Yes! it was the same old Narcissus, and he was wielding just the same old magic, I could see, as in our class-rooms and playgrounds five years before. What is it in him that made all men take him so on his own terms, made his talk hold one so, though it so often stumbled in the dark, and fell dumb on many a verbal _cul-de-sac_? Whatever it is, Samuel felt it, and, with that fine worshipful spirit of his--an attitude which always reminds me of the elders listening to the boy Jesus--was doing that homage for which no beauty or greatness ever appeals to him in vain. What an eye for soul has Samuel! How inevitably it pierces through all husks and excrescences to the central beauty! In that short talk he knew Narcissus through and through; three years or thirty years could add but little. But the talk was not ended yet; indeed, it seemed like so many of those Tithefields talks, as if in the 'eternal fitness of things' it never could, would, or should end. It was I at last who gave it pause, and--yes! indeed, it was he. We had, somehow, not met for quite three years, chums as we had been at school. He had left there for an office some time before I did, and, oddly enough, this was our first meeting since then. A purchaser for one of those aforesaid treatises on farriery just then coming in, dislodged us; so, bidding Samuel good-bye--he and Narcissus already arranging for 'a night'--we obeyed a mutual instinct, and presently found ourselves in the snuggery of a quaint tavern, which was often to figure hereafter in our sentimental history, though probably little in these particular chapters of it. The things 'seen done at "The Mermaid "' may some day be written in another place, where the Reader will know from the beginning what to expect, and not feel that he has been induced to buy a volume under false pretences. CHAPTER III IN WHICH NARCISSUS OPENS HIS 'GLADSTONE' Though it was so long since we had met--is not three years indeed 'so long' in youth?--we had hardly to wait for our second glass to be again _en rapport_. Few men grow so rapidly as Narcissus did in those young days, but fewer still can look back on old enthusiasms and superannuated ideals with a tenderness so delicately considerate. Most men hasten to witness their present altitude by kicking away the old ladders on the first opportunity; like vulgar lovers, they seek to flatter to-day at the expense of yesterday. But Narcissus was of another fibre; he could as soon have insulted the memory of his first love.