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My friend Mulock in his “Magnus and Morna,” has written that “ye should drink at a wedding with discerning lest you lose the way upon a straight road afterwards.” ’Tis no man I am to quarrel with a precept so honest or a reflection upon matrimony so prudent. We shall drink at the Goldsmith Club this night to the lost liberty of my dear comrade Ean Fabos, and would that it could be with that same measure the poet speaks of. If I doubt me of the possibility, ’tis to remember with Horace, that wine is mighty to inspire new hopes, and able to drown the bitterness of cares. Shall we reflect upon this loss to our club, and to society, with parched throats, and a hand upon the soda-water syphon? Bacchus and the Corybantes forbid! We will drown it in the best—at my dear friend’s request, and, as he would wish it, ah, noble heart!—at his expense.

He was married at the Parish Church in Hampstead, you should know, and Timothy McShanus it was who gave the bride away. The little witch of a shepherdess that has carried honest men twice round the world and back again, set other women weeping, and come at last to that sure port which Destiny had built for her—was she changed from the black-eyed minx I saw at Kensington, less mischievous, less sprightly, more of a woman, not so much the pretty child of the school-books? No, I say, a thousand times, no! There is golden light about her path, and all the spirits of laughter shine in her eyes. Could I search all the cities for a wife for my friend, this is the dear heart I would choose for him; this the companion I would name for his blessing. She has won a brave man’s love, and is happy therein. God be good to her, says old Timothy—and he is one that has read the heart of women.

So am I cast out again to the familiar haunts, a wanderer once more, a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles. My dear friend, it is true, remembering that I have eaten the food of the law, drunk its port and paid its fees, would make of me a Government man and an official. But my heart fails me. I am grown old in the sin of indolence. If I have a merit, it is that I know the blessings of doing nothing and the salary that should be expected therefrom. Let me continue henceforth in paths so straight, in ways so ancient. My friendship for Ean Fabos is too precious that men should call me a gatherer of moss and a roller of stones.

And this is to say that henceforth I have no career; that like the little Jap, of whom my friend has almost made a son, henceforth my place is at the gate without. Must I be a “past” to Ean Fabos, dear to his memory, one of his household but voiceless as the night, unhonoured, unremembered, unsung? The gods forbid, I say. The book that I am writing upon our adventures in the South Seas—shortly to be published in one volume at six shillings—that book shall be my monument more lasting than brass. You will find many things in it, reader, much for the improvement of your mind, and the elevation of your intellect—but above all you shall find a love and devotion to Dr. Fabos which is the truest instinct of my eventful life.

And he is married and is gone to the West, and I am alone and in sorrow, and the doors of the Club are open to me. Many men and cities have I seen, but London—ah! blessed art thou, London, for the desolate shall make their home with thee, and the children that are orphans shall nestle at thy bosom. In the Metropolis of the British Empire, then, let this sorrow of mine be buried.

For hither shall my friend Ean return when the days of summer have waned, and his little wife begins to speak of home and of those who love him and have not forgotten.