n at the half-years, what
'charge it to my account' really meant. Perhaps it was because, poor
lad, he had so small a practical acquaintance with it, that he knew so
little the value of money. But how he suffered when those accounts did
come in! Of course, there was nothing to be done but to apply to some
long-suffering friend; denials of lunch and threadbare coats but nibbled
at the amount--especially as a fast to-day often found revulsion in a
festival to-morrow. To save was not in Narcissus.

I promised to digress, Reader, and I have kept my word. Now to return to
that afternoon again. It so chanced that on that day in the year I
happened to have in my pocket--what you might meet me every day in five
years without finding there--a ten-pound note. It was for this I felt
after we had been musing awhile--Narcissus, probably, on everything
else in the world except his debts--and it was with this I awoke him
from his reverie. He looked at his hand, and then at me, in
bewilderment. Poor fellow, how he wanted to keep it, yet how he tried to
look as if he couldn't think of doing so. He couldn't help his joy
shining through.

'But I want you to take it,' I said; 'believe me, I have no immediate
need of it, and you can pay me at your leisure.' Ten pounds towards the
keep of a poet once in a lifetime is, after all, but little interest on
the gold he brings us. At last I 'prevailed,' shall I say? but on no
account without the solemnity of an IOU and a fixed date for repayment,
on which matter poor N. was always extremely emphatic. Alas! Mr. George
Meredith has already told us how this passionate anxiety to be bound by
the heaven above, the earth, and the waters under the earth, is the most
fatal symptom by which to know the confirmed in this kind. Captain
Costigan had it, it may be remembered; and the same solicitude, the same
tearful gratitude, I know, accompanied every such transaction of my
poor Narcissus.

Whether it was as apparent on the due date, or whether of that ten
pounds I have ever looked upon the like again, is surely no affair of
the Reader's; but, lest he should do my friend an injustice, I had
better say--I haven't.

CHAPTER IV

ACCOUNTS RENDERED

Nothing strikes one more in looking back, either on our own lives or on
those of others, than how little we assimilate from the greatest
experiences; in nothing is Nature's apparent wastefulness of means more
ironically impressive. A great love comes an