All day long the shoal of customers flocked in and rattled their money across the busy counters. Each individual wanted a word with the proprietors. Buyers and brewery agents poured in too, asking for orders, and newspaper reporters took notes for descriptive articles which duly appeared next morning. The dining-room did a roaring trade and every stool at the long lunch counter had its occupant. How easy it all seemed! And no one the worse for liquor! Everybody was beaming, and, as a partner in the Hub Wine Company, I already felt that my failure in the dairy farm was forgotten, an unlucky incident at most; a boyish episode due to inexperience, but now atoned for. Lord Dufferin, a few years before, had been Governor-General of Canada, and a huge framed photograph of him hung above the cold meat, game pies and salads of the lunch counter. A connexion of my father’s, the newspapers had insisted upon a closer relationship, and while some thought he would do better as a first cousin, others preferred him as my uncle. As an exceedingly popular Governor-General, his place above the good Canadian food seemed appropriate at any rate, and the number of customers, both known and unknown, who congratulated me upon our distinguished framed patron, gave me the odd feeling that somehow the shock to my father was thereby lessened. The stories of what Dufferin and his wife had done for Tom, Dick and Harry, for their wives and their children or their dogs, told to me beside our House of Lords’ bar that opening day proved good for business. I had come to the colony somewhat overburdened with distinguished relations of heavy calibre who, to extend the simile a little, neither now nor later, ever fired a single shot on my behalf. The mere inertia of their names, indeed, weighed down my subsequent New York days with the natural suspicion that a young man so well born must have done something dreadful at home to be forced to pose to artists for a living. Why, otherwise, should he suffer exile in the underworld of a city across the seas? Lord Dufferin’s photograph augustly throned above the Hub luncheon counter, certainly, however, fired a shot on my behalf, making the cash-registers clink frequently. His effect on our bar-trade, innocently uncalculated, deserves this word of gratitude.