e is the only one who has sought
me out in his manhood. And strange to say we had only a few months
together, during my first year's apprenticeship to the dismal craft, he
being in the sixth form, and but three or four years younger than I. He
was the maddest, oddest, most diabolical and most unpopular boy in the
school. The staff, to whom the conventional must of necessity be always
the Divine, loathed him. I alone took to the creature. I think now that
my quaint passion for the cinquecento Italian must have had something
to do with my attraction. In externals he is as English as I am, having
been brought up in England by an English mother, but there are thousands
of Hindoos who are more British than he. The McMurrays were telling me
dreadful stories about him this afternoon. Sighing after an obdurate
Viennese dancer, he had lured her coachman into helpless intoxication,
had invested himself in the domestic's livery, and had driven off with
the lady in the darkness after the performance to the outskirts of the
town. What happened exactly, the McMurrays did not know; but there was
the devil to pay in Vienna. And yet this inconsequent libertine did the
following before my own eyes. We were walking down Piccadilly together
one afternoon in the hard winter of 1894. It was a black frost,
agonizingly cold. A shivering wretch held out matches for sale. His
hideous red toes protruded through his boots. "My God, my God!" cried
Pasquale, "I can't stand this!" He jumped into a crawling hansom, tore
off his own boots, flung them to the petrified beggar and drove home
in his stocking-feet. I stood on the curb and, with mingled feelings,
watched the recipient, amid an interested group of bystanders, match the
small shapely sole against his huge foot, and with a grin tuck the boots
under his arm and march away with them to the nearest pawnbroker. If
Pasquale had been an equally compassionate Briton, he would have stopped
to think, and have tossed the man a sovereign. _But he didn't stop to
think._ That was my cinquecento Pasquale. And I loved him for it.

I went to bed last night, as I have indicated, the most contented
of created beings. I awoke this morning with no greater ruffle on my
consciousness than the appointment with my lawyers. The sun shone. A
thrush sang lustily in the big elm opposite my bedroom windows. The
tree, laughed and shook out its finery at me like a woman, saying: "See
how green I am, after Sunday's rain." Anto