—but something—some serious trouble—had happened to that. All these were evidently placed on a shelf just at the level to show.
"Come right into the sanctum," said my uncle, after he had finished something about "esteemed consideration," and whisked me through the door into a room that quite amazingly failed to verify the promise of that apparatus. It was papered with dingy wallpaper that had peeled in places; it contained a fireplace, an easy-chair with a cushion, a table on which stood two or three big bottles, a number of cigar-boxes on the mantel, a whiskey Tantalus and a row of soda syphons. He shut the door after me carefully.
"Well, here we are!" he said. "Going strong! Have a whiskey, George? No!—Wise man! Neither will I! You see me at it! At it—hard!"
"Hard at what?"
"Read it," and he thrust into my hand a label—that label that has now become one of the most familiar objects of the chemist's shop, the greenish-blue rather old-fashioned bordering, the legend, the name in good black type, very clear, and the strong man all set about with lightning flashes above the double column of skilful lies in red—the label of Tono-Bungay. "It's afloat," he said, as I stood puzzling at this. "It's afloat. I'm afloat!" And suddenly he burst out singing in that throaty tenor of his—
"I'm afloat, I'm afloat on the fierce flowing tide,
The ocean's my home and my bark is my bride!"
"Ripping song that is, George. Not so much a bark as a solution, but still—it does! Here we are at it! By-the-by! Half a mo'! I've thought of a thing." He whisked out, leaving me to examine this
