initial commit of ebook 9817HEADmain

11 files changed, 42428 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6833f05
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.gitattributes
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+* text=auto
+*.txt text
+*.md text
diff --git a/9817-8.txt b/9817-8.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..db33f59
--- /dev/null
+++ b/9817-8.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,10624 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Peter Ibbetson, by George Du Maurier
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Peter Ibbetson
+
+Author: George Du Maurier
+
+Illustrator: George Du Maurier
+
+Posting Date: December 7, 2011 [EBook #9817]
+Release Date: February, 2006
+First Posted: October 20, 2003
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PETER IBBETSON ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Keren Vergon, Charlie
+Kirschner, and Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PETER IBBETSON
+
+by George du Maurier
+
+With an Introduction by His Cousin Lady **** ("Madge Plunket")
+
+Edited and Illustrated by George Du Maurier
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Part One
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+The writer of this singular autobiography was my cousin, who died at
+the ----- Criminal Lunatic Asylum, of which he had been an inmate
+three years.
+
+He had been removed thither after a sudden and violent attack of
+homicidal mania (which fortunately led to no serious consequences),
+from ----- Jail, where he had spent twenty-five years, having been
+condemned to penal servitude for life, for the murder of ---- ----,
+his relative.
+
+He had been originally sentenced to death.
+
+It was at ---- Lunatic Asylum that he wrote these memoirs, and I received
+the MS. soon after his decease, with the most touching letter, appealing
+to our early friendship, and appointing me his literary executrix.
+
+It was his wish that the story of his life should be published just as
+he had written it.
+
+I have found it unadvisable to do this. It would revive, to no useful
+purpose, an old scandal, long buried and forgotten, and thereby give
+pain or annoyance to people who are still alive.
+
+Nor does his memory require rehabilitation among those who knew him, or
+knew anything of him--the only people really concerned. His dreadful
+deed has long been condoned by all (and they are many) who knew the
+provocation he had received and the character of the man who had
+provoked him.
+
+On mature consideration, and with advice, I resolved (in order that his
+dying wishes should not be frustrated altogether) to publish the memoir
+with certain alterations and emendations.
+
+I have nearly everywhere changed the names of people and places;
+suppressed certain details, and omitted some passages of his life (most
+of the story of his school-days, for instance, and that of his brief
+career as a private in the Horse Guards) lest they should too easily
+lead to the identification and annoyance of people still alive, for he
+is strongly personal at times, and perhaps not always just; and some
+other events I have carefully paraphrased (notably his trial at the Old
+Bailey), and given for them as careful an equivalent as I could manage
+without too great a loss of verisimilitude.
+
+I may as well state at once that, allowing for these alterations, every
+incident of his _natural_ life as described by himself is absolutely
+true, to the minutest detail, as I have been able to ascertain.
+
+For the early part of it--the life at Passy he describes with such
+affection--I can vouch personally; I am the Cousin "Madge" to whom he
+once or twice refers.
+
+I well remember the genial abode where he lived with his parents (my
+dear uncle and aunt); and the lovely "Madame Seraskier," and her husband
+and daughter, and their house, "Parva sed Apta," and "Major Duquesnois,"
+and the rest.
+
+And although I have never seen him since he was twelve years old, when
+his parents died and he went to London (as most of my life has been
+spent abroad), I received occasional letters from him.
+
+I have also been able to obtain much information about him from others,
+especially from a relative of the late "Mr. and Mrs. Lintot," who knew
+him well, and from several officers in his regiment who remembered him;
+also from the "Vicar's daughter," whom he met at "Lady Cray's" and who
+perfectly recollects the conversation she had with him at dinner, his
+sudden indisposition, and his long interview with the "Duchess of
+Towers," under the ash-tree next morning; she was one of the
+croquet-players.
+
+He was the most beautiful boy I ever saw, and so charming, lively, and
+amiable that everybody was fond of him. He had a horror of cruelty,
+especially to animals (quite singular in a boy of his age), and was very
+truthful and brave.
+
+According to all accounts (and from a photograph in my possession), he
+grew up to be as handsome as a man can well be, a personal gift which he
+seems to have held of no account whatever, though he thought so much of
+it in others. But he also became singularly shy and reserved in manner,
+over-diffident and self-distrustful; of a melancholy disposition, loving
+solitude, living much alone, and taking nobody into his confidence; and
+yet inspiring both affection and respect. For he seems to have always
+been thoroughly gentlemanlike in speech, bearing, manner, and aspect.
+
+It is possible, although he does not say so, that having first enlisted,
+and then entered upon a professional career under somewhat inauspicious
+conditions, he felt himself to have fallen away from the social rank
+(such as it was) that belonged to him by birth; and he may have found
+his associates uncongenial.
+
+His old letters to me are charmingly open and effusive.
+
+Of the lady whom (keeping her title and altering her name) I have called
+the "Duchess of Towers," I find it difficult to speak. That they only
+met twice, and in the way he describes, is a fact about which there can
+be no doubt.
+
+It is also indubitable that he received in Newgate, on the morning after
+his sentence to death, an envelope containing violets, and the strange
+message he mentions. Both letter and violets are in my possession, and
+the words are in her handwriting; about that there can be no mistake.
+
+It is certain, moreover, that she separated from her husband almost
+immediately after my cousin's trial and condemnation, and lived in
+comparative retirement from the world, as it is certain that he went
+suddenly mad, twenty-five years later, in ---- Jail, a few hours after
+her tragic death, and before he could possibly have heard of it by the
+ordinary channels; and that he was sent to ---- Asylum, where, after his
+frenzy had subsided, he remained for many days in a state of suicidal
+melancholia, until, to the surprise of all, he rose one morning in high
+spirits, and apparently cured of all serious symptoms of insanity; so he
+remained until his death. It was during the last year of his life that
+he wrote his autobiography, in French and English.
+
+There is nothing to be surprised at, taking all the circumstances into
+consideration, that even so great a lady, the friend of queens and
+empresses, the bearer of a high title and an illustrious name, justly
+celebrated for her beauty and charm (and her endless charities), of
+blameless repute, and one of the most popular women in English society,
+should yet have conceived a very warm regard for my poor cousin; indeed,
+it was an open secret in the family of "Lord Cray" that she had done so.
+But for them she would have taken the whole world into her confidence.
+
+After her death she left him what money had come to her from her father,
+which he disposed of for charitable ends, and an immense quantity of MS.
+in cipher--a cipher which is evidently identical with that he used
+himself in the annotations he put under innumerable sketches he was
+allowed to make during his long period of confinement, which (through
+her interest, and no doubt through his own good conduct) was rendered as
+bearable to him as possible. These sketches (which are very
+extraordinary) and her Grace's MS. are now in my possession.
+
+They constitute a mystery into which I have not dared to pry.
+
+From papers belonging to both I have been able to establish beyond doubt
+the fact (so strangely discovered) of their descent from a common French
+ancestress, whose name I have but slightly modified and the tradition of
+whom still lingers in the "Departement de la Sarthe," where she was a
+famous person a century ago; and her violin, a valuable Amati, now
+belongs to me.
+
+Of the non-natural part of his story I will not say much.
