CHAPTER VII.
GILRAY.
[Illustration] Gilray is an actor, whose life I may be said to have strangely influenced, for it was I who brought him and the Arcadia Mixture together.

After that his coming to live on our stair was only a matter of rooms being vacant.
We met first in the Merediths' house-boat, the _Tawny Owl_, which was then lying at Molesey.

Gilray, as I soon saw, was a man trying to be miserable, and finding it the hardest task in life.

It is strange that the philosophers have never hit upon this profound truth.

No man ever tried harder to be unhappy than Gilray; but the luck was against him, and he was always forgetting himself.