as time went on I came to be esteemed among the lighter sort for those qualities of the tongue and mind that are calculated to send any man, in due course, headlong down the crooked path. “But I must tell you I had one very great friend among them. This was a man who had everything I had not: a simple frankness, a plain but almost painfully honest bearing, and a heart like gold; which was then, of course, more evidently in circulation than it is now. I cannot imagine how a boy of that sort could have loved and admired me; but he undoubtedly did, and to a singular degree, so that I was frequently enabled to borrow money from him almost painlessly, for he was heir to a great fortune, with which went a great name; although, to be sure, he was often as hard put to it as I was to fit a morsel of caviare to a piece of toast, for his father had ideas about real estate quite contrary to ours. “My friend became engaged to a beautiful girl. What she saw in the boy, I do not know. Women are, let’s face it, odd. That she loved him, I was instantly certain. Even my youthful cynicism could not ascribe to her the mean calculation of a fortune-hunter. That he loved her, madly and madly again, he frequently made clear to me in those broken and inarticulate periods that are the hall-mark of all honest Englishmen in love: and which, being often quite inaudible, have earned for Englishmen a delightful reputation for restraint. But let us not generalise when we can so profitably be particular. “We were at that time in the barracks that guard the frontiers of Chelsea: my friend and I in adjacent rooms. Our ways of life, however, were at that time vastly different; for as I was passing through a financial void I would, with that resignation which no one can deny has been my one consistent virtue, go early to bed every night: whereas my friend would return night after night at about this hour, having escorted his betrothed home after a play and a ball; and night after night, as he prepared himself for bed in the adjoining room, he would softly whistle a tune. Thus, you understand, he expressed his happiness; and killed it, for the walls were thin and the tune intolerable. “It was Mendelssohn’s _Spring Song_; and, Sir Guy, I have already told you,” said Mr. Maturin with a glance at the old gentleman, who was listening with every mark of attention if not of approval, “how my distaste for that composition led me, some months after the time I speak of, to a hasty action. But what that same distaste caused me to do to that boy was not done hastily. “One day I borrowed a sum of money from him. He, poor boy, was so absorbed in his happiness that he scarcely noticed the third zero which, having seen how readily he had already attached two, I persuaded him to add to the primary numeral on the cheque. Whereupon, with his full permission, and a thousand pounds of his money, I prepared to make myself agreeable to his _fiancée_.