sir; and I wanted some one to keep me
company;" and a glance of extreme kindness and melancholy passed out of
Warrington's dark eyes.

Pen was too much pleased with his own thoughts to perceive the sadness
of the friend who was complimenting him. "Thank you, Warrington," he
said, "thank you for your friendship to me, and--and what you say about
me. I have often thought I was a poet. I will be one--I think I am one,
as you say so, though the world mayn't. Is it--is it the Ariadne in
Naxos which you liked (I was only eighteen when I wrote it), or the
Prize Poem?"

Warrington burst into a roar of laughter. "Why, young goose," he yelled
out--"of all the miserable weak rubbish I ever tried, Ariadne in Naxos
is the most mawkish and disgusting. The Prize Poem is so pompous and
feeble, that I'm positively surprised, sir, it didn't get the medal. You
don't suppose that you are a serious poet, do you, and are going to cut
out Milton and Aeschylus? Are you setting up to be a Pindar, you absurd
little tom-tit, and fancy you have the strength and pinion which the
Theban eagle bear, sailing with supreme dominion through the azure
fields of air? No, my boy, I think you can write a magazine article, and
turn a pretty copy of verses; that's what I think of you."

"By Jove!" said Pen, bouncing up and stamping his foot, "I'll show you
that I am a better man than you think for."

Warrington only laughed the more, and blew twenty-four puffs rapidly out
of his pipe by way of reply to Pen.

An opportunity for showing his skill presented itself before very
long. That eminent publisher, Mr. Bacon (formerly Bacon and Bungay) of
Paternoster Row, besides being the proprietor of the legal Review,
in which Mr. Warrington wrote, and of other periodicals of note and
gravity, used to present to the world every year a beautiful gilt volume
called the Spring Annual, edited by the Lady Violet Lebas, and numbering
amongst its contributors not only the most eminent, but the most
fashionable, poets of our time. Young Lord Dodo's poems first appeared
in this miscellany--the Honourable Percy Popjoy, whose chivalrous
ballads have obtained him such a reputation--Bedwin Sands's Eastern
Ghazuls, and many more of the works of our young nobles, were fast given
to the world in the Spring Annual, which has since shared the fate
of other vernal blossoms, and perished out of the world. The book was
daintily illustrated with pictures of reigning beauties, or other