Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 3).djvu/567



HIS, be it remarked, is an essential feature of your mission in life: whatever you go in for enthusiastically is sure to have a touch of exaggeration. At the stammering age there is exaggeration in your stammers; at the blushing, in your blushes; at the shaving period you not only shave the visible but the invisible; and when inclination is on the other side, where is the elixir you would not purchase to aid and abet your designs?

So it was when Felix Armstrong first of all took to the pen critical; he was critical, with a vengeance. It was Anathema—Maranatha! One of the least assertive men living in the natural flesh, veiled in the imposing anonymity of the critic, he launched thunderbolts and flashed forked lightning like another Jove upon benighted and erring humanity.

Felix and I had been colleagues on a journal in the provinces. He wrote the theatrical criticisms and the facetious paragraphs that set the townsmen by the ears, under the title of "Titillaters." I have reason to remember them, because they provoked three libel suits, one divorce case, two breaches of promise, a challenge to a duel, a wedding, and, it was currently reported, a funeral. That is a record of which any journalist may be proud. I may add that I have another cause to remember my friend's facetiæ, inasmuch as I once fell a victim to it.

One evening I was violently assaulted by an acrimonious milkman, the quality of whose milk had been tested and found wanting. Felix had referred to him in the "Titillaters" as "a gentleman of the first water"—a eulogistic title which the doughty milkman repudiated, backed up with the pugilistic statemer that he would show my friend that if he was capable of tapping water, he was also acquainted with a method known as "tapping claret." And he proved his assertion. Only he mistook me for Felix, and "tapped" mine instead.

At the important crisis in his history to which I wish more particularly to allude, Felix had grown out of all that. His critical zeal was tempered with discretion, and he would jocularly refer to his past as the "big bow-wow days."

Fate, rather than ability—I speak more