failed me, and I was caught with a shivering in the
knees, which the doctor said was ague. This and that shyness of dining
at his house (which I thought it expedient to adopt during the years of
his married life) created some little reserve between us, though
hardly so bad as our first disagreement concerning the stripe down the
pantaloons.

However, before that dereliction I had made my friend a wedding present,
as was right and proper--a present such as nothing less than a glorious
windfall could have enabled me to buy. For while engaged, some three
years back, upon a grand historical painting of "Cour de Lion and
Saladin," now to be seen--but let that pass; posterity will always know
where to find it--I was harassed in mind perpetually concerning the
grain of the fur of a cat. To the dashing young artists of the present
day this may seem a trifle; to them, no doubt, a cat is a cat--or would
be, if they could make it one. Of course, there are cats enough in
London, and sometimes even a few to spare; but I wanted a cat of
peculiar order, and of a Saracenic cast. I walked miles and miles;
till at last I found him residing in a very old-fashioned house in the
Polygon, at Somers Town. Here was a genuine paradise of cats, carefully
ministered to and guarded by a maiden lady of Portuguese birth and of
advanced maturity. Each of these nine cats possessed his own stool--a
mahogany stool, with a velvet cushion, and his name embroidered upon it
in beautiful letters of gold. And every day they sat round the fire to
digest their dinners, all nine of them, each on his proper stool,
some purring, some washing their faces, and some blinking or nodding
drowsily. But I need not have spoken of this, except that one of
them was called "Saladin." He was the very cat I wanted. I made his
acquaintance in the area, and followed it up on the knife-boy's board.
And then I had the most happy privilege of saving him from a tail-pipe.
Thus my entrance was secured into this feline Eden; and the lady was
so well pleased that she gave me an order for nine full-length cat
portraits, at the handsome price of ten guineas apiece. And not only
this, but at her demise--which followed, alas! too speedily--she left me
L150, as a proof of her esteem and affection.

This sum I divided into three equal parts--fifty pounds for a present
for George, another fifty for a duty to myself, and the residue to be
put by for any future purposes. I knew that my friend