quick. Call to mind
the days we went nutting, the times we walked in the woods, arms
wreathed about each other, showing trunks invined like the trees:--oh,
Charlie!"

"Pish! we were boys."

"Then lucky the fate of the first-born of Egypt, cold in the grave ere
maturity struck them with a sharper frost.--Charlie?"

"Fie! you're a girl."

"Help, help, Charlie, I want help!"

"Help? to say nothing of the friend, there is something wrong about the
man who wants help. There is somewhere a defect, a want, in brief, a
need, a crying need, somewhere about that man."

"So there is, Charlie.--Help, Help!"

"How foolish a cry, when to implore help, is itself the proof of
undesert of it."

"Oh, this, all along, is not you, Charlie, but some ventriloquist who
usurps your larynx. It is Mark Winsome that speaks, not Charlie."

"If so, thank heaven, the voice of Mark Winsome is not alien but
congenial to my larynx. If the philosophy of that illustrious teacher
find little response among mankind at large, it is less that they do not
possess teachable tempers, than because they are so unfortunate as not
to have natures predisposed to accord with him.

"Welcome, that compliment to humanity," exclaimed Frank with energy,
"the truer because unintended. And long in this respect may humanity
remain what you affirm it. And long it will; since humanity, inwardly
feeling how subject it is to straits, and hence how precious is help,
will, for selfishness' sake, if no other, long postpone ratifying a
philosophy that banishes help from the world. But Charlie, Charlie!
speak as you used to; tell me you will help me. Were the case reversed,
not less freely would I loan you the money than you would ask me to loan
it.

"_I_ ask? _I_ ask a loan? Frank, by this hand, under no circumstances
would I accept a loan, though without asking pressed on me. The
experience of China Aster might warn me."

"And what was that?"

"Not very unlike the experience of the man that built himself a palace
of moon-beams, and when the moon set was surprised that his palace
vanished with it. I will tell you about China Aster. I wish I could do
so in my own words, but unhappily the original story-teller here has so
tyrannized over me, that it is quite impossible for me to repeat his
incidents without sliding into his style. I forewarn you of this, that
you may not think me so maudlin as, in some parts, the story would seem
to make its narrator. It is too bad