up our minds to be gloomy, saturnine young men, weary with the
world, and prone to soliloquy. I determined to join them.

For a month I rarely smiled, or, when I did, it was with a weary,
bitter smile, concealing a broken heart--at least that was the
intention. Shallow-minded observers misunderstood.

"I know exactly how it feels," they would say, looking at me
sympathetically, "I often have it myself. It's the sudden change in
the weather, I think;" and they would press neat brandy upon me, and
suggest ginger.

Again, it is distressing to the young man, busy burying his secret
sorrow under a mound of silence, to be slapped on the back by
commonplace people and asked--"Well, how's 'the hump' this morning?"
and to hear his mood of dignified melancholy referred to, by those
who should know better, as "the sulks."

There are practical difficulties also in the way of him who would
play the Byronic young gentleman. He must be supernaturally
wicked--or rather must have been; only, alas! in the unliterary
grammar of life, where the future tense stands first, and the past
is formed, not from the indefinite, but from the present indicative,
"to have been" is "to be"; and to be wicked on a small income is
impossible. The ruin of even the simplest of maidens costs money.
In the Courts of Love one cannot sue in forma pauperis; nor would it
be the Byronic method.

"To drown remembrance in the cup" sounds well, but then the "cup,"
to be fitting, should be of some expensive brand. To drink deep of