"I will, by Duncan!" He tore the page out of the magazine and put it in his pocket. "I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll give this thing a trial for a week or two, and at the end of that time I'll go to the boss and see how he reacts when I ask for a rise of salary. If he crawls, it'll show there's something in this. If he flings me out, it will prove the thing's no good." We left it at that, and I am bound to say--owing, no doubt, to my not having written for the booklet of the Memory Training Course advertised on the adjoining page of the magazine--the matter slipped from my mind. When, therefore, a few weeks later, I received a telegram from young Mackintosh which ran: _Worked like magic,_ I confess I was intensely puzzled. It was only a quarter of an hour before George himself arrived that I solved the problem of its meaning. "So the boss crawled?" I said, as he came in. He gave a light, confident laugh. I had not seen him, as I say, for some time, and I was struck by the alteration in his appearance. In what exactly this alteration consisted I could not at first have said; but gradually it began to impress itself on me that his eye was brighter, his jaw squarer, his carriage a trifle more upright than it had been. But it was his eye that struck me most forcibly. The George Mackintosh I had known had had a pleasing gaze, but, though frank and agreeable, it had never been more dynamic than a fried egg. This new George had an eye that was a combination of a gimlet and a searchlight. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, I imagine, must have been somewhat similarly equipped. The Ancient Mariner stopped a wedding guest on his way to a wedding; George Mackintosh gave me the impression that he could have stopped the Cornish Riviera express on its way to Penzance. Self-confidence--aye, and more than self-confidence--a sort of sinful, overbearing swank seemed to exude from his very pores. "Crawled?" he said. "Well, he didn't actually lick my boots, because I saw him coming and side-stepped; but he did everything short of that. I hadn't been talking an hour when----" "An hour!" I gasped. "Did you talk for an hour?"