It has probably happened to many of you to come across a companion of your primary-school days, after the lapse of fifteen years or so.  You receive a letter in an unfamiliar hand, you glance at the signature, and you shout out:  “What?  Is he alive?” On with your hat and off you rush to the hotel.  Your heart thumps as you run, and you race upstairs to his door in hot haste, laughing, rejoicing, and thinking to yourself that you wouldn’t have missed those few minutes for any amount of money.  Well, those few minutes are the best.  You bounce into the room, and find yourself embracing a strange man in whom, as you look at him more closely, you can just discern some faint resemblance to the lad you used to know; one of you exclaims, “How are you, old man?” the other plunges breathlessly into some old school reminiscence; and then... that’s all.

You begin to say to yourself:  “Who is this strange man? what has he been doing all these years? what has been going on in his soul? is he good or bad, a believer or a sceptic?  I have nothing in common with him, I don’t know the man!  He must be observed and studied first—­how can I call him a friend?”

What you think of him, he thinks of you, and conversation languishes.  With your first words you may have discovered that you and he have followed opposite paths in life; he betrays his democratic tendencies, you, your monarchical leanings; you try him on literature, he retaliates with the culture of silk-worms.  Before telling him that you are married, you take the precaution to ask if he has a wife; he answers, “What do you take me for?” and you take leave with a touch of the finger-tips and a smile that has died at its birth.

The friends of infancy!  Dear indeed above all others when the years of boyhood have been spent with them; mere phantoms otherwise!  And childhood itself!  I have never been able to understand why people long to return to it.  Why mourn for years without toil, without suffering, without intelligent belief, without those outbursts of fierce and bitter sorrow that purify the soul and uplift the brow in a splendid renewal of hope and courage?  Better a thousand times to suffer, to toil, to fight and weep, than to let life exhale itself in a ceaseless irresponsible gayety, causeless, objectless, and imperturbable!  Better to stand bleeding on the breach than to lie dreaming among the flowers.

II.

I was seventeen years old when I made the acquaintance of my dearest friends, in a splendid palace which I see before me as clearly as though I had left it only yesterday.  I see the great courtyard, the stately porticos, the saloons adorned with columns, statues and bas-reliefs; and, amidst these beautiful and magnificent objects, vestiges of the bygone splendors of the ducal residence, the long lines of bedsteads and school-benches, the hanging rows of uniforms, dirks and rifles.  Five hundred youths are scattered