rand for eightpence.

The marvel of it all was that we believed in that wine and when the
company left for home, the merchant's address was in almost everybody's
pocket. It was not a bad wine in the sample bottles J. and I received a
day or two later, nothing much to boast of, but harmless. For the
further cheapness promised we next ordered it by the case, one of red
and one of white--a rare bargain we thought. But in the end it was the
most expensive wine it has ever been our misfortune to invest in. For
when it came in cases it was so potent that nobody could drink as much
as a glass without going to sleep. I never had it analyzed, but, after a
couple of bottles, I did not dare to put it on the table again, or to
use it even for cooking or as vinegar. To balance our accounts, we did
without wine of any kind, or at any price, for many a week to come. But
we had our revenge. In the course of a few months Bob's wine merchant
was summoned before the magistrate for manufacturing Bordeaux and
Burgundies out of Greek currants and more reprehensible materials in the
backyard of his unpretending riverside house, and it was one of our
Thursday night fellow victims who had the pleasure of exposing him in
the _Daily Chronicle_. Bob did not share our resentment. He had his
pleasure in the charm his imagination gave to every drop of the few
bottles he drank and managed not to die of.

I began to notice in the galleries and on Thursday nights that Bob
became more and more engrossed in the question of his health and quicker
to fly at a sniff or a sneeze. The time came when no persuasion could
bring him home with me. He described symptoms rather than pictures, his
interest in anything in the shape of paint weakened. I fancied that he
was romancing, that he was playing the hypochondriac as part of his role
of middle-age, and I thought it a pity. It might provide a new
entertainment for him, but it deprived us of the entertainment of his
company. Then I hardly met him at all, or if I did he was too nervous to
linger before each painting or drawing, to gossip about it and
everything under the sun. He would walk through the galleries with one
leg dragging a little--the visible sign, I would say to myself, amused
to see that he could turn romance into reality as easily as reality into
romance. He would start for Kew right off, without any loitering,
without any delicious pretending that he was going in the very next
train and then not goi