old cock, always ready for a yarn, and with a romantic turn about travel by land and sea which I greatly enjoyed. He and I used often to forecast the future of travel, and wonder what travelling might come to, say a thousand years hence. White would assert, in his vehement way, and with a slam of our table that would send the tobacco-pipe out of his mouth, that he should not wonder if our descendants got outside the world altogether, and voyaged far and away upon the ether ocean.
Brown, again, was even a still older friend, a near neighbour, and a brother trader in the same line as myself, although happily sufficiently "round the corner" to save mutual business interference. One of his sons being in a stockbroker's office, we were often amused by accounts of the bulling and bearing that went on in the Stock Exchange, and both of us were curious as to how fortunes were made there. But, as fortunes were also lost, we never risked our money. Our two families had been long intimate; and if there has been anything in my wife's late mysteriously significant looks and hints, as regards our eldest girl and another son of Brown's, the said families are, some day soon, to be more intimate still.
Brown and I agreed in most things to a very hair's-breadth. If not very much ever came out of Brown, the amount that went into him was something marvellous. He was the most exemplary listener within all the range of my acquaintance, and I was bound to reward him abundantly in that way. On our half-holiday Saturday excursions, we used to seek out some suburban solitude, by way of change from busy and noisy London, and there I would pour into
