CHAPTER II.
MY FIRST CIGAR.
[Illustration] It was not in my chambers, but three hundred miles further north, that I learned to smoke.

I think I may say with confidence that a first cigar was never smoked in such circumstances before.
At that time I was a school-boy, living with my brother, who was a man.
People mistook our relations, and thought I was his son.

They would ask me how my father was, and when he heard of this he scowled at me.

Even to this day I look so young that people who remember me as a boy now think I must be that boy's younger brother.

I shall tell presently of a strange mistake of this kind, but at present I am thinking of the evening when my brother's eldest daughter was born--perhaps the most trying evening he and I ever passed together.