, as he confidently
believes, of benevolent emotion), 'One likes to see one's friends
prosperous;' but even when they are not so, it requires some effort to
follow the dictates of prudence and cast them off. And, after all, the
man, even though you may cut him, remains the same; as fit for the
purposes of friendship as ever, except for his pecuniary condition.
There is no such change in his relation to oneself as Emerson describes
in one of his essays; his words I forget, and his works are miles away,
but the man he has in his mind has in some way fallen short of
expectation--declined, perhaps, to lend the philosopher money.
'Yesterday,' he says, 'my friend was the illimitable ocean; to-day he
is a pond.' He had come to the end of him. And some friends, as my
little child complains as he strokes his black kitten, 'end so soon.'

There are no circumstances, however, under which friendship comes so
often to a violent and sudden death as under the pressure of travel. It
is like the fate which the Scientific ascribe to a box sunk in the sea;
after a certain depth, which varies according to the strength of the
box, the weight of the superincumbent water bursts it up. It is merely
a question of how deep or how strong. Our travelling companion remains
our friend for a day, for a week, for even a month; but at the month's
end he is our friend no longer. Our relations have probably become what
the diplomatists term 'strained' long before that date, but a day comes
when the tension becomes intolerable; the cable parts and we lose him.
Unfortunately, not always, however; there are circumstances--such as
being on board ship, for example--when we thus part without parting
company. A long voyage is the most terrible trial to which friendship
can be subjected. It is like the old sentence of pressing to death, 'as
much as he can bear, and more.' It is doubtful, for example, whether
friendship has ever survived a voyage to Australia. I have sometimes
asked a man whether he knew So-and-So, who hails, like himself, from
Melbourne, and he has replied, 'We came over in the same ship'--'Only
that, and nothing more,' as the poet puts it; but his tone has an
unmistakable significance, and one perceives at once that the topic had
better not be pursued.

A very dear friend of mine once proposed that we should go round the
world together; he offered to pay all my expenses, and painted the
expedition in rose-colour. But I had the good sense to de