ould not give
to own it. And close by our _Allahakbarries_, Henry Harland's
_Mademoiselle Miss_ meets in the old friendly companionship Steevens's
_Land of the Dollar_ and Graham Tomson's _Poems_ and Bob Stevenson's
_Velasquez_ and Harold Frederic's _Return of the O'Mahoney_ and Bernard
Shaw's _Cashel Byron's Profession_ in its rare paper cover, and George
Moore's _Strike_ at _Arlingford_, and Marriott Watson's _Diogenes of
London_, and--but of what use to go through the list, the long
catalogue, to the end? Ghosts greet me from those shelves, ghosts from
the old Thursdays, from the radiant days when youth was merging into
middle age--surely the best period in one's existence--days into which
the breath of life never can be breathed again. We could not revive the
old nights if we would. I suppose nobody now reads Zola, but we read him
in the Nineties and I have always been haunted by his description in
_L'Oeuvre_ of the last reunion of the friends who, in their eager youth,
had meant to conquer Paris and who used to meet to plan their campaign
over a dinner as meagre as their income and gay as their hopes. But
when, after years during which money and fame had been heaped up by more
than one and disappointment and despair lavished in equal measure upon
others, they ventured to dine together again, and the dinner was good
and well served as it never had been of old, it turned to dust and ashes
in their mouths--a funeral feast. Dust and ashes would be our fare were
we so foolish as again to open our doors on the Thursday night
consecrated to youth and its battles long ago.

X

If we have had no more Thursday nights, it does not follow that we have
had no other nights. The habit of years is not so easily broken, and our
habit was, and is, at night to gather people about us and to talk. Only,
after the Nineties, or rather before the end of the Nineties, we never
settled again with weekly regularity upon one special night out of the
seven for the purpose--on the contrary, we took, and we now take, our
nights as they came and come.

They have not been, for that, the less interesting and amusing, not less
loud with the sound of battle, not less fragrant with the smell of
smoke. It was just after our Thursday nights, for instance, that we
began what I might call our Whistler nights, and a more stimulating
talker than Whistler never talked, a more stimulating fighter never
fought. I do not mean in the impossible way meant by