year, as they gave me this: and may the Mayfly be strong on, and a
south-west gale blowing!

In the course of the next week, in many a conversation, the three men
compared notes as to the events of two years ago; and each supplied
the other with new facts, which shall be duly set forth in this tale,
saving and excepting, of course, the real reason why everybody did
everything. For--as everybody knows who has watched life--the true
springs of all human action are generally those which fools will not
see, which wise men will not mention; so that, in order to present
a readable tragedy of Hamlet, you must always "omit the part of
Hamlet,"--and probably the ghost and the queen into the bargain.




CHAPTER I.

POETRY AND PROSE.


Now, to tell my story--if not as it ought to be told, at least as I
can tell it,--I must go back sixteen years,--to the days when Whitbury
boasted of forty coaches per diem, instead of one railway,--and set
forth how, in its southern suburb, there stood two pleasant houses
side by side, with their gardens sloping down to the Whit, and parted
from each other only by the high brick fruit-wall, through which there
used to be a door of communication; for the two occupiers were fast
friends. In one of these two houses, sixteen years ago, lived our
friend Mark Armsworth, banker, solicitor, land-agent, churchwarden,