Lipton

Sir Thomas Lipton, gallant yachtsman with the barnacle beard whose toast is drunk in 5,000,000 cups of tea, is a sportsman who has made an enormous reputation for his tea by knowing how to be beaten. Last week, in the famed Shamrock IV, he heard a pistol crack and scurried past a buoy at Cowes, England. Pennants crackled stiffly at mastheads; admirals, generals, statesmen, literary lions, captains of industry, peers and parasites eyed the heeling white boats, for it was the first day of the famed Cowes Week, and the King's cutter with Prince Henry and the Duke of Connaught aboard was racing against Sir Thomas and the others. Doubtless in the gnarled heart of that connoisseur of defeats there pricked, for a moment, the thrill of the possibility of victory; his boat was first at the gun; the royal cutter slipped farther and farther behind. But, having learned to savor the futility of hope, doubtless he was not surprised when Lord Waring's White Heather slipped past his lee on the crest of a feathering wave and beat him across the line. Grimly he twisted his barnacle, fixed upon his features his professionally smile, repeated mechanically: "I will try again...."