One particular Roman road, I know, is but remembered now, because, in the rich twilight of an old June evening, it led up the gorsy stretches of Lancashire ‘Heights’ to a solemn plateau, wide and solitary as Salisbury Plain, from the dark border of which, a warm human note against the lonely infinite of heath and sky, beamed the little whitewashed ‘Traveller’s Rest,’ its yellow light, growing stronger as the dusk deepened, meeting the eye with a sense of companionship becoming a vague need just then.

The seeming spiritual significance of such forlorn wastes of no-man’s land had, I know, a specially strong appeal for Narcissus, and, in some moods, the challenge which they seem to call from some ‘dark tower’ of spiritual adventure would have led him wandering there till star-light; but a day of rambling alone, in a strange country, among unknown faces, brings a social hunger by evening, and a craving for some one to speak to and a voice in return becomes almost a fear.  A bright kitchen-parlour, warm with the health of six workmen, grouped round a game of dominoes, and one huge quart pot of ale, used among them as woman in the early world, was a grateful inglenook, indeed, wherein to close the day.  Of course, friend N. joined them, and took his pull and paid his round, like a Walt Whitman.  I like to think of his slight figure amongst them; his delicate, almost girl-like, profile against theirs; his dreamy eyes and pale brow, surmounted by one of those dark clusters of hair in which the fingers of women love to creep—­an incongruity, though of surfaces only, which certain who knew him but ’by sight,’ as the phrase is, might be at a loss to understand.  That was one of the surprises of his constitution.  Nature had given him the dainty and dreamy form of the artist, to which habit had added a bookish touch, ending in a tout ensemble of gentleness and distinction with little apparent affinity to a scene like that in the ‘Traveller’s Rest.’  But there are many whom a suspicion of the dilettante in such an exterior belies, and Narcissus was one of them.  He had very strongly developed that instinct of manner to which sympathy is a daily courtesy, and he thus readily, when it suited him, could take the complexion of his company, and his capacity of ‘bend’ was well-nigh genius.  Of course, all this is but to say that he was a gentleman; yet is not that in itself a fine kind of originality?  Besides, he had a genuine appetite for the things of earth, such as many another delicate thing—­a damask rose-bush, for example—­must be convicted of too; and often, when some one has asked him ‘what he could have in common with so-and-so,’ I have heard him answer:  ‘Tobacco and beer.’  Samuel Dale once described him as Shelley with a chin; and perhaps the chin accounted for the absence of any of those sentimental scruples with regard to beefsteaks and certain varieties of jokes, for which the saint-like deserter of Harriet Westbrook was distinguished.