I had an unfortunate friend at Boulogne in the year 1865—­then and many years before.  He lived on the ramparts in the upper town; had put on that shabby military air, capped with a naval couvre-chef (to use a Paris street word that is expressive, as street words often are), which distinguishes the British inhabitant of Boulogne-sur-mer; and was the companion of a group of majors and skippers, sprinkled with commercial men of erratic book-keeping tendencies.  He had lost tone.  He took me to his club; nothing more than a taproom, reserved to himself and men with whom he would not have exchanged a cigar light in London.  The jokes were bad and flat.  A laid-up captain of an old London boat—­sad old rascal was he!—­led the conversation.  Who was drunk last night?  How did the Major get the key into the lock?  Who paid for Todger’s last go?  “My word,” said I, to my friend, who had liquored himself out of one of the snuggest civil berths I know, “how you can spend your time with those blackguards, surpasses my comprehension.”  They amused him, he said.  He must drink with them, or play whist with another set, whose cards—­he emphatically added, giving me to understand much thereby—­he did not like.  It was only for a short time, and he would be quit of them.  This was his day dream.  My friend was always on the point of getting rid of Boulogne; everything was just settled; and so, buoyed with a hope that never staled, death caught him one summer’s afternoon, in the Rue Siblequin, and it was the bibulous sea captain and the very shady major who shambled after him, when he was borne through those pretty Petits Arbres to the English section of the cemetery.  Wrecks of many happy families lie around him in that narrow field of rest; and passing through on my state errands, I have thought once or twice, what sermons indeed are there not in the headstones of Boulogne cemetery.

I was with my poor friend in the December of 1865.  I was on way home to pass a cheery Christmas with my own people—­a luxury which was not often reserved for me—­and he had persuaded me to give him a couple of days.  It would have been hard to refuse Hanger, who had been gazing across Channel so many weary months, seeing friends off whither he might not follow; and wondering when he should trip down the ladder, and bustle with the steward in the cabin, and ask the sailors whether we shall have a fine passage.  To see men and women and children crowding home to their English Christmas from every corner of Europe, and to be left behind to eat plum-pudding in a back parlour of an imitation British tavern, with an obsolete skipper, and a ruined military man, whose family blushed whenever his name was mentioned, was trying.  Hanger protested he had no sentiment about Christmas, but he nearly wrung my hand off when he took leave of me.