at
first sight, ain't it?"

"It is," was the placidly pleased reply: "and the same may be said of
friendship at first sight as of love at first sight: it is the only true
one, the only noble one. It bespeaks confidence. Who would go sounding
his way into love or friendship, like a strange ship by night, into an
enemy's harbor?"

"Right. Boldly in before the wind. Agreeable, how we always agree.
By-the-way, though but a formality, friends should know each other's
names. What is yours, pray?"

"Francis Goodman. But those who love me, call me Frank. And yours?"

"Charles Arnold Noble. But do you call me Charlie."

"I will, Charlie; nothing like preserving in manhood the fraternal
familiarities of youth. It proves the heart a rosy boy to the last."

"My sentiments again. Ah!"

It was a smiling waiter, with the smiling bottle, the cork drawn; a
common quart bottle, but for the occasion fitted at bottom into a little
bark basket, braided with porcupine quills, gayly tinted in the Indian
fashion. This being set before the entertainer, he regarded it with
affectionate interest, but seemed not to understand, or else to pretend
not to, a handsome red label pasted on the bottle, bearing the capital
letters, P. W.

"P. W.," said he at last, perplexedly eying the pleasing poser, "now
what does P. W. mean?"

"Shouldn't wonder," said the cosmopolitan gravely, "if it stood for port
wine. You called for port wine, didn't you?"

"Why so it is, so it is!"

"I find some little mysteries not very hard to clear up," said the
other, quietly crossing his legs.

This commonplace seemed to escape the stranger's hearing, for, full of
his bottle, he now rubbed his somewhat sallow hands over it, and with a
strange kind of cackle, meant to be a chirrup, cried: "Good wine, good
wine; is it not the peculiar bond of good feeling?" Then brimming both
glasses, pushed one over, saying, with what seemed intended for an air
of fine disdain: "Ill betide those gloomy skeptics who maintain that
now-a-days pure wine is unpurchasable; that almost every variety on sale
is less the vintage of vineyards than laboratories; that most
bar-keepers are but a set of male Brinvilliarses, with complaisant arts
practicing against the lives of their best friends, their customers."

A shade passed over the cosmopolitan. After a few minutes' down-cast
musing, he lifted his eyes and said: "I have long thought, my dear
Charlie, that the spirit in which wine is