Page:Poet Lore, volume 4, 1892.djvu/460

 “Very well. But where shall we put it?”

“To-morrow I shall send several boxes; you will help me to pack them. I shall have them secretly delivered in the cellars of the prince’s castle; and should I ever—when I feel lonesome in Trieste or Pesth, or some Catholic village of the Tyrol, you know—well, then I shall write to you, and you will look up the necessary instruments and send them to me.”

I promised to do so. The next day we filled no less than five large boxes with books, apparatus, and other magician’s trash. On the following day the boxes were carried away. We saw each other several more times; but two or three weeks afterward he was ordered to leave for Königgrätz, the seat of his regiment. Since then I have been lonely. My friend did not write, nor did I; and thus our formerly indissoluble friendship ended with a mutual, though only apparent, indifference.

Two years later—I believe it was in January or February of 1866—my friend sent me a letter. He told me various incidents of his life, recalled the “folly” of his studies, and asking me to reply soon, concluded thus:—

“Do you know the phrase ‘Let pleasure live’? If you do not, you would learn to know it in its full extent if you were an officer of the same regiment with me. I would never ask for jollier comrades or a more pleasant life. Only sometimes,—sometimes only, understand,—when the last days of the month have come, and the salary has gone, I feel rather melancholy. Several times I thought of how to prevent it, but never dared to follow my plan; and, therefore, I beg you now, write me, if you know of any one who would be as crazy now as I was years ago,—possibly he might purchase either all or a part at least of my tools and instruments which I have deposited in the cellars of Prince Kinsky’s villa.”

I did not expect such a conclusion of the letter. Knowing my friend’s passion for his favorite pursuit, I could not believe that he would have freed himself altogether from it; and thinking that the words just cited were either a momentary fancy or an escamoteur’s attempt to make me believe that he had forever abandoned his