“Friends of my youth, companions of my unmitigated follies! the ancient figure that sits at the head of this table was once young--the years cannot rob him of that. And it is because he has not been ashamed to share his youngness with the lion and the ass that I rise to-night to bid you drink to the Passing of Youth in the mirth-provoking wines of France. This is the last mad moment of his splendid years; to-night his heroic follies are done; this room, where have been revelry and dance and song and wit and laughter and boon companionship, will know him no more. He is called home--across the sea-sick channel. He goes to shiver forlorn amidst the gloomy fogs of respectability. He will marry a staid wife and beget staid children and dine with lord mayors and wear white waistcoats over a self-conscious stomach. With the corduroy breeches of his studentship he has no more to do. Whither he goes there are no gay cafés--no riotous junketings. He will dance down the streets no more--shout no more--to the stars no more. Whither he goes the people are glum, grey-minded, commonplace--he must not sing, except out of tune, or monotonously, for fear of sin in the music--he must not dance, except with pre-arranged precision and with demure one, two, three to tunes that are piously bereft of all ecstasy. Revelry he will pass by with averted glance and eyes downcast. And yet, as he sits at his plethoric ease before the fire, after a full dinner, prosperous, rotund, bourgeois, he will nod, and nodding sleep--and in the freedom of dreams his ranging memory, rid for awhile of its crude discipline, will flit here, back to the old room, back to the bare walls--he will live again the blithe days of his fantastic youth; he will hear the echo of old laughter as his old jests set the ghosts of his old companions in a roar about the table; at break of day, as the mists rise from the river, he will skip down the Boule Miche, the highway of youth; he will caper through the dawn to blow out the stars above Montparnasse; he will recall with a glow and a bracing of the nerves that he was acquainted with hardship and scarce knew it, for the streets were paved with gladness, and kind eyes made stars in his firmament on the blackest of nights, and he lodged amongst the skies--and in Paris.... Fill your glasses, comrades, and drink.” They all rose to their feet. Latour raised his glass: “Old man!” said he, with meaning accent on the threadbare words; and “Old man!” cried they all, laughing, with a sob in the laugh. Horace rose, when they sat down, telling them that he could not trust himself to speak otherwise than to say that it warmed his heart as it grieved his heart that he found himself seated amongst his dear companions for the last time in his old room. He raised his glass to Youth, to the comrades of youth, to the students’ quarter, to the university, to the Boule Miche which was the highway of youth, to the great dead, to Paris, to France.