“Well,” said I.  “Very well.”  I sipped my port.  I recognised Cockburn 1870.

“You seemed rather at a loose end.”

“When one has 1870 port to drink,” said I, “why fritter away its flavour in vain words?”

“It is damned good port,” Adrian admitted.

“Earth holds nothing better,” said I.

We lapsed into silence amid the talk on each side of us.  I confess that I rather surrendered myself to the wine.  A little taper for cigarettes happened to be in front of me; I held my glass in its light and lost myself in the wine’s pure depths of mystery and colour; and my mind wandered to the lusty sunshine of “Lusitanian summers” that was there imprisoned.  I inhaled its fragrance, I accepted its exquisite and spacious generosity.  Wine, like bread and oil—­“God’s three chief words”—­is a thing of itself—­a thing of earth and air and sun—­one of the great natural things, such as the stars and the flowers and the eyes of a dog.  Even the most mouth-twisting new wine of Northern Italy has its fascination for me, in that it is essentially something apart from the dust and empty racket of the world; how much more then this radiant vintage suddenly awakened from its slumber in the darkness of forty years.  So I mused, as I think an honest man is justified in musing, soberly, over a great wine, when suddenly my left eye caught Adrian’s face.  He too was musing; but musing on unhappy things, for a hand seemed to have swept his face and wiped the joy from it.  He was gazing at his half-emptied glass, with the short stem of which his fingers were nervously toying.  There was a quick snap.  The stem broke and the wine flowed over the cloth.  He started, and with a flash the old Adrian came back, manifesting itself in his smiling dismay, his boyish apology to Mr. Jornicroft for smashing a rare glass, spoiling the tablecloth and wasting precious wine.  The incident served to disequilibrate, as one might say, the two discussions on Wilmot and Abyssinia.  Coffee came and liqueurs.  I bade farewell to Lusitanian dreams and found myself in heart to heart conversation with my neighbour on the right, a florid, simple-minded sugar-broker, a certain next-year’s Sheriff of the City of London, whose consuming ambition was to become a member of the Athenaeum Club.  When I informed him that I was privileged to enter that Valley of Dry Bones—­my late father, an eminent Assyriologist and a disastrous Master of Fox hounds, had put me up for all sorts of weird institutions, I think, before I was born—­my sugar broker almost fell at my feet and worshipped me.  Although I told him that the premises were overrun with Bishops and that we had laid down all kinds of episcopicide to no avail, he refused to be disillusioned.  I told him that on the occasion of my last visit to the Megatherium—­Thackeray, I explained—­a Royal Academician, with whom I had a slight acquaintance, reading desolate “The Hibbert Journal” in the smoking-room, embraced me as fondly as the