nded from them."

I could not help it; I burst out laughing.

"What are you laughing at, Frank?" he asked with a touch of annoyance.

"It seems humorous to me," I explained, "that Oscar Wilde should want
to be an O'Flahertie," and as I spoke a picture of the greatest of the
O'Flaherties, with bushy head and dirty rags, warming enormous hairy
legs before a smoking peat-fire, flashed before me. I think something
of the sort must have occurred to Oscar, too, for, in spite of his
attempt to be grave, he could not help laughing.

"It's unkind of you, Frank," he said. "The Irish were civilised and
Christians when the English kept themselves warm with tattooings."

He could not help telling one in familiar talk of Clumber or some
other great house where he had been visiting; he was intoxicated with
his own popularity, a little surprised, perhaps, to find that he had
won fame so easily and on the primrose path, but one could forgive him
everything, for he talked more delightfully than ever.

It is almost inexplicable, but nevertheless true that life tries all
of us, tests every weak point to breaking, and sets off and
exaggerates our powers. Burns saw this when he wrote:

"Wha does the utmost that he can
Will whyles do mair."

And the obverse is true: whoever yields to a weakness habitually, some
day goes further than he ever intended, and comes to worse grief than
he deserved. The old prayer: _Lead us not into temptation_, is perhaps
a half-conscious recognition of this fact. But we moderns are inclined
to walk heedlessly, no longer believing in pitfalls or in the danger
of gratified desires. And Oscar Wilde was not only an unbeliever; but
he had all the heedless confidence of the artist who has won
world-wide popularity and has the halo of fame on his brow. With high
heart and smiling eyes he went to his fate unsuspecting.

It was in the autumn of 1891 that he first met Lord Alfred Douglas. He
was thirty-six and Lord Alfred Douglas a handsome, slim youth of
twenty-one, with large blue eyes and golden-fair hair. His mother,
the Dowager Lady Queensberry, preserves a photograph of him taken a
few years before, when he was still at Winchester, a boy of sixteen
with an expression which might well be called angelic.

When I met him, he was still girlishly pretty, with the beauty of
youth, coloring and fair skin; though his features were merely
ordinary. It was Lionel Johnson, the writer, a friend and intimate of