think," said he, "how the natures of men differ. Some are like the gods of old, and others again are like—well, like anything you choose to call them. And yet," with philosophic speculation, "these two widely diversified types are sometimes friends. To the surprise of everyone they occasionally take up with one another. It's hard to say why, but it is so."
"I've noticed it myself," said Ashton-Kirk.