om one or two bows. I wonder if an
image will help at all here. Think on a pebbly stream, on a brisk,
bright morning; dwell on the soft, shining lines of its flowing; and
then recall the tonic influence, the sensation of grip, which the
pebbles give it. Dip your hand into it again in fancy; realise how
chaste it is, and then again think how bright and good it is. And if you
realise these impressions as they come to me, you will have gained some
idea of George Muncaster's face--the essential spirit of it, I mean,
ever so much more important than the mere features. Such, at least,
seemed the meaning of his face even in the first moment of our
intercourse that September dusk, and so it has never ceased to come upon
us even until now.

And what a night that was! what a talk! How soon did we find each other
out! Long before the maid knocked at the door, and hinted by the
delicate insinuation of a supposed ring that there was 'a budding
morrow' in the air. But our passionate generosity of soul was running in
too strong a tide just then to be stemmed by any such interference; it
could but be diverted, and Muncaster's bedroom served us as well wherein
to squat in one of those close, rapt circles of talk such as, I think,
after all, men who love poetry can alone know--men, anyhow, with _a_
poetry.

Bed, that had for some time been calling us, unheeded as Juliet's nurse,
had at last to be obeyed; but how grudgingly; and how eagerly we sprang
from it at no late hour in the morning, at the first thought of the
sweet new thing that had come into the world--like children who, half
in a doze before waking, suddenly remember last night's new wonder of a
toy, to awake in an instant, and scramble into clothes to look at it
again. Thus, like children we rose; but it was shy as lovers we met at
the breakfast-table, as lovers shy after last night's kissing. (You may
not have loved a fellow-man in this way, Reader, but we are, any one of
us, as good men as you; so keep your eyebrows down, I beseech you.)

One most winsome trait of our new friend was soon apparent--as, having,
to our sorrow, to part at the inn door right and left, we talked of
meeting again at one or the other's home: a delicate disinclination to
irreverently 'make sure' of the new joy; a 'listening fear,' as though
of a presiding good spirit that might revoke his gift if one stretched
out towards it with too greedy hands. 'Rather let us part and say
nought. You know where