was sitting with my nose in the Gascon wine, I was
also reading, and I was alone. I have had chums, I have had companions,
but none like Mitch, never in all my life. And being alone, I was
reading--what do you suppose? I had been out for the evening, I had
found a book lying on the table of my host, I had looked in the book and
begun to read. My host saw I was intrigued and said, "Take it along." I
did, and was reading before going to bed. The book was the letters of
John Keats to Fannie Brawne.--Well, don't you suppose these letters made
me think of Mitch who had repeated "La Belle Dame sans Merci" to me and
was uttering some of its marvelous lines with his dying breath? But this
was not all. Let me quote one of Keats' letters to Fanny Brawne:

"When you were in the habit of flirting with Brown, you would
have left off, could your own heart have felt one half of one
pang mine did. Brown is a good sort of man--he did not know he
was doing me to death by inches. I feel the effect of every one of
those hours in my side now; and for that cause, though he has done
me many services, though I know his love and friendship for me,
though at this moment I should be without pence were it not for his
assistance, I will never see or speak to him, until we are both old
men, if we are to be. I will resent my heart having been made a
football. You will call this madness. I have heard you say that it
was not unpleasant to wait a few years--you have amusements--your
mind is away,--you have not brooded over one idea as I have, and
how should you? You are to me an object intensely desirable--the
air I breathe in a room empty of you is unhealthy. I am not the
same to you--no--you can wait--you have a thousand activities--you
can be happy without me. Any party, any thing to fill up the day
has been enough. How have you passed this month? Who have you
smiled with? All this may seem savage in me. You do not feel as I
do--you do not know what it is to love--one day you may--your time
is not come. Ask yourself how many unhappy hours Keats has caused
you in loneliness. For myself I have been a martyr the whole time,
and for this reason I speak; the confession is forced from me by
the torture. I appeal to you by the blood of Christ you believe in.
Do not write to me if you have done anything this month which it
would have ha