My old friend George, as full of human nature as an egg is of meat, held the puritan doctrine. He condemned all his neighbours impartially; he had not however like the ordinary man any self-complacent acrimony, no, that was not his way. He was an indulgent and compassionate puritan, because a consistent puritan. If he condemned others he condemned himself also, and he sadly saw himself in those predestined sinners and transgressors and backsliders. Now he was a chief of story tellers. I remember the late York Powell, that Savant who by some strange accident was also a man of genius, praising one of his stories, saying it was the best he had ever listened to. He would tell a story that would take at least two hours in the telling and it would be about nothing at all, yet as it grew and developed, the mere nothing became everything, because he would mass together such richness of significant detail. Long ago at school he slept in a room known as number twelve, and in it slept all the bigger boys of the school. There was a rule that every boy should keep perfectly silent once in bed and the gas turned out. George would keep all that room awake--sleepy schoolboys though they were--telling them in a whisper long stories made in the fashion of Dumas & Fenimore Cooper. All his life he delighted compassionately in the foibles of dandies from the time of Dumas down to our own times, especially if they were military. He had a gift for every kind of indulgence. He never showed capacity for any religions or poetic ecstasy. I could not conceive his reading Shelley with understanding, yet Keats would have pleased him. He was pitiful for men and women and animals and the very plants in the garden. He was as pitiful as St. Francis of Assisi. In this I do not in the least exaggerate. A convinced puritan, holding the doctrine as profoundly as he held all his beliefs, he was naturally a melancholy man. His doctor said of him after his death that he was by no means a delicate man, 'but very low spirited.' The ordinary puritan, in the buoyant strength of high animal spirits, reacts against every kind of depression. He is pessimist as regards other men, as regards himself a confirmed optimist. My old friend, because of his uncheered solitary existence in a small town under a rainy sky beside the sad sea wave, suffered in some degree from what I have called the puritan malady self-exaggeration. He was full of himself and that self all doubt and dreariness, yet among genial friends who loved him it soon passed away. When he came to my house he would invariably dedicate the first evening, or part of it, to this kind of sorrowful personal preoccupation, sighing and shaking his head, complaining aloud of everything, and we who knew him would wait, and be outwardly sympathetic, while inwardly we smiled. At hand grips with hard times we were naturally a little incredulous of the sorrows of an old bachelor who was exceedingly well off and knew how