+
+It is, of course, a fact that he had been absolutely and, to all
+appearance, incurably insane before he wrote his life.
+
+There seems to have been a difference of opinion, or rather a doubt,
+among the authorities of the asylum as to whether he was mad after the
+acute but very violent period of his brief attack had ended.
+
+Whichever may have been the case, I am at least convinced of this: that
+he was no romancer, and thoroughly believed in the extraordinary mental
+experience he has revealed.
+
+At the risk of being thought to share his madness--if he _was_ mad--I
+will conclude by saying that I, for one, believe him to have been sane,
+and to have told the truth all through.
+
+MADGE PLUNKET
+
+
+
+
+
+I am but a poor scribe; ill-versed in the craft of wielding words and
+phrases, as the cultivated reader (if I should ever happen to have one)
+will no doubt very soon find out for himself.
+
+[Illustration:]
+
+I have been for many years an object of pity and contempt to all who
+ever gave me a thought--to all but _one_! Yet of all that ever lived on
+this earth I have been, perhaps, the happiest and most privileged, as
+that reader will discover if he perseveres to the end.
+
+My outer and my inner life have been as the very poles--asunder; and if,
+at the eleventh hour, I have made up my mind to give my story to the
+world, it is not in order to rehabilitate myself in the eyes of my
+fellow-men, deeply as I value their good opinion; for I have always
+loved them and wished them well, and would fain express my goodwill and
+win theirs, if that were possible.
+
+It is because the regions where I have found my felicity are accessible
+to all, and that many, better trained and better gifted, will explore
+them to far better purpose than I, and to the greater glory and benefit
+of mankind, when once I have given them the clew. Before I can do this,
+and in order to show how I came by this clew myself, I must tell, as
+well as I may, the tale of my checkered career--in telling which,
+moreover, I am obeying the last behest of one whose lightest wish was
+my law.
+
+If I am more prolix than I need be, it must be set down to my want of
+experience in the art of literary composition--to a natural wish I have
+to show myself neither better nor worse than I believe myself to be; to
+the charm, the unspeakable charm, that personal reminiscences have for
+the person principally concerned, and which he cannot hope to impart,
+however keenly he may feel it, without gifts and advantages that have
+been denied to me.
+
+And this leads me to apologize for the egotism of this Memoir, which is
+but an introduction to another and longer one that I hope to publish
+later. To write a story of paramount importance to mankind, it is true,
+but all about one's outer and one's inner self, to do this without
+seeming somewhat egotistical, requires something akin to genius--and I
+am but a poor scribe.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     "_Combien j'ai douce souvenance
+     Du joli lieu de ma naissance_!"
+
+These quaint lines have been running in my head at intervals through
+nearly all my outer life, like an oft-recurring burden in an endless
+ballad--sadly monotonous, alas! the ballad, which is mine; sweetly
+monotonous the burden, which is by Châteaubriand.
+
+I sometimes think that to feel the full significance of this refrain one
+must have passed one's childhood in sunny France, where it was written,
+and the remainder of one's existence in mere London--or worse than mere
+London--as has been the case with me. If I had spent all my life from
+infancy upward in Bloomsbury, or Clerkenwell, or Whitechapel, my early
+days would be shorn of much of their retrospective glamour as I look
+back on them in these my after-years.
+
+     _"Combien j'ai douce souvenance!"_
+
+It was on a beautiful June morning in a charming French garden, where
+the warm, sweet atmosphere was laden with the scent of lilac and
+syringa, and gay with butterflies and dragon-flies and humblebees, that
+I began my conscious existence with the happiest day of all my
+outer life.
+
+It is true that I had vague memories (with many a blank between) of a
+dingy house in the heart of London, in a long street of desolating
+straightness, that led to a dreary square and back again, and nowhere
+else for me; and then of a troubled and exciting journey that seemed of
+jumbled days and nights. I could recall the blue stage-coach with the
+four tall, thin, brown horses, so quiet and modest and well-behaved; the
+red-coated guard and his horn; the red-faced driver and his husky voice
+and many capes.
+
+Then the steamer with its glistening deck, so beautiful and white it
+seemed quite a desecration to walk upon it--this spotlessness did not
+last very long; and then two wooden piers with a light-house on each,
+and a quay, and blue-bloused workmen and red-legged little soldiers with
+mustaches, and bare-legged fisher-women, all speaking a language that I
+knew as well as the other commoner language I had left behind; but which
+I had always looked upon as an exclusive possession of my father's and
+mother's and mine for the exchange of sweet confidence and the
+bewilderment of outsiders; and here were little boys and girls in the
+street, quite common children, who spoke it as well and better than I
+did myself.
+
+After this came the dream of a strange, huge, top-heavy vehicle, that
+seemed like three yellow carriages stuck together, and a mountain of
+luggage at the top under an immense black tarpaulin, which ended in a
+hood; and beneath the hood sat a blue-bloused man with a singular cap,
+like a concertina, and mustaches, who cracked a loud whip over five
+squealing, fussy, pugnacious white and gray horses, with bells on their
+necks and bushy fox-tails on their foreheads, and their own tails
+carefully tucked up behind.
+
+From the _coupé_ where I sat with my father and mother I could watch
+them well as they led us through dusty roads with endless apple-trees or
+poplars on either side. Little barefooted urchins (whose papas and
+mammas wore wooden shoes and funny white nightcaps) ran after us for
+French half-pennies, which were larger than English ones, and pleasanter
+to have and to hold! Up hill and down we went; over sounding wooden
+bridges, through roughly paved streets in pretty towns to large
+court-yards, where five other quarrelsome steeds, gray and white, were
+waiting to take the place of the old ones--worn out, but
+quarreling still!
+
+And through the night I could hear the gay music of the bells and hoofs,
+the rumbling of the wheels the cracking of the eternal whip, as I
+fidgeted from one familiar lap to the other in search of sleep; and
+waking out of a doze I could see the glare of the red lamps on the five
+straining white and gray backs that dragged us so gallantly through the
+dark summer night.
+
+[Illustration: "A STRANGE, HUGE, TOP-HEAVY VEHICLE."]
+
+Then it all became rather tiresome and intermittent and confused, till
+we reached at dusk next day a quay by a broad river; and as we drove
+along it, under thick trees, we met other red and blue and green lamped
+five-horsed diligences starting on their long journey just as ours was
+coming to an end.
+
+Then I knew (because I was a well-educated little boy, and heard my
+father exclaim, "Here's Paris at last!") that we had entered the capital
+of France--a fact that impressed me very much--so much, it seems, that I
+went to sleep for thirty-six hours at a stretch, and woke up to find
+myself in the garden I have mentioned, and to retain possession of that
+self without break or solution of continuity (except when I went to
+sleep again) until now.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The happiest day in all my outer life!
+
+For in an old shed full of tools and lumber at the end of the garden,
+and half-way between an empty fowl-house and a disused stable (each an
+Eden in itself) I found a small toy-wheelbarrow--quite the most
+extraordinary, the most unheard of and undreamed of, humorously,
+daintily, exquisitely fascinating object I had ever come across in all
+my brief existence.
