My head was spinning with unwonted Benedictine and Burgundy.

"Let me go back and look at the game again," I said. "Let me see
upstairs and round about."

I did.

"What do you think of it all?" my uncle asked at last.

"Well, for one thing," I said, "why don't you have those girls working
in a decently ventilated room? Apart from any other consideration,
they'd work twice as briskly. And they ought to cover the corks before
labelling round the bottle."

"Why?" said my uncle.

"Because--they sometimes make a mucker of the cork job, and then the
label's wasted."

"Come and change it, George," said my uncle, with sudden fervour "Come
here and make a machine of it. You can. Make it all slick, and then make
it woosh. I know you can. Oh! I know you can."

II

I seem to remember very quick changes of mind after that lunch. The
muzzy exaltation of the unaccustomed stimulants gave way very rapidly
to a model of pellucid and impartial clairvoyance which is one of my
habitual mental states. It is intermittent; it leaves me for weeks
together, I know, but back it comes at last like justice on circuit,