, Titmarsh, in your purse?"
Alas! I was not so rich. My reply was, that I was coming to Jack, only
in the morning, to borrow a similar sum.

He did not make any reply, but turned away homeward: I never heard him
speak another word.

Two mornings after (for none of our party met on the day succeeding the
supper), I was awakened by my porter, who brought a pressing letter from
Mr. Gortz:--

"DEAR T.,--I wish you would come over here to breakfast. There's a row
about Attwood.--Yours truly,

"SOLOMON GORTZ."

I immediately set forward to Gortz's; he lived in the Rue du Helder, a
few doors from Attwood's new lodging. If the reader is curious to know
the house in which the catastrophe of this history took place, he has
but to march some twenty doors down from the Boulevard des Italiens,
when he will see a fine door, with a naked Cupid shooting at him from
the hall, and a Venus beckoning him up the stairs. On arriving at the
West Indian's, at about mid-day (it was a Sunday morning), I found that
gentleman in his dressing-gown, discussing, in the company of Mr Fips, a
large plate of bifteck aux pommes.

"Here's a pretty row!" said Gortz, quoting from his letter;--"Attwood's
off--have a bit of beefsteak?"

"What do you mean?" exclaimed I, adopting the familiar phraseology of my
acquaintances:--"Attwood off?--has he cut his stick?"

"Not bad," said the feeling and elegant Fips--"not such a bad guess, my
boy; but he has not exactly CUT HIS STICK."

"What then?"

"WHY, HIS THROAT." The man's mouth was full of bleeding beef as he
uttered this gentlemanly witticism.

I wish I could say that I was myself in the least affected by the
news. I did not joke about it like my friend Fips; this was more for
propriety's sake than for feeling's: but for my old school acquaintance,
the friend of my early days, the merry associate of the last few months,
I own, with shame, that I had not a tear or a pang. In some German tale
there is an account of a creature most beautiful and bewitching, whom
all men admire and follow; but this charming and fantastic spirit only
leads them, one by one, into ruin, and then leaves them. The novelist,
who describes her beauty, says that his heroine is a fairy, and HAS NO
HEART. I think the intimacy which is begotten over the wine-bottle, is
a spirit of this nature; I never knew a good feeling come from it, or an
honest friendship made by it; it only entices men and ruins them; it
is only a pha