In fact, ever so many of the members of the Mausoleum
Club manufacture things, or cause them to be manufactured,
or--what is the same thing--merge them when they are
manufactured. This gives them their peculiar chemical
attitude towards their food. One often sees a member
suddenly call the head waiter at breakfast to tell him
that there is too much ammonia in the bacon; and another
one protest at the amount of glucose in the olive oil;
and another that there is too high a percentage of nitrogen
in the anchovy. A man of distorted imagination might
think this tasting of chemicals in the food a sort of
nemesis of fate upon the members. But that would be very
foolish, for in every case the head waiter, who is the
chief of the Chinese philosophers mentioned above, says
that he'll see to it immediately and have the percentage
removed. And as for the members themselves, they are
about as much ashamed of manufacturing and merging things
as the Marquis of Salisbury is ashamed of the founders
of the Cecil family.

What more natural, therefore, than that Mr. Lucullus
Fyshe, before serving the soda to the Duke, should try
it on somebody else? And what better person could be
found for this than Mr. Furlong, the saintly young rector
of St. Asaph's, who had enjoyed the kind of expensive
college education calculated to develop all the faculties.
Moreover, a rector of the Anglican Church who has been
in the foreign mission field is the kind of person from
whom one can find out, more or less incidentally, how
one should address and converse with a duke, and whether