Of course, you can judge of the lateness of the hour from the fact that a group of moderately intelligent men tolerated, and contributed to, a chat of this nature. But what brings me down to the story is the few words which I exchanged with Dunlap at the break-up of the party, when he was leaving. His cousin Robert, as you know, is well on the rippity side; but Jack, with all his fine capacity for heather-dew, had always struck me as something of a psalmster. I've heard that Bacchus holds the keys of truth, and it may be right; for out on the steps of the club, I said to Jack Dunlap: "It seems you don't practise what you preach?" "Don't I?" he snapped hardly. "What do you suppose I am doing here?" "Engineering, I take it. Do you aspire to a pedestal beside De Lesseps?" "De Lesseps be damned!" he retorted sourly. "Look at these." He held out his hands, hardened with manual toil--the hands of a grinder. "Clearly you are a glutton for work," I said. "I am aiming at never doing another hand's stroke in my life," he replied, with an odd glint in his blue eyes. "My idea of life--_life_, mind you, not mere existence--is to be a pasha--one of the old school, with gate porters, orange trees, fountains, slaves, mosaic pavements, a marble bath." He mixed his ambitions oddly. "Someone to do all the shifting for me, and even the thinking; to hold a book in front of me if I wanted to read, to poke my pipe in my mouth, and to take it out when I wanted to blow smoke rings--and to _know_ when I wanted it taken out without being told." "On your showing, you are traveling by the wrong road." "Am I?" he snapped viciously. "Just wait awhile." That was all the indication I had of Dunlap's ideas, and remembering the time of night and other circumstances, I did not count upon it worth a brass farthing; putting it down to the heather-dew rather than to any innate viciousness of the man. But listen to the sequel, which shifts us up just about twelve months, to the spring of the following year, in fact. II I had seen no more of Dunlap, and concluded that he was back in Assuan, or somewhere on the river, foozling with his irrigation again. I never had the clearest conception of the work of his department, by the way. An irrigation man once started to explain to me about his section, mixing up surveying paraphernalia in his talk, telling me something about an allowance of half an inch variation in half a mile of bank, or chat to that effect; but I couldn't quite make it out. My impression of Dunlap at business was very hazy; I pictured him measuring the bank of the Nile with a six-foot rule, and periodically kneeling down in the smelly mud to footle with a spirit-level. But he was a Senior Wrangler, as you remember, and a man, too, of more substantial accomplishments, and he drew five hundred a year from the Egyptian Government; so that probably I underestimated his usefulness.