An excellent man, most kindly in all his dealings, told us that he never lent money. The borrower is ordinarily in such straits that he has little chance of ever repaying. If he never intends to pay he is a knave,[222:A] and if he has more honourable thought he is crushed by the burden of the debt. Anyone who came to our excellent friend with a true and touching story was sympathetically received, and his request for the temporary loan of twenty pounds promptly declined! As an alternative he was offered a somewhat smaller sum, the half or, mayhap, the quarter of this, as a free gift, which he never failed to accept joyfully. In one of the Harleian manuscripts, dating from the reign of Edward IV., the writer's experience is a very common one, and his decision sound: "I wold lend but I ne dare, I have lent and I will beware When I lant I had a frynd, When I hym asked he was unkynd. Thus of my frynd I made my foo, Therefore darre I lend no moo." The writer was evidently a kindly man, desiring to do the best he could, and he touchingly appeals to us not to judge him harshly: "I pray yo of your gentilnesse Report for no unkyndnesse." Some one has very wisely remarked that many of the disappointments of life arise from our mistaking acquaintances for friends, and then when some little testing incident arises they break under the strain. "Prosperity makes friends, adversity proves them." One sarcastic adage hath it that "Friends are like fiddle-strings: they must not be screwed too tight"; but the Scotch say, and justly, that "He that's no my friend at a pinch is no my friend ava." Some centuries ago, human nature being then evidently very similar to what it is to-day, a wise man wrote: "If thou wouldst get a friend, prove him first, and be not hasty to credit him. For some man is a friend for his own occasion, and will not abide in the day of thy trouble; and there is a friend who, being turned to enmity and strife, will discover thy reproach; again, some friend is a companion at the table, and will not continue in the day of thy affliction." In Chaucer's "Romaunt of the Rose," we find the poet using the expression, "Farewel fieldfare," a valediction on summer friends that, like the wild and migratory fieldfare, take to themselves wings and depart. An old rhyming adage declares that "In time of prosperity friends will be plenty, in time of adversity not one in twenty"; or, to quote Tusser: "Where welthines floweth, no friendship can lack, Whom pouertie pincheth, hath friendship as slack"; while Goldsmith, it will be remembered, bitterly sums all up in, "What is friendship but a name, A charm that lulls to sleep, A shade that follows wealth and fame, But leaves the wretch to weep."