are now resting over your head!” shouted the medium; and the pallid emotionless man said, with a slight tremor in his voice, “Pray tell me who this mysterious visitant may be!” “It is your mother.”  “Oh,” said Greville, “I am delighted to hear that!” “She says she is perfectly happy, and she watches you constantly.”  “Dear soul!” muttered the imperturbable one.  “She tells me you will join her soon, and be happy with her.”  Then Greville said gravely, in dulcet tones, “That is extremely likely, for I am going to take tea with her at five o’clock!” He had led on the poor swindler in his usual fashion; and he never hinted at the fact that his mother was nearly a century old.  His friends were “pumped” in the same subtle manner; and the immortally notorious memoirs are strewn with assassinated characters.

As we study the phenomena indicated by these memoirs, we begin to wonder whether friendship is or is not extinct.  Men are gregarious, and flocks of them meet together at all hours of the day and night.  They exchange conventional words of greeting, they wear happy smiles, they are apparently cordial and charming’ one with another; and yet a rigidly accurate observer may look mournfully for signs of real friendship.  How can it exist?  The men and women who pass through the whirl of a London season cannot help regarding their fellow-creatures rather as lay figures than as human beings.  They go to crowded balls and seething “receptions,” not to hold any wise human converse, but only to be able to say that they were in such and such a room on a certain night.  The glittering crowds fleet by like shadows, and no man has much chance of knowing his neighbour’s heart.

     How fast the flitting figures come—­
       The mild, the fierce, the stony face;
     Some bright with thoughtless smiles, and some
       Where secret tears have left their trace!

Ah, it is only the faces that the tired pleasure-seeker sees and knows; the real comrade, the human soul, is hidden away behind the mask!

Genuine heroic friendship cannot flourish in an artificial society; and that perhaps accounts for the fact that the curled darlings of our modern community spend much of their leisure in reading papers devoted to tattle and scandal.  It seems as though the search after pleasure poisoned the very sources of nobleness in the nature of men.  In our monstrous city a man may live without a quarrel for forty years; he may be popular, he may be received with genial greetings wherever he goes—­and yet he has no friend.  He lingers through his little day; and, when he passes away, the change is less heeded than would be the removal of a chair from a club smoking-room.  When I see the callous indifference with which illness, misfortune, and death are regarded by the dainty classes, I can scarcely wonder when irate philosophers denounce polite society as a pestilent and demoralizing nuisance.  Among the people airily and impudently called “the