+
+I spent hours--enchanted hours--in wheeling brick-bats from the stable
+to the fowl-house, and more enchanted hours in wheeling them all back
+again, while genial French workmen, who were busy in and out of the
+house where we were to live, stopped every now and then to ask
+good-natured questions of the "p'tit Anglais," and commend his knowledge
+of their tongue, and his remarkable skill in the management of a
+wheelbarrow. Well I remember wondering, with newly-aroused
+self-consciousness, at the intensity, the poignancy, the extremity of my
+bliss, and looking forward with happy confidence to an endless
+succession of such hours in the future.
+
+But next morning, though the weather was as fine, and the wheelbarrow
+and the brick-bats and the genial workmen were there, and all the scents
+and sights and sounds were the same, the first fine careless rapture was
+not to be caught again, and the glory and the freshness had departed.
+
+Thus did I, on the very dawning of life, reach at a single tide the
+high-water-mark of my earthly bliss--never to be reached again by me on
+this side of the ivory gate--and discover that to make the perfection of
+human happiness endure there must be something more than a sweet French
+garden, a small French wheelbarrow, and a nice little English boy who
+spoke French and had the love of approbation--a fourth dimension
+is required.
+
+I found it in due time.
+
+But if there were no more enchanted hours like the first, there were to
+be seven happy years that have the quality of enchantment as I look
+back on them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Oh, the beautiful garden! Roses, nasturtiums and convolvulus,
+wallflowers, sweet-pease and carnations, marigolds and sunflowers,
+dahlias and pansies and hollyhocks and poppies, and Heaven knows what
+besides! In my fond recollection they all bloom at once, irrespective of
+time and season.
+
+To see and smell and pick all these for the first time at the
+susceptible age of five! To inherit such a kingdom after five years of
+Gower Street and Bedford Square! For all things are relative, and
+everything depends upon the point of view. To the owner of Chatsworth
+(and to his gardeners) my beautiful French Garden would have seemed a
+small affair.
+
+[Illustration: LE P'TIT ANGLAIS.]
+
+And what a world of insects--Chatsworth could not beat _these_ (indeed,
+is no doubt sadly lacking in them)--beautiful, interesting, comic,
+grotesque, and terrible; from the proud humble-bee to the earwig and his
+cousin, the devil's coach-horse; and all those rampant, many footed
+things that pullulate in damp and darkness under big flat stones. To
+think that I have been friends with all these--roses and centipedes and
+all--and then to think that most of my outer life has been spent between
+bare whitewashed walls, with never even a flea or a spider to be friends
+with again!
+
+Our house (where, by-the-way, I had been born five years before), an old
+yellow house with green shutters and Mansard-roofs of slate, stood
+between this garden and the street--a long winding street, roughly
+flagged, with oil-lamps suspended across at long intervals; these lamps
+were let down with pulleys at dusk, replenished and lit, and then hauled
+up again to make darkness visible for a few hours on nights when the
+moon was away.
+
+Opposite to us was a boys' school--"Maison d'Éducation, Dirigée par M.
+Jules Saindou, Bachelier et Maître ès Lettres et ès Sciences," and
+author of a treatise on geology, with such hauntingly terrific pictures
+of antediluvian reptiles battling in the primeval slime that I have
+never been able to forget them. My father, who was fond of science, made
+me a present of it on my sixth birthday. It cost me many a nightmare.
+
+From our windows we could see and hear the boys at play--at a proper
+distance French boys sound just like English ones, though they do not
+look so, on account of their blue blouses and dusky, cropped heads--and
+we could see the gymnastic fixtures in the play-ground, M. Saindou's
+pride. "Le portique! la poutre! le cheval! et les barres parallèles!"
+Thus they were described in M. Saindou's prospectus.
+
+On either side of the street (which was called "the Street of the
+Pump"), as far as eye could reach looking west, were dwelling-houses
+just like our own, only agreeably different; and garden walls overtopped
+with the foliage of horse-chestnut, sycamore, acacia, and lime; and here
+and there huge portals and iron gates defended by posts of stone gave
+ingress to mysterious abodes of brick and plaster and granite,
+many-shuttered, and embosomed in sun-shot greenery.
+
+Looking east one could see in the near distance unsophisticated shops
+with old-fashioned windows of many panes--Liard, the grocer; Corbin, the
+poulterer; the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker.
+
+And this delightful street, as it went on its winding way, led not to
+Bedford Square or the new University College Hospital, but to Paris
+through the Arc de Triomphe at one end, and to the river Seine at the
+other; or else, turning to the right, to St. Cloud through the Bois de
+Boulogne of Louis Philippe Premier, Roi des Français--as different from
+the Paris and the Bois de Boulogne of to-day as a diligence from an
+express train.
+
+On one side of the beautiful garden was another beautiful garden,
+separated from ours by a high wall covered with peach and pear and plum
+and apricot trees; on the other, accessible to us through a small door
+in another lower wall clothed with jasmine, clematis, convolvulus, and
+nasturtium, was a long, straight avenue of almond-trees, acacia,
+laburnum, lilac, and may, so closely planted that the ivy-grown walls
+on either side could scarcely be seen. What lovely patches they made on
+the ground when the sun shone! One end of this abutted on "the Street of
+the Pump," from which it was fenced by tall, elaborately-carved iron
+gates between stone portals, and at the side was a "porte bâtarde,"
+guarded by le Père et la Mère François, the old concierge and his old
+wife. Peace to their ashes, and Heaven rest their kindly, genial souls!
+
+The other end of the avenue, where there was also an iron gate, admitted
+to a large private park that seemed to belong to nobody, and of which we
+were free--a very wilderness of delight, a heaven, a terror of tangled
+thickets and not too dangerous chalk cliffs, disused old quarries and
+dark caverns, prairies of lush grass, sedgy pools, turnip fields,
+forests of pine, groves and avenues of horse-chestnut, dank valleys of
+walnut-trees and hawthorn, which summer made dark at noon; bare,
+wind-swept mountainous regions whence one could reconnoitre afar; all
+sorts of wild and fearsome places for savages and wild beasts to hide
+and small boys to roam quite safely in quest of perilous adventure.
+
+All this vast enclosure (full of strange singing, humming, whistling,
+buzzing, twittering, cooing, booming, croaking, flying, creeping,
+crawling, jumping, climbing, burrowing, splashing, diving things) had
+been neglected for ages--an Eden where one might gather and eat of the
+fruit of the tree of knowledge without fear, and learn lovingly the ways
+of life without losing one's innocence; a forest that had remade for
+itself a new virginity, and become primeval once more; where beautiful
+Nature had reasserted her own sweet will, and massed and tangled
+everything together as though a Beauty had been sleeping there
+undisturbed for close on a hundred years, and was only waiting for the
+charming Prince--or, as it turned out a few years later, alas! the
+speculative builder and the railway engineer--those princes of our day.
+
+My fond remembrance would tell me that this region was almost boundless,
+well as I remember its boundaries. My knowledge of physical geography,
+as applied to this particular suburb of Paris, bids me assign more
+modest limits to this earthly paradise, which again was separated by an
+easily surmounted fence from Louis Philippe's Bois de Boulogne; and to
+this I cannot find it in my heart to assign any limits whatever, except
+the pretty old town from which it takes its name, and whose principal
+street leads to that magical combination of river, bridge, palace,
+gardens, mountain, and forest, St. Cloud.
