Mr. Waddy laughed heartily. Tootler also smiled in length and breadth; in breadth over his rosy cheeks of indigenous cheerfulness, and in greater length from where his chin showed the cloven dimple up to the apex of his tonsure. It was doing Mr. Waddy vast good--this intercourse with his old comrade. It seems to me quite possible that if he had found his friend transmuted from the old nimble sixpence to a slow shilling--corrupted into a man of the two-and-sixpenny type, slim, prim, close, pious to the point of usury--that the returning man would have been disgusted away from all his possibilities of content and hopes of home; would have scampered back to the lounges of Europe and there withered away. Then, certes, never would this tale of his Return have been written. But Mr. Waddy found his old friend now even more a friend. The meeting carried each back to the dear days of youth, jolly and joyous, ardent, generous, unsuspecting. How many were left who could call either by prenomen? These were two who, together, had done all the boyish mischiefs--all for which boyhood is walloped and riper years remember with delight. Had they not together lugged away the furtive watermelon? What Boston bell-pulls were not familiar with their runaway rings? Who, as time went on, were the best skaters but they? Who went farthest for water lilies for boyish sweethearts; who, into stickiest mud for the second joints of that amphibious kangaroo, the frog? To enumerate their joint adventures and triumphs demands a folio. Were this written, the old types of friendship would be forgotten, and even now, as I think of Waddy and Tootler, those other duos of history, Orestes and Pythias, Damon and Jonathan, Pylades and David, mingle themselves like uncoupled hounds--their conjunctions seem only casual and temporary. There must have been good reason for their reciprocal silence during so many years, for their meeting was not as of two who have wished to forget each other, and such a meeting, with so unchanged a comrade, was, as I have said, to Mr. Waddy a wondrous good. It seems impossible that a man of his many noble traits should not have had other friends, all in their way as sincere as this one. But whether this prove to be so or not, here we have the first fact a favourable fact. The first hand he grasps returns the pressure warmly, and not with traitorous warmth. The first face he recognises even precedes his in recognition. Pleasant omens these! If not ominous, pleasant enough as facts.