hes
of Lancashire 'Heights' to a solemn plateau, wide and solitary as
Salisbury Plain, from the dark border of which, a warm human note
against the lonely infinite of heath and sky, beamed the little
whitewashed 'Traveller's Rest,' its yellow light, growing stronger as
the dusk deepened, meeting the eye with a sense of companionship
becoming a vague need just then.

The seeming spiritual significance of such forlorn wastes of no-man's
land had, I know, a specially strong appeal for Narcissus, and, in some
moods, the challenge which they seem to call from some 'dark tower' of
spiritual adventure would have led him wandering there till star-light;
but a day of rambling alone, in a strange country, among unknown faces,
brings a social hunger by evening, and a craving for some one to speak
to and a voice in return becomes almost a fear. A bright
kitchen-parlour, warm with the health of six workmen, grouped round a
game of dominoes, and one huge quart pot of ale, used among them as
woman in the early world, was a grateful inglenook, indeed, wherein to
close the day. Of course, friend N. joined them, and took his pull and
paid his round, like a Walt Whitman. I like to think of his slight
figure amongst them; his delicate, almost girl-like, profile against
theirs; his dreamy eyes and pale brow, surmounted by one of those dark
clusters of hair in which the fingers of women love to creep--an
incongruity, though of surfaces only, which certain who knew him but 'by
sight,' as the phrase is, might be at a loss to understand. That was one
of the surprises of his constitution. Nature had given him the dainty
and dreamy form of the artist, to which habit had added a bookish touch,
ending in a _tout ensemble_ of gentleness and distinction with little
apparent affinity to a scene like that in the 'Traveller's Rest.' But
there are many whom a suspicion of the dilettante in such an exterior
belies, and Narcissus was one of them. He had very strongly developed
that instinct of manner to which sympathy is a daily courtesy, and he
thus readily, when it suited him, could take the complexion of his
company, and his capacity of 'bend' was well-nigh genius. Of course, all
this is but to say that he was a gentleman; yet is not that in itself a
fine kind of originality? Besides, he had a genuine appetite for the
things of earth, such as many another delicate thing--a damask
rose-bush, for example--must be convicted of too; and often, when some
on