+
+What more could be wanted for a small boy fresh (if such be freshness)
+from the very heart of Bloomsbury?
+
+That not a single drop should be lacking to the full cup of that small
+boy's felicity, there was a pond on the way from Passy to St. Cloud--a
+memorable pond, called "La Mare d'Auteuil," the sole aquatic treasure
+that Louis Philippe's Bois de Boulogne could boast. For in those
+ingenuous days there existed no artificial lake fed by an artificial
+stream, no pré-Catelan, no Jardin d'Acclimatation. The wood was just a
+wood, and nothing more--a dense, wild wood, that covered many hundreds
+of acres, and sheltered many thousands of wild live things. Though
+mysteriously deep in the middle, this famous pond (which may have been
+centuries old, and still exists) was not large; you might almost fling a
+stone across it anywhere.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Bounded on three sides by the forest (now shorn away), it was just
+hidden from the dusty road by a fringe of trees; and one could have it
+all to one's self, except on Sunday and Thursday afternoons, when a few
+love-sick Parisians remembered its existence, and in its loveliness
+forgot their own.
+
+To be there at all was to be happy; for not only was it quite the most
+secluded, picturesque, and beautiful pond in all the habitable
+globe--that pond of ponds, the _only_ pond--but it teemed with a far
+greater number and variety of wonderful insects and reptiles than any
+other pond in the world. Such, at least, I believed must be the case,
+for they were endless.
+
+To watch these creatures, to learn their ways, to catch them (which we
+sometimes did), to take them home and be kind to them, and try to tame
+them, and teach them our ways (with never varying non-success, it is
+true, but in, oh, such jolly company!) became a hobby that lasted me, on
+and off, for seven years.
+
+La Mare d'Auteuil! The very name has a magic, from all the associations
+that gathered round it during that time, to cling forever.
+
+How I loved it! At night, snoozing in my warm bed, I would awesomely
+think of it, and how solemn it looked when I had reluctantly left it at
+dusk, an hour or two before; then I would picture it to myself, later,
+lying deep and cold and still under the stars, in the dark thicket, with
+all that weird, uncanny lite seething beneath its stagnant surface.
+
+Then gradually the water would sink, and the reeds, left naked, begin to
+move and rustle ominously, and from among their roots in the uncovered
+slush everything alive would make for the middle--hopping, gliding,
+writhing frantically....
+
+Down shrank the water; and soon in the slimy bottom, yards below, huge
+fat salamanders, long-lost and forgotten tadpoles as large as rats,
+gigantic toads, enormous flat beetles, all kinds of hairy, scaly, spiny,
+blear-eyed, bulbous, shapeless monsters without name, mud-colored
+offspring of the mire that had been sleeping there for hundreds of
+years, woke up, and crawled in and out, and wallowed and interwriggled,
+and devoured each other, like the great saurians and batrachians in my
+_Manuel de Géologie Élémentaire_. Édition illustrée à l'usage des
+enfants. Par Jules Saindou, Bachelier et Maître ès Lettres et
+ès Sciences.
+
+Then would I wake up with a start, in a cold perspiration, an icy chill
+shooting through me that roughed my skin and stirred the roots of my
+hair, and ardently wish for to-morrow morning.
+
+In after-years, and far away among the cold fogs of Clerkenwell, when
+the frequent longing would come over me to revisit "the pretty place of
+my birth," it was for the Mare d'Auteuil I longed the most; _that_ was
+the loadstar, the very pole of my home-sick desires; always thither the
+wings of my hopeless fancy bore me first of all; it was, oh! to tread
+that sunlit grassy brink once more, and to watch the merry tadpoles
+swarm, and the green frog takes its header like a little man, and the
+water-rat swim to his hole among the roots of the willow, and the
+horse-leech thread his undulating way between the water-lily stems; and
+to dream fondly of the delightful, irrevocable past, on the very spot of
+all where I and mine were always happiest!
+
+     "...Qu'ils étaient beaux, les jours De France!"
+
+In the avenue I have mentioned (_the_ avenue, as it is still to me, and
+as I will always call it) there was on the right hand, half the way up,
+a _maison de santé_, or boarding-house, kept by one Madame Pelé; and
+there among others came to board and lodge, a short while after our
+advent, four or five gentlemen who had tried to invade France, with a
+certain grim Pretender at their head, and a tame eagle as a symbol of
+empire to rally round.
+
+The expedition had failed; the Pretender had been consigned to a
+fortress; the eagle had found a home in the public slaughter-house of
+Boulogne-sur-Mer, which it adorned for many years, and where it fed as
+it had never probably fed before; and these, the faithful followers, le
+Colonel Voisil, le Major Duquesnois, le Capitaine Audenis, le Docteur
+Lombal (and one or two others whose names I have forgotten), were
+prisoners on parole at Madame Pelé's, and did not seem to find their
+durance very vile.
+
+[Illustration: (no caption)]
+
+I grew to know and love them all, especially the Major Duquesnois, an
+almost literal translation into French of Colonel Newcome. He took to
+me at once, in spite of my Englishness, and drilled me, and taught me
+the exercise as it was performed in the Vieille Garden and told me a new
+fairy-tale, I verily believe, every afternoon for seven years.
+Scheherezade could do no more for a Sultan, and to save her own neck
+from the bowstring!
+
+Cher et bien amé "Vieux de la Vieille!" with his big iron-gray mustache,
+his black satin stock, his spotless linen, his long green frock-coat so
+baggy about the skirts, and the smart red ribbon in his button-hole! He
+little foresaw with what warm and affectionate regard his memory would
+be kept forever sweet and green in the heart of his hereditary foe and
+small English tyrant and companion!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Opposite Madame Pelé's, and the only other dwelling besides hers and
+ours in the avenue, was a charming little white villa with a Grecian
+portico, on which were inscribed in letters of gold the words "Parva sed
+Apta"; but it was not tenanted till two or three years after
+our arrival.
+
+In the genial French fashion of those times we soon got on terms of
+intimacy with these and other neighbors, and saw much of each other at
+all times of the day.
+
+My tall and beautiful young mother (la belle Madame Pasquier, as she was
+gallantly called) was an Englishwoman who had been born and partly
+brought up in Paris.
+
+My gay and jovial father (le beau Pasquier, for he was also tall and
+comely to the eye) was a Frenchman, although an English subject, who had
+been born and partly brought up in London; for he was the child of
+emigres from France during the Reign of Terror.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+     "When in death I shall calm recline,
+        Oh take my heart to my mistress dear!
+      Tell her it lived upon smiles and wine
+       Of the brightest hue while it lingered here!"
+
+He was gifted with a magnificent, a phenomenal voice--a barytone and
+tenor rolled into one; a marvel of richness, sweetness, flexibility, and
+power--and had intended to sing at the opera; indeed, he had studied for
+three years at the Paris Conservatoire to that end; and there he had
+carried all before him, and given rise to the highest hopes. But his
+family, who were Catholics of the blackest and Legitimists of the
+whitest dye--and as poor as church rats had objected to such a godless
+and derogatory career; so the world lost a great singer, and the great
+singer a mine of wealth and fame.
