It was early afternoon of a warm July day. There was barely enough wind to blow the spray of the fountains, and the water itself rose straight in the soft air. I stood contentedly watching the endless procession of busses, hansoms, and four-wheelers, with the occasional coster's cart, and asked for nothing more. Long-eared "Neddy" dragging "Arry," "Arriet," and a load of gooseberries was a combination on which my eye rested with peculiar fascination. No amateur "whip" in a red coat on a bottle-green coach could handle the "ribbons" over four "choice uns" with a finer air than "Arry" as he swung through the line and came clicking up the street. I would rather see him pass than the Lord Mayor in his chariot. I must have stood on the top step of "Morley's" for a good half-hour, not caring even to smoke, so sweet was the smell of a London street to me. I was thinking, as a man must at such a time, of old days and old friends,--not dismally, but with a certain sense of loss,--when a tall gentleman came slowly up the steps and stopped immediately in front of me. I moved aside, although there was plenty of room for him to pass; but still he looked at me gravely, and at last held out a big brown hand and said, as if we had parted only yesterday, "Well, Walter, old man, how are you?" I was a bit in doubt at first. He was so tall that his eyes were nearly on a level with my own, his figure erect and soldierly, his face bronzed as if from long exposure to a tropic sun. Only when he smiled did I know him, and then we gripped hands hard, our fingers clinging until we saw we were attracting the notice of those around us. Then our hands unclasped, and feeling a bit foolish over our emotion, we sat down together. At first we talked of commonplaces, though all the time I was thinking of an evening more than thirty years ago when we stood together on the river path, under the shadows of old Oxford towers, and said, "Good-bye." He then offered to stand by me when the friendship would have cost him something, and I declined the sacrifice. Would it have been better? Who can tell? Our first thoughts were a bit serious, perhaps, but our second became decidedly cheerful at meeting again after so long a time. I learned that he was "Colonel" Patterson, having gained his regiment a good ten years ago; that he had spent nearly all his time in India; that he had been invalided home; that he was, like myself, unmarried, and that he found himself rather "out of it" after all these years away from the "old country."