as I will, I cannot recall a case of man or woman who ever occupied any considerable part of my thoughts and did not contribute largely towards my moral or physical welfare.  In other words, and in very colloquial language, I never had useless friends hanging about me.  From this crude statement of a signal fact, the thoughtless reader will at once judge me rapacious, egotistical, false, fawning, mendacious.  Well, I may be all this and more, but not because all who have known me have rendered me eminent services.  I can say that no one ever formed relationships in life with less design than myself.  Never have I given a thought to the advantage that might accrue from being on terms of friendship with this man and avoiding that one.  “Then how do you explain,” cries the angry reader, “that you have never had a friend whom you did not make a profit out of?  You must have had very few friends.”  On the contrary, I have had many friends, and of all sorts and kinds—­men and women:  and, I repeat, none took part in my life who did not contribute something towards my well-being.  It must, of course, be understood that I make no distinction between mental and material help; and in my case the one has ever been adjuvant to the other.  “Pooh, pooh!” again exclaims the reader; “I for one will not believe that chance has only sent across your way the people who were required to assist you.”  Chance! dear reader, is there such a thing as chance?  Do you believe in chance?  Do you attach any precise meaning to the word?  Do you employ it at haphazard, allowing it to mean what it may?  Chance!  What a field for psychical investigation is at once opened up; how we may tear to shreds our past lives in search of—­what?  Of the Chance that made us.  I think, reader, I can throw some light on the general question, by replying to your taunt:  Chance, or the conditions of life under which we live, sent, of course, thousands of creatures across my way who were powerless to benefit me; but then an instinct of which I knew nothing, of which I was not even conscious, withdrew me from them, and I was attracted to others.  Have you not seen a horse suddenly leave a corner of a field to seek pasturage further away?

Never could I interest myself in a book if it were not the exact diet my mind required at the time, or in the very immediate future.  The mind asked, received, and digested.  So much was assimilated, so much expelled; then, after a season, similar demands were made, the same processes were repeated out of sight, below consciousness, as is the case in a well-ordered stomach.  Shelley, who fired my youth with passion, and purified and upbore it for so long, is now to me as nothing:  not a dead or faded thing, but a thing out of which I personally have drawn all the sustenance I may draw from him; and, therefore, it (that part which I did not absorb) concerns me no more.  And the same with Gautier.  Mdlle. de Maupin, that godhead of flowing line, that desire