+
+However, he had just enough to live upon, and had married a wife (a
+heretic!) who had just about as much, or as little; and he spent his
+time, and both his money and hers, in scientific inventions--to little
+purpose, for well as he had learned how to sing, he had not been to any
+conservatoire where they teach one how to invent.
+
+So that, as he waited "for his ship to come home," he sang only to amuse
+his wife, as they say the nightingale does; and to ease himself of
+superfluous energy, and to charm the servants, and le Père et la Mère
+François, and the five followers of Napoleon, and all and everybody who
+cared to listen, and last and least (and most!), myself.
+
+For this great neglected gift of his, on which he set so little store,
+was already to me the most beautiful and mysterious thing in the world;
+and next to this, my mother's sweet playing on the harp and piano, for
+she was an admirable musician.
+
+It was her custom to play at night, leaving the door of my bedroom ajar,
+and also the drawing-room door, so that I could hear her till I fell
+asleep.
+
+Sometimes, when my father was at home, the spirit would move him to hum
+or sing the airs she played, as he paced up and down the room on the
+track of a new invention.
+
+And though he sang and hummed "pian-piano," the sweet, searching, manly
+tones seemed to fill all space.
+
+The hushed house became a sounding-board, the harp a mere subservient
+tinkle, and my small, excitable frame would thrill and vibrate under the
+waves of my unconscious father's voice; and oh, the charming airs
+he sang!
+
+His stock was inexhaustible, and so was hers; and thus an endless
+succession of lovely melodies went ringing through that happy period.
+
+And just as when a man is drowning, or falling from a height, his whole
+past life is said to be mapped out before his mental vision as in a
+single flash, so seven years of sweet, priceless home love--seven times
+four changing seasons of simple, genial, prae-imperial Frenchness; an
+ideal house, with all its pretty furniture, and shape, and color; a
+garden full of trees and flowers; a large park, and all the wild live
+things therein; a town and its inhabitants; a mile or two of historic
+river; a wood big enough to reach from the Arc de Triomphe to St. Cloud
+(and in it the pond of ponds); and every wind and weather that the
+changing seasons can bring--all lie embedded and embalmed for me in
+every single bar of at least a hundred different tunes, to be evoked at
+will for the small trouble and cost of just whistling or humming the
+same, or even playing it with one finger on the piano--when I had a
+piano within reach.
+
+Enough to last me for a lifetime--with proper economy, of course--it
+will not do to exhaust, by too frequent experiment, the strange capacity
+of a melodic bar for preserving the essence of by-gone things, and days
+that are no more.
+
+Oh, Nightingale! whether thou singest thyself or, better still, if thy
+voice by not in thy throat, but in thy fiery heart and subtle brain, and
+thou makest songs for the singing of many others, blessed be thy name!
+The very sound of it is sweet in every clime and tongue: Nightingale,
+Rossignol, Usignuolo, Bulbul! Even Nachtigall does not sound amiss in
+the mouth of a fair English girl who has had a Hanoverian for a
+governess! and, indeed, it is in the Nachtigall's country that the best
+music is made!
+
+[Illustration: "OH, NIGHTINGALE!"]
+
+And oh, Nightingale! never, never grudge thy song to those who love
+it--nor waste it upon those who do not....
+
+Thus serenaded, I would close my eyes, and lapped in darkness and
+warmth and heavenly sound, be lulled asleep--perchance to dream!
+
+For my early childhood was often haunted by a dream, which at first I
+took for a reality--a transcendant dream of some interest and importance
+to mankind, as the patient reader will admit in time. But many years of
+my life passed away before I was able to explain and account for it.
+
+I had but to turn my face to the wall, and soon I found myself in
+company with a lady who had white hair and a young face--a very
+beautiful young face.
+
+Sometimes I walked with her, hand in hand--I being quite a small
+child--and together we fed innumerable pigeons who lived in a tower by a
+winding stream that ended in a water-mill. It was too lovely, and I
+would wake.
+
+Sometimes we went into a dark place, where there was a fiery furnace
+with many holes, and many people working and moving about--among them a
+man with white hair and a young face, like the lady, and beautiful red
+heels to his shoes. And under his guidance I would contrive to make in
+the furnace a charming little cocked hat of colored glass--a treasure!
+And the sheer joy thereof would wake me.
+
+Sometimes the white-haired lady and I would sit together at a square
+box from which she made lovely music, and she would sing my favorite
+song--a song that I adored. But I always woke before this song came to
+an end, on account of the too insupportably intense bliss I felt on
+hearing it; and all I could remember when awake were the words
+"triste--comment--sale." The air, which I knew so well in my dream, I
+could not recall.
+
+It seemed as though some innermost core of my being, some childish holy
+of holies, secreted a source of supersubtle reminiscence, which, under
+some stimulus that now and again became active during sleep, exhaled
+itself in this singular dream--shadowy and slight, but invariably
+accompanied by a sense of felicity so measureless and so penetrating
+that I would always wake in a mystic flutter of ecstasy, the bare
+remembrance of which was enough to bless and make happy many a
+succeeding hour.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Besides this happy family of three, close by (in the Street of the
+Tower) lived my grandmother Mrs. Biddulph, and my Aunt Plunket, a widow,
+with her two sons, Alfred and Charlie, and her daughter Madge. They also
+were fair to look at--extremely so--of the gold-haired, white-skinned,
+well-grown Anglo-Saxon type, with frank, open, jolly manners, and no
+beastly British pride.
+
+So that physically, at least, we reflected much credit on the English
+name, which was not in good odor just then at Passy-lès-Paris, where
+Waterloo was unforgotten. In time, however, our nationality was condoned
+on account of our good looks--"non Angli sed angeli!" as M. Saindou was
+gallantly pleased to exclaim when he called (with a prospectus of his
+school) and found us all gathered together under the big apple-tree
+on our lawn.
+
+But English beauty in Passy was soon to receive a memorable addition to
+its ranks in the person of a certain Madame Seraskier, who came with an
+invalid little daughter to live in the house so modestly described in
+gold as "Parva sed Apta."
+
+She was the English, or rather the Irish, wife of a Hungarian patriot
+and man of science, Dr. Seraskier (son of the famous violinist); an
+extremely tall, thin man, almost gigantic, with a grave, benevolent
+face, and a head like a prophet's; who was, like my father, very much
+away from his family--conspiring perhaps--or perhaps only inventing
+(like my father), and looking out "for his ship to come home!"
+
+[Illustration: "SHE TOPPED MY TALL MOTHER."]
+
+This fair lady's advent was a sensation--to me a sensation that never
+palled or wore itself away; it was no longer now "la belle Madame
+Pasquier," but "la divine Madame Seraskier"--beauty-blind as the French
+are apt to be.
+
+She topped my tall mother by more than half a head; as was remarked by
+Madame Pelé, whose similes were all of the kitchen and dining-room,
+"elle lui mangerait des petits pâtés sur la tête!" And height, that
+lends dignity to ugliness, magnifies beauty on a scale of geometrical
+progression--2, 4, 8, 16, 32--for every consecutive inch, between five
+feet five, let us say, and five feet ten or eleven (or thereabouts),
+which I take to have been Madame Seraskier's measurement.
