should not be writing now these boyish recollections. My friend was because of his family and their traditions puritanic, but his puritanism was of a peculiar sort; he wasn't in the least aggressive like the Belfast man, nor was he conceited nor inquisitorial as the Scotch are; it was merely that he saw human nature sorrowfully, and with little hope. It only enhanced his tenderness, which was like that of a nurse by the bedside of a sick man, and veritably there were times when thinking about this benighted and lost human nature he was like a tender mother with a fractious child: yet never did he lose his sense of proportion, or his sense of fact, or his mirthfulness. At first in any company he would be a perfect wet blanket, and an embarrassment, so that conversation would flag; presently he would begin to talk and then people would discover that he knew more about the subject than, as it seemed to them, anybody else that had ever existed, and that he knew it all as a man of feeling and imagination. They would also discover that he was a listener, whose attention you would woo as that of a king on his throne. He died possessed of a good deal of money: but as he himself told me, with characteristic veracity, the money was made for him by a clerk whom he kept from drink. It never entered into his head to give any of the money to the clerk; it was his by the law, and by the law he kept it. Why puritans are thus tied up and bound and handcuffed and padlocked in the prisons of the law is not for me to say. I have always distrusted puritanism, in that respect I am a genuine Irish Protestant and believe with Christ that the law was made for man and not man for the law. So did not believe my melancholy friend. At the command of the law he would have given you everything he owned and not harboured a regret. What he was ready to give he would exact of others. His life was a long imprisonment. Yet human nature is never more interesting than when undergoing this kind of ordeal. To meet a man in the pleasant ways of acquaintanceship is interesting and exciting, to visit him in prison may be painful, but it is enthralling; for which reason, though I hate puritanism, I don't think I would like it to be entirely removed from the world, unless it be the Belfast variety, which like the east wind is good for neither man nor beast. There was a phrase sometimes on my father's lips, forced from him by sudden annoyance: 'Nothing can exceed the vulgar assumption of a Belfast man.' The root of my old friend's puritanism was self-immolation, the other sort is the glorification of self-assertion. When I think of my friend and others like him, I say to myself that the prison pallor on a fine face is more interesting than the ruddy cheeks of the warden or turnkey or the Governor of the gaol, who all live in the open air.