But to soften the liberty here taken, as well as the licence throughout, yes, and not without hope to propitiate and even please thee, I have so contrived matters that thou personated the part here allotted thee at the special instance of M. de Grandvin; thus in a literary way associating thee with one whose social companionship thou so unaffectedly lovest, and whose magnanimous spirit thou art ever fain to imbibe. Vale! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JACK GENTIAN (_Omitted from the final sketch of him._) True, hardly to-day art thou what formerly thou wast. Thou thyself sometimes hintest that thy decline has even more than begun. With which confession for warrant some there be--alas for them! who in private are not slow to contribute confirmatory words and enlarge thereon. ‘Failing?’ says one. ‘To be sure! And how manifest the signs. In July you see him parrying the sun with his big white umbrella green-line; nevertheless, ere the straw hats yet begin to disappear from the promenade, reassuming his slouched felt sombrero he betakes himself to the street’s sunny side.’ ‘I have noted that,’ says another; ‘but--will you believe it?--late I espied him musing on a shaded bench in Madison Square; in the forenoon it was, too, not far from a seated file of disreputable nondescripts, non-producers in deplorable attire, plunged in lugubrious reveries on their doubtless misspent lives. Yes, and presently he rose, and after looking about him went straight up to a solitary old vagabond, and standing before him seemed making personal inquiries of him, and concluded by putting hand in pocket and bestowing something upon him. Now seems not that an indication of impaired senses?--deliberately to put a premium on improvidence and thriftlessness, or worse?’ ‘You go a little too far there,’ observes a middle-aged merchant and vestryman, the comfortable president of a charity; ‘the Major was always benevolent, as officially I have reason to know, always benevolent, but too often, as I hear, unsystematically so; and this unwisdom may very likely increase with years. But I hardly thought that he had any way so far decayed in his sense of what is beseeming in a gentleman whatever his years, as publicly to idle, and in business hours, and in such vicinity as you mention. Besides, those Madison Square benches so frequented by the untidy, how can some of them be otherwise than infected, yes, and with vermin. Dear me,’ in a tone of real concern, ‘it were almost enough to banish him from respectable society were it not the esteemed Major and the Dean.’