+
+She had black hair and blue eyes--of the kind that turns violet in a
+novel--and a beautiful white skin, lovely hands and feet, a perfect
+figure, and features chiselled and finished and polished and turned out
+with such singular felicitousness that one gazed and gazed till the
+heart was full of a strange jealous resentment at any one else having
+the right to gaze on something so rare, so divinely, so sacredly
+fair--any one in the world but one's self!
+
+But a woman can be all this without being Madame Seraskier--she was much
+more.
+
+For the warmth and genial kindness of her nature shone through her eyes
+and rang in her voice. All was of a piece with her--her simplicity, her
+grace, her naturalness and absence of vanity; her courtesy, her
+sympathy, her mirthfulness.
+
+I do not know which was the most irresistible: she had a slight Irish
+accent when she spoke English, a less slight English accent when she
+spoke French!
+
+I made it my business to acquire both.
+
+Indeed, she was in heart and mind and body what we should _all_ be but
+for the lack of a little public spirit and self-denial (under proper
+guidance) during the last few hundred years on the part of a few
+thousand millions of our improvident fellow-creatures.
+
+There should be no available ugly frames for beautiful souls to be
+hurried into by carelessness or mistake, and no ugly souls should be
+suffered to creep, like hermit-crabs, into beautiful shells never
+intended for them. The outward and visible form should mark the inward
+and spiritual grace; that it seldom does so is a fact there is no
+gainsaying. Alas! such beauty is such an exception that its possessor,
+like a prince of the blood royal, is pampered and spoiled from the very
+cradle, and every good and generous and unselfish impulse is corroded by
+adulation--that spontaneous tribute so lightly won, so quickly paid, and
+accepted so royally as a due.
+
+So that only when by Heaven's grace the very beautiful are also very
+good, is it time for us to go down on our knees, and say our prayers in
+thankfulness and adoration; for the divine has been permitted to make
+itself manifest for a while in the perishable likeness of our
+poor humanity.
+
+A beautiful face! a beautiful tune! Earth holds nothing to beat these,
+and of such, for want of better materials, we have built for ourselves
+the kingdom of Heaven.
+
+     _"Plus oblige, et peut davantage
+       Un beau visage
+     Qu'un homme armé--
+       Et rien n'est meilleur que d'entendre
+     Air doux et tendre
+     Jadis aimé!"_
+
+My mother soon became the passionately devoted friend of the divine
+Madame Seraskier; and I, what would I not have done--what danger would I
+not have faced--what death would I not have died for her!
+
+I did not die; I lived her protestant to be, for nearly fifty years. For
+nearly fifty years to recollect the rapture and the pain it was to look
+at her; that inexplicable longing ache, that dumb, delicious, complex,
+innocent distress, for which none but the greatest poets have ever found
+expression; and which, perhaps, they have not felt half so acutely,
+these glib and gifted ones, as _I_ did, at the susceptible age of seven,
+eight, nine, ten, eleven, and twelve.
+
+She had other slaves of my sex. The five Napoleonic heroes did homage
+each after his fashion: the good Major with a kind of sweet fatherly
+tenderness touching to behold; the others with perhaps less unselfish
+adoration; notably the brave Capitaine Audenis, of the fair waxed
+mustache and beautiful brown tail coat, so tightly buttoned with gilt
+buttons across his enormous chest, and imperceptible little feet so
+tightly imprisoned in shiny tipped female cloth boots, with buttons of
+mother-of-pearl; whose hobby was, I believe, to try and compensate
+himself for the misfortunes of war by more successful attempts in
+another direction. Anyhow he betrayed a warmth that made my small bosom
+a Gehenna, until she laughed and snubbed him into due propriety and
+shamefaced self-effacement.
+
+It soon became evident that she favored two, at least, out of all this
+little masculine world--the Major myself; and a strange trio we made.
+
+Her poor little daughter, the object of her passionate solicitude, a
+very clever and precocious child, was the reverse of beautiful, although
+she would have had fine eyes but for her red lashless lids. She wore her
+thick hair cropped short, like a boy, and was pasty and sallow in
+complexion, hollow-cheeked, thick-featured, and overgrown, with long
+thin hands and feet, and arms and legs of quite pathetic length and
+tenuity; a silent and melancholy little girl, who sucked her thumb
+perpetually, and kept her own counsel. She would have to lie in bed for
+days together, and when she got well enough to sit up, I (to please her
+mother) would read to her _Le Robinson Suisse_, _Sandford and Merton_,
+_Evenings at Home_, _Les Contes de Madame Perrault_, the shipwreck from
+"Don Juan," of which we never tired, and the "Giaour," the "Corsair,"
+and "Mazeppa"; and last, but not least, _Peter Parleys Natural History_,
+which we got to know by heart.
+
+And out of this latter volume I would often declaim for her benefit what
+has always been to me the most beautiful poem in the world, possibly
+because it was the first I read for myself, or else because it is so
+intimately associated with those happy days. Under an engraving of a
+wild duck (after Bewick, I believe) were quoted W.C. Bryant's lines "To
+a Water-fowl." They charmed me then and charm me now as nothing else has
+quite charmed me; I become a child again as I think of them, with a
+child's virgin subtlety of perception and magical susceptibility to
+vague suggestions of the Infinite.
+
+Poor little Mimsey Seraskier would listen with distended eyes and quick
+comprehension. She had a strange fancy that a pair of invisible beings,
+"La fée Tarapatapoum," and "Le Prince Charmant" (two favorite characters
+of M. le Major's) were always in attendance upon us--upon her and
+me--and were equally fond of us both; that is, "La fée Tarapatapoum" of
+me, and "Le Prince Charmant" of her--and watched over us and would
+protect us through life.
+
+"O! ils sont joliment bien ensemble, tous les deux--ils sont
+inséparables!" she would often exclaim, _apropos_ of these visionary
+beings; and _apropos_ of the water-fowl she would say--
+
+"Il aime beaucoup cet oiseau-là, le Prince Charmant! dis encore, quand
+il vole si haut, et qu'il fait froid, et qu'il est fatigué, et que la
+nuit vient, mais qu'il ne veut pas descendre!"
+
+And I would re-spout--
+
+        _"'All day thy wings have fanned,
+     At that far height, the cold, thin atmosphere,
+     Yet stoop not, weary, to the welcome land,
+           Though the dark night be near!'"_
+
+And poor, morbid, precocious, overwrought Mimsey's eyes would fill, and
+she would meditatively suck her thumb and think unutterable things.
+
+And then I would copy Bewick's wood-cuts for her, as she sat on the arm
+of my chair and patiently watched; and she would say: "La fée
+Tarapatapoum trouve que tu dessines dans la perfection!" and treasure up
+these little masterpieces--"pour l'album de la fée Tarapatapoum!"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+There was one drawing she prized above all others--a steel engraving
+in a volume of Byron, which represented two beautiful beings of either
+sex, walking hand in hand through a dark cavern. The man was in sailor's
+garb; the lady, who went barefoot and lightly clad, held a torch; and
+underneath was written--
+
+     _"And Neuha led her Torquil by the hand,
+     And waved along the vaults her flaming brand."_
+
+I spent hours in copying it for her, and she preferred the copy to the
+original, and would have it that the two figures were excellent
+portraits of her Prince and Fairy.
