madness, as usual, would have its time, and no sufferings seemed to teach him prudence—­and he took me up to a certain ‘fine set’ that he had actually resisted, he said, for a fortnight.  Alas!  I knew what that meant.  Yes, he must have it; it was just the thing to help him with a something he was writing—­’not to read, you know, but to make an atmosphere,’ etc.  So he used to talk; and the odd thing was, that we always took the wildness seriously; he seemed to make us see just what he wanted.  ‘I say, John,’ was the next I heard, at the other end of the shop, ’will you kindly send me round that set of’ so-and-so, ‘and charge it to my account?’ ‘John,’ the son of old Oldbuck, and for a short time a sort of friend of Narcissus, would answer, ‘Certainly,’ with a voice of the most cheerful trust; and yet, when we had gone, it was indeed no less a sum than L10, 10s. which he added to the left-hand side of Mr. N.’s account.

Do not mistake this for a certain vulgar quality, with a vulgar little name of five letters.  No one could have less of that than Narcissus.  He was often, on the contrary, quite painfully diffident.  No, it was not ‘cheek,’ Reader; it was a kind of irrational innocence.  I don’t think it ever occurred to him, till the bills came in at the half-years, what ‘charge it to my account’ really meant.  Perhaps it was because, poor lad, he had so small a practical acquaintance with it, that he knew so little the value of money.  But how he suffered when those accounts did come in!  Of course, there was nothing to be done but to apply to some long-suffering friend; denials of lunch and threadbare coats but nibbled at the amount—­especially as a fast to-day often found revulsion in a festival to-morrow.  To save was not in Narcissus.

I promised to digress, Reader, and I have kept my word.  Now to return to that afternoon again.  It so chanced that on that day in the year I happened to have in my pocket—­what you might meet me every day in five years without finding there—­a ten-pound note.  It was for this I felt after we had been musing awhile—­Narcissus, probably, on everything else in the world except his debts—­and it was with this I awoke him from his reverie.  He looked at his hand, and then at me, in bewilderment.  Poor fellow, how he wanted to keep it, yet how he tried to look as if he couldn’t think of doing so.  He couldn’t help his joy shining through.

‘But I want you to take it,’ I said; ’believe me, I have no immediate need of it, and you can pay me at your leisure.’  Ten pounds towards the keep of a poet once in a lifetime is, after all, but little interest on the gold he brings us.  At last I ‘prevailed,’ shall I say? but on no account without the solemnity of an IOU and a fixed date for repayment, on which matter poor N. was always extremely emphatic.  Alas!  Mr. George Meredith has already told us how this passionate anxiety to be bound by the heaven above, the earth, and the waters under the earth, is the most fatal symptom by which to know the confirmed in this kind.  Captain Costigan had it, it may be remembered; and the same solicitude, the same tearful gratitude, I know, accompanied every such transaction of my poor Narcissus.