And so he began to talk about this past. He went back to their boyhood together. He laughed over the time when he began to go to the manor house every Saturday to stay all night. He declared that he had expected the first time to starve in a house where there were no women; but to his astonishment--and relief--he had found that he had devoured things as never before. He had not been prepared to say--speaking for the boy he then was--that a woman at the table took away his appetite; but there was the fact, unquestionable and satisfying, that at the table with males only he had discovered bodily abysses within himself that had never been called into requisition! He was as frivolous as all this, winding quietly along through those happy years. He recalled another incident: that during one of their first rabbit hunts they had fired almost simultaneously at the same rabbit. As neither could claim the glory of killing it, they had decided that at least they must share equally the glory of its pelt. And so, measuring to an equal distance from the tip of its nose and the tip of its tail, they had there inserted a penknife and severed the skin; and then, propping their boots, soles against soles, like those resolved on a tug of war, and each taking hold of his half of the skin, with one mighty jerk backwards each was in possession of his trophy! He was as frivolous as that. Nor would he ever leave this theme of their friendship, weaving about it here and there remembered tricks and escapades as he traced it down--this bond in their lives. (There were such friendships in those days.) And so he poured out a man's tribute to a man's friendship; and then quickly with a change of tone by which we all may intimate to a visitor that his visit is at an end, he bade the doctor take his leave. But he did one thing first--one little thing:-- "Josephine sent you these, and told me to pin them on you, with her love," he said with a tremor of the mouth, his eyes filling; and taking from the lapel of his coat a little freshly plucked bunch of heliotrope and rose geranium, he leaned affectionately over against the doctor's shoulder and pinned the flowers on his breast. Then he held out his hand as if to drag the doctor to his feet, walked with him to the buggy, pushed him in, put the reins in his palm, and gave a slap to the horse to start it. "Come to see us, Downs," he said; "we can't have you much longer." * * * * * Truly if the rest of us had nobility enough to treat one another's failings with sympathy and understanding, there would be few tragedies for us in our human lives, except the inevitable tragedies of nature. The way in which these two friends instead of turning away from him instantly turned toward him, sparing not themselves that they might rescue him from what now might swiftly and easily be utter ruin--this most human touch of most human nobleness wrought in him a revelation and a revolution.