Brown is evidently a very truthful man, for he hesitated. "That is the interview pipe," he explained. "When we decided to come to America, Sir James said he would have to be interviewed, and that it would be wise to bring something with us for the interviewers to take notice of. So he told me to buy the biggest pipe I could find, and he practiced holding it in his mouth in his cabin on the way across. He is very pleased with the way the gentlemen of the press have taken notice of it." "So that is not the pipe he really smokes?" I said, perceiving I was on the verge of a grand discovery. "I suppose he actually smokes an ordinary small pipe." Again Brown hesitated, but again truth prevailed. "He does not smoke any pipe," he said, "nor cigars, nor cigarettes; he never smokes at all; he just puts that one in his mouth to help the interviewers." "It has the appearance of having been smoked," I pointed out. "I blackened it for him," the faithful fellow replied. "But he has written a book in praise of My Lady Nicotine." "So I have heard," Brown said guardedly. "I think that was when he was hard up and had to write what people wanted; but he never could abide smoking himself. Years after he wrote the book he read it; he had quite forgotten it, and he was so attracted by what it said about the delights of tobacco that he tried a cigarette. But it was no good; the mere smell disgusted him." *Strange Forgetfulness.* "Odd that he should forget his own book," I said. "He forgets them all," said Brown. "There is this Peter Pan foolishness, for instance. I have heard people talking to him about that play and mentioning parts in it they liked, and he tried to edge them off the subject; they think it is his shyness, but I know it is because he has forgotten the bits they are speaking about. Before strangers call on him I have seen him reading one of his own books hurriedly, so as to be able to talk about it if that is their wish. But he gets mixed up, and thinks that the little minister was married to Wendy." "Almost looks as if he hadn't written his own works," I said. "Almost," Brown admitted uncomfortably. I asked a leading question. "You don't suppose," I said, "that any one writes them for him? Such things have been. You don't write them for him by any chance, just as you blackened the pipe, you know?" Brown assured me stolidly that he did not. Suddenly, whether to get away from a troublesome subject I cannot say, he vouchsafed me a startling piece of information. "The German Kaiser was on our boat coming across," he said. "Sure?" I asked, wetting my pencil.