“Go in and win,” said the Superintendent. “When do you start?”
“This very night, sir?”
“Let me have a report in the morning.”
That evening the head of the department sent to the Up Office a new hand to assist the late-duty men. He was black-bearded with a very ruddy face, and he wore a uniform that had apparently belonged to a shorter and a slimmer person. His name, he said, was Edward Jones, but the Up Office seemed not contented with this and decided on the suggestion of a junior clerk to call him by the title of “Sunset.” He settled to the work with moderate determination, calling off parcels and sorting them into bins for delivery with perhaps more intelligence than the raw amateur usually showed: he spoke in a hoarse voice, and this he accounted for by confessing himself a slave to tobacco; he discussed the matter with the other men, between the arrival of trains, and seemed, not unnaturally, more interested in those who smoked than in the one or two who limited themselves to a cigarette a week, consumed after dinner on Sundays. The Up Office always had a composite scent, in which fruit, game, cheese, and other things mixed, with sometimes one gaining ascendancy, sometimes another; a new flavour of a more pleasant and a vaguer character was contributed presently by a small brown-paper-covered box, brought in from an arrival platform, bearing a proud label:—
VALUABLE CIGARS.
KEEP DRY.
“’Ere’s a chance for some one,” said the porter, as he called it off. “Sunset, old chum, these’d do your palate good.”
“Silly thing to mark ’em like that,” remarked the new man. “It’s throwing temptation in anybody’s way. I should say they’re likely enough worth about fifteen pence to one-and-six a-piece.”
“How d’you know?”
“I don’t profess to know,” said the new man hurriedly. “I’m only giving a rough estimate. But bless my soul,” he went on after a pause, “what a refining influence a cigar has.”