+
+Sometimes during these readings and sketchings under the apple-tree on
+the lawn, the sleeping Médor (a huge nondescript sort of dog, built up
+of every breed in France, with the virtues of all and the vices of none)
+would wag his three inches of tail, and utter soft whimperings of
+welcome in his dream; and she would say--
+
+"C'est le Prince Charmant qui lui dit; 'Médor donne la patte!'"
+
+Or our old tomcat would rise from his slumbers with his tail up, and rub
+an imaginary skirt; and it was--
+
+"Regarde Mistigris! La fée Tarapatapoum est en train de lui frotter les
+oreilles!'"
+
+We mostly spoke French, in spite of strict injunctions to the contrary
+from our fathers and mothers, who were much concerned lest we should
+forget our English altogether.
+
+In time we made a kind of ingenious compromise; for Mimsey, who was
+full of resource, invented a new language, or rather two, which we
+called Frankingle and Inglefrank, respectively. They consisted in
+anglicizing French nouns and verbs and then conjugating and pronouncing
+them Englishly, or _vice versâ_.
+
+For instance, it was very cold, and the school-room window was open, so
+she would say in Frankingle--
+
+"Dispeach yourself to ferm the feneeter, Gogo. It geals to pier-fend! we
+shall be inrhumed!" or else, if I failed to immediately
+understand--"Gogo, il frise a splitter les stonnes--maque aste et chute
+le vindeau; mais chute--le donc vite! Je snize déjà!" which was
+Inglefrank.
+
+With this contrivance we managed to puzzle and mystify the uninitiated,
+English and French alike. The intelligent reader, who sees it all in
+print, will not be so easily taken in.
+
+When Mimsey was well enough, she would come with my cousins and me into
+the park, where we always had a good time--lying in ambush for red
+Indians, rescuing Madge Plunket from a caitiff knight, or else hunting
+snakes and field-mice and lizards, and digging for lizard's eggs, which
+we would hatch at home--that happy refuge for all manner of beasts, as
+well as little boys and girls. For there were squirrels, hedgehogs, and
+guinea-pigs; an owl, a raven, a monkey, and white mice; little birds
+that had strayed from the maternal nest before they could fly (they
+always died!), the dog Médor, and any other dog who chose; not to
+mention a gigantic rocking-horse made out of a real stuffed pony--the
+smallest pony that had ever been!
+
+Often our united high spirits were too boisterous for Mimsey. Dreadful
+headaches would come on, and she would sit in a corner, nursing a
+hedgehog with one arm and holding her thumb in her mouth with the other.
+Only when we were alone together was she happy, and then, _moult
+tristement!_
+
+On summer evenings whole parties of us, grown-up and small, would walk
+through the park and the Bois de Boulogne to the "Mare d'Auteuil"; as we
+got near enough for Médor to scent the water, he would bark and grin and
+gyrate, and go mad with excitement, for he had the gift of diving after
+stones, and liked to show it off.
+
+There we would catch huge olive-colored water-beetles, yellow
+underneath; red-bellied newts; green frogs, with beautiful spots and a
+splendid parabolic leap; gold and silver fish, pied with purply brown. I
+mention them in the order of their attractiveness. The fish were too
+tame and easily caught, and their beauty of too civilized an order; the
+rare, flat, vicious dytiscus "took the cake."
+
+Sometimes, even, we would walk through Boulogne to St. Cloud, to see the
+new railway and the trains--an inexhaustible subject of wonder and
+delight--and eat ices at the "Tête Noire" (a hotel which had been the
+scene of a terrible murder, that led to a cause célèbre); and we would
+come back through the scented night, while the glowworms were shining in
+the grass, and the distant frogs were croaking in the Mare d'Auteuil.
+Now and then a startled roebuck would gallop in short bounds across
+the path, from thicket to thicket, and Médor would go mad again and wake
+the echoes of the new Paris fortification, which were still in the
+course of construction.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+He had not the gift of catching roebucks!
+
+If my father were of the party, he would yodel Tyrolese melodies, and
+sing lovely songs of Boieldieu, Hérold, and Grétry; or "Drink to me only
+with thine eyes," or else the "Bay of Dublin" for Madame Seraskier, who
+had the nostalgia of her beloved country whenever her beloved
+husband was away.
+
+Or else we would break out into a jolly chorus and march to the tune--
+
+          _"Marie, trempe ton pain,
+            Marie, trempe ton pain,
+     Marie, trempe ton pain dans la soupe;
+            Marie, trempe ton pain,
+            Marie, trempe ton pain,
+     Marie, trempe ton pain dans le vin!"_
+
+Or else--
+
+     _"La--soupe aux choux--se fait dans la marmite;
+     Dans--la marmite--se fait la soupe aux choux."_
+
+which would give us all the nostalgia of supper.
+
+Or else, again, if it were too hot to sing, or we were too tired, M. le
+Major, forsaking the realms of fairy-land, and uncovering his high bald
+head as he walked, would gravely and reverently tell us of his great
+master, of Brienne, of Marengo, and Austerlitz; of the farewells at
+Fontainebleau, and the Hundred Days--never of St. Helena; he would not
+trust himself to speak to us of that! And gradually working his way to
+Waterloo, he would put his hat on, and demonstrate to us, by A+B, how,
+virtually, the English had lost the day, and why and wherefore. And on
+all the little party a solemn, awe-struck stillness would fall as we
+listened, and on some of us the sweet nostalgia of bed!
+
+Oh, the good old time!
+
+The night was consecrated for me by the gleam and scent and rustle of
+Madame Seraskier's gown, as I walked by her side in the deepening dusk--a
+gleam of yellow, or pale blue, or white--a scent of sandalwood--a rustle
+that told of a light, vigorous tread on firm, narrow, high-arched feet,
+that were not easily tired; of an anxious, motherly wish to get back to
+Mimsey, who was not strong enough for these longer expeditions.
+
+On the shorter ones I used sometimes to carry Mimsey on my back most of
+the way home (to please her mother)--a frail burden, with her poor,
+long, thin arms round my neck, and her pale, cold cheek against my
+ear--she weighed nothing! And when I was tired M. le Major would relieve
+me, but not for long. She always wanted to be carried by Gogo (for so I
+was called, for no reason whatever, unless it was that my name
+was Peter).
+
+She would start at the pale birches that shone out against the gloom,
+and shiver if a bough scraped her, and tell me all about the
+Erl-king--"mais comme ils sont là tous les deux" (meaning the Prince and
+the Fairy) "il n'y a absolument rien à craindre."
+
+And Mimsey was _si bonne camarade_, in spite of her solemnity and poor
+health and many pains, so grateful for small kindnesses, so appreciative
+of small talents, so indulgent to small vanities (of which she seemed to
+have no more share than her mother), and so deeply humorous in spite of
+her eternal gravity--for she was a real tomboy at heart--that I soon
+carried her, not only to please her mother, but to please herself, and
+would have done anything for her.
+
+As for M. le Major, he gradually discovered that Mimsey was half a
+martyr and half a saint, and possessed all the virtues under the sun.
