loved of
fair women are familiar. And Narcissus might, moreover, truthfully say
that _it_ has never appeared upon any manner of stamped paper coming
under a certain notable Act.

To be less indulgent to a vice from which the Reader will, I fear, have
too frequent occasion to suffer in these pages, and for which he may
have a stronger term than digression, let me at once say that Narcissus
is but the name Love knew him by, Love and the Reader; for that name by
which he was known to the postman--and others--is no necessity here. How
and why he came to be so named will appear soon enough.

Yes! it was the same old Narcissus, and he was wielding just the same
old magic, I could see, as in our class-rooms and playgrounds five years
before. What is it in him that made all men take him so on his own
terms, made his talk hold one so, though it so often stumbled in the
dark, and fell dumb on many a verbal _cul-de-sac_? Whatever it is,
Samuel felt it, and, with that fine worshipful spirit of his--an
attitude which always reminds me of the elders listening to the boy
Jesus--was doing that homage for which no beauty or greatness ever
appeals to him in vain. What an eye for soul has Samuel! How inevitably
it pierces through all husks and excrescences to the central beauty! In
that short talk he knew Narcissus through and through; three years or
thirty years could add but little. But the talk was not ended yet;
indeed, it seemed like so many of those Tithefields talks, as if in the
'eternal fitness of things' it never could, would, or should end. It was
I at last who gave it pause, and--yes! indeed, it was he. We had,
somehow, not met for quite three years, chums as we had been at school.
He had left there for an office some time before I did, and, oddly
enough, this was our first meeting since then. A purchaser for one of
those aforesaid treatises on farriery just then coming in, dislodged us;
so, bidding Samuel good-bye--he and Narcissus already arranging for 'a
night'--we obeyed a mutual instinct, and presently found ourselves in
the snuggery of a quaint tavern, which was often to figure hereafter in
our sentimental history, though probably little in these particular
chapters of it. The things 'seen done at "The Mermaid "' may some day be
written in another place, where the Reader will know from the beginning
what to expect, and not feel that he has been induced to buy a volume
under false pretences.

CHAPTER III

IN