a machine--and so on.'

'I tried pawning them at first,' he continued, 'because there was hope
of getting them back some time that way; but, trudging from shop to
shop, with many prayers, "a sovereign for the lot" was all I could get.
Worse than dress-clothes!' concluded the frank creature.

For Narcissus to be in debt was nothing new: he had always been so at
school, and probably always will be. Had you reproached him with it in
those young self-conscious days of glorious absurdity, he would probably
have retorted, with a toss of his vain young head:--

'Well, and so was Shelley!'

I ventured to enquire the present difficulty that compelled him to make
sacrifice of things so dear.

'Why, to pay for them, of course,' was the answer.

And so I first became initiated into the mad method by which Narcissus
had such a library about him at twenty-one. From some unexplained
reason, largely, I have little doubt, on account of the charm of his
manners, he had the easy credit of those respectable booksellers to whom
reference has been made above. No extravagance seemed to shake their
confidence. I remember calling upon them with him one day some months
following that afternoon--for the madness, as usual, would have its
time, and no sufferings seemed to teach him prudence--and he took me up
to a certain 'fine set' that he had actually resisted, he said, for a
fortnight. Alas! I knew what that meant. Yes, he must have it; it was
just the thing to help him with a something he was writing--'not to
read, you know, but to make an atmosphere,' etc. So he used to talk; and
the odd thing was, that we always took the wildness seriously; he seemed
to make us see just what he wanted. 'I say, John,' was the next I heard,
at the other end of the shop, 'will you kindly send me round that set
of' so-and-so, 'and charge it to my account?' 'John,' the son of old
Oldbuck, and for a short time a sort of friend of Narcissus, would
answer, 'Certainly,' with a voice of the most cheerful trust; and yet,
when we had gone, it was indeed no less a sum than L10, 10s. which he
added to the left-hand side of Mr. N.'s account.

Do not mistake this for a certain vulgar quality, with a vulgar little
name of five letters. No one could have less of that than Narcissus. He
was often, on the contrary, quite painfully diffident. No, it was not
'cheek,' Reader; it was a kind of irrational innocence. I don't think it
ever occurred to him, till the bills came i