tears came into his eyes
in spite of all his efforts to repress them. "If we meet again," he
said, "do not look at me, but if hereafter you hear of me writing things
you do not like, think of me as charitably as you can," and so they
parted.

"Towneley is a good fellow," said I, gravely, "and you should not have
cut him."

"Towneley," he answered, "is not only a good fellow, but he is without
exception the very best man I ever saw in my life--except," he paid me
the compliment of saying, "yourself; Towneley is my notion of everything
which I should most like to be--but there is no real solidarity between
us. I should be in perpetual fear of losing his good opinion if I said
things he did not like, and I mean to say a great many things," he
continued more merrily, "which Towneley will not like."

A man, as I have said already, can give up father and mother for Christ's
sake tolerably easily for the most part, but it is not so easy to give up
people like Towneley.

CHAPTER LXXXI

So he fell away from all old friends except myself and three or four old
intimates of my own, who were as sure to take to him as he to them, and
who like myself enjoyed getting hold of a young fresh mind. Ernest
attended to the keeping of my account books whenever there was anything
which could possibly be attended to, which there seldom was, and spent
the greater part of the rest of his time in adding to the many notes and
tentative essays which had already accumulated in his portfolios. Anyone
who was used to writing could see at a glance that literature was his
natural development, and I was pleased at seeing him settle down to it so
spontaneously. I was less pleased, however, to observe that he would
still occupy himself with none but the most serious, I had almost said
solemn, subjects, just as he never cared about any but the most serious
kind of music.

I said to him one day that the very slender reward which God had attached
to the pursuit of serious inquiry was a sufficient proof that He
disapproved of it, or at any rate that He did not set much store by it
nor wish to encourage it.

He said: "Oh, don't talk about rewards. Look at Milton, who only got 5
pounds for 'Paradise Lost.'"

"And a great deal too much," I rejoined promptly. "I would have given
him twice as much myself not to have written it at all."

Ernest was a little shocked. "At any rate," he said laughingly, "I don't
write poetry."

This was a c