“He is described in the poem as walking with two or three friends one snowy night in December, when suddenly he was missed from the little company of students, who were returning home from a supper party, and none of them saw him again, nor could anything be learned of his whereabouts till years after, when one of his friends, sailing by Trieste, caught a glimpse of the lost Waring’s face under a great grass hat, in a fruit-boat, offering to trade with the English brig: caught that glimpse, and nothing more, as the boat which bore him went off— ‘Into the rosy and golden half o’ the sky to overtake the sun.’” “How romantic!” exclaimed several of the party. “Yes,” said the junior house physician; “very like young Sapsford; he disappeared just that way, after a supper party, and was not heard of till several days after, and then he was found in a boat off Margate jetty, with his landlady’s daughter!” “Shut up!” cried Dr. Aubrey; “you’ve no poetry or sentiment in you—not a bit. You are saturated with ‘Mark Twain,’ and it’s blasphemy to quote Browning in your ribald hearing!” “Do you think Elsworth has gone into the fruit business ‘in the rosy half of the sky?’” meekly asked Maberley the dresser. “I’ve no idea,” said Bingley; “but I have known things quite as strange as that. By the way, you were all so anxious to laugh at my poetry that you didn’t wait to hear the _dénouement_.” “Oh, isn’t it over?” asked a groggy individual on the sofa, smoking a churchwarden. “How could he get back out of the rosy sky?” “That I can’t say; but he did, and is now living in a pretty villa on Hampstead Heath, is very fat and jolly, and sketches in fine weather ‘bits’ which he exhibits at the Academy.” “Then I say it’s a beastly shame,” cried Ryder, the “Resident Acc.,” “to come to a public place like Hampstead and dissipate all that beautiful poetry and rend asunder those rosy skies and appear as a fat sketcher amongst donkey boys and nursemaids, to say nothing of girls’ schools. It’s indecent, and Robert Browning ought to go at him for damages. I would! ‘Avatar’ indeed.”