I almost wished in those days that I could fall ill myself. Five or six months of nursing under Bindo’s hand would have been a lazy delight to me, and (selfish as it may seem) better far for him than the life he was leading. Unhappily I never felt fitter, much too fit and too self-occupied to be interesting to Bindo, and so he left me for others, more at liberty and likely to be more amusing. All this time he was (to quote his own words) “looking about for something”—the Micawber-like expression that does duty for an idle life. Whatever Bindo’s interpretation may have been, I know it made him very late in coming home of an evening. Yet he never asked me for money. His resources seemed boundless, and the stock of rings and watches inexhaustible. But, portable and useful property as they are, you must have a good supply of them in hand to live upon it for a year in the style Bindo was doing. Besides, it occurred to me as strange that I had never had a sight of them; in old days I had always had the first view of any present that was made him. On another point, too, he was inflexible as ever. Advice and help towards securing permanent employment he absolutely and positively refused. “Better that, old boy,” he said, “than do what most people do—bother their friends all round for an opinion when they’ve decided all along to follow their own.” Your practical and steady-going individual—the one, for example, who can “see nothing” in _Alice in Wonderland_—never admits into his reckoning the influence of excitement. It disturbs and disarranges his equilibrium of life. Yet, disparage it as you may, it is one of the most important factors in shaping life and character, and perhaps the very strongest lever that operates for the development of vice. Fortunately, a fair number of mankind can do with a small and weak modicum of this dangerous stimulant. Individuals like Bindo, who ask for more, are classed among the eccentricities of nature, for whom it is impossible to prescribe. Yet, think what it means for a boy of sixteen, without discipline or experience to steady him, to drop, literally in a moment, from notoriety to neglect, activity to stagnation; almost from life to death. No wonder Bindo pined and drooped. I knew the alternative that lay before him: life and death—not in metaphor this time, but in sober earnest. Yet I let him go, for he had taught me himself, if I had wanted the knowledge, that no man can cage a human will. So from the very moment I had become more hopeful about him, the gulf widened between us. But only in companionship; never in spirit— “For, till the thunder in the trumpet be, Soul may divide from body, but not we, One from the other.”