+
+"Ah, vous ne la comprenez pas, cette enfant; vous verrez un jour quand
+ça ira mieux! vous verrez! elle est comme sa mère ... elle a toutes les
+intelligences de la tête et du coeur!" and he would wish it had pleased
+Heaven that he should be her grandfather--on the maternal side.
+
+_L'art d'être grandpère!_ This weather-beaten, war-battered old soldier
+had learned it, without ever having had either a son or a daughter of
+his own. He was a _born_ grandfather!
+
+Moreover, Mimsey and I had many tastes and passions in common--music,
+for instance, as well as Bewick's wood-cuts and Byron's poetry, and
+roast chestnuts and domestic pets; and above all, the Mare d'Auteuil,
+which she preferred in the autumn, when the brown and yellow leaves were
+eddying and scampering and chasing each other round its margin, or
+drifting on its troubled surface, and the cold wet wind piped through
+the dishevelled boughs of the forest, under the leaden sky.
+
+She said it was good to be there then, and think of home and the
+fireside; and better still, when home was reached at last, to think of
+the desolate pond we had left; and good, indeed, it was to trudge home
+by wood and park and avenue at dusk, when the bats were about, with
+Alfred and Charlie and Mimsey and Madge and Médor; swishing our way
+through the lush, dead leaves, scattering the beautiful, ripe
+horse-chestnut out of its split creamy case, or picking up acorns and
+beechnuts here and there as we went.
+
+And, once home, it was good, very good, to think how dark and lonesome
+and shivery it must be out there by the _mare_, as we squatted and
+chatted and roasted chestnuts by the wood fire in the school-room before
+the candles were lit--_entre chien et loup_, as was called the French
+gloaming--while Thérèse was laying the tea-things, and telling us the
+news, and cutting bread and butter; and my mother played the harp in the
+drawing-room above; till the last red streak died out of the wet west
+behind the swaying tree-tops, and the curtains were drawn, and there was
+light, and the appetites were let loose.
+
+I love to sit here, in my solitude and captivity, and recall every
+incident of that sweet epoch--to ache with the pangs of happy
+remembrance; than which, for the likes of me, great poets tell us there
+is no greater grief. This sorrow's crown of sorrow is my joy and my
+consolation, and ever has been; and I would not exchange it for youth,
+health, wealth, honor, and freedom; only for thrice happy childhood
+itself once more, over and over again, would I give up its thrice happy
+recollections.
+
+That it should not be all beer and skittles with us, and therefore apt
+to pall, my cousins and I had to work pretty hard. In the first place,
+my dear mother did all she could to make me an infant prodigy of
+learning. She tried to teach me Italian, which she spoke as fluently as
+English or French (for she had lived much in Italy), and I had to
+translate the "Gierusalemme Liberata" into both those latter
+languages--a task which has remained unfinished--and to render the
+"Allegro" and the "Penseroso" into Miltonian French prose, and "Le Cid"
+into Corneillian English. Then there were Pinnock's histories of Greece
+and Rome to master, and, of course, the Bible; and, every Sunday, the
+Collect, the Gospel, and the Epistle to get by heart. No, it was not all
+beer and skittles.
+
+It was her pleasure to teach, but, alas! not mine to learn; and we cost
+each other many a sigh, but loved each other all the more, perhaps.
+
+Then we went in the mornings, my cousins and I, to M. Saindou's,
+opposite, that we might learn French grammar and French-Latin and
+French-Greek. But on three afternoons out of the weekly six Mr. Slade, a
+Cambridge sizar stranded in Paris, came to anglicize (and neutralize)
+the Latin and Greek we had learned in the morning, and to show us what
+sorry stuff the French had made of them and of their quantities.
+
+Perhaps the Greek and Latin quantities are a luxury of English growth--a
+mere social test--a little pitfall of our own invention, like the letter
+_h_, for the tripping up of unwary pretenders; or else, French
+education being so deplorably cheap in those days, the school-masters
+there could not afford to take such fanciful superfluities into
+consideration; it was not to be done at the price.
+
+In France, be it remembered, the King and his greengrocer sent their
+sons to the same school (which did not happen to be M. Saindou's, by the
+way, where it was nearly all greengrocer and no King); and the fee for
+bed, board, and tuition, in all public schools alike, was something like
+thirty pounds a year.
+
+The Latin, in consequence, was without the distinction that comes of
+exclusiveness, and quite lacked that aristocratic flavor, so grateful
+and comforting to scholar and ignoramus alike, which the costly British
+public-school system (and the British accent) alone can impart to a dead
+language. When French is dead we shall lend it a grace it never had
+before; some of us even manage to do so already.
+
+That is (no doubt) why the best French writers so seldom point their
+morals and adorn their tales, as ours do, with the usual pretty,
+familiar, and appropriate lines out of Horace or Virgil; and why Latin
+is so little quoted in French talk, except here and there by a weary
+shop-walker, who sighs--
+
+"Varium et mutabile semper femina!" as he rolls up the unsold silk; or
+exclaims, "O rus! quando te aspiciam!" as he takes his railway ticket
+for Asnières on the first fine Sunday morning in spring.
+
+But this is a digression, and we have wandered far away from Mr. Slade.
+
+Good old Slade!
+
+We used to sit on the tone posts outside the avenue gate and watch for
+his appearance at a certain distant corner of the winding street.
+
+With his green tail coat, his stiff shirt collar, his flat thumbs stuck
+in the armholes of his nankeen waistcoat, his long flat feet turned
+inward, his reddish mutton-chop whiskers his hat on the back of his
+head, and his clean, fresh, blooming, virtuous, English face--the sight of
+him was not sympathetic when he appeared at last.
+
+[Illustration: "GOOD OLD SLADE"]
+
+Occasionally, in the course of his tuition, illness or domestic affairs
+would, to his great regret, detain him from our midst, and the beatitude
+we would experience when the conviction gradually dawned upon us that
+we were watching for him in vain was too deep for either words or deeds
+or outward demonstration of any sort. It was enough to sit on our stone
+posts and let it steal over us by degrees.
+
+These beatitudes were few and far between. It would be infelicitous,
+perhaps, to compare the occasional absences of a highly respectable
+English tutor to an angel's visits, but so we felt them.
+
+And then he would make up for it next afternoon, that conscientious
+Englishman; which was fair enough to our parents, but not to us. And
+then what extra severity, as interest for the beggarly loan of half an
+afternoon! What rappings on ink-stained knuckles with a beastly, hard,
+round, polished, heavy-wooded, business-like English ruler!
+
+It was our way in those days to think that everything English was
+beastly--an expression our parents thought we were much too fond
+of using.
+
+But perhaps we were not without some excuse for this unpardonable
+sentiment. For there was _another_ English family in Passy--the
+Prendergasts, an older family than ours--that is, the parents (and
+uncles and aunts) were middle-aged, the grandmother dead, and the
+children grown up. We had not the honor of their acquaintance. But
+whether that was their misfortune and our fault (or _vice versâ_) I
+cannot tell. Let us hope the former.
+
+They were of an opposite type to ours, and, though I say it, their type
+was a singularly unattractive one; perhaps it may have been the original
+of those caricatures of our compatriots by which French comic artists
+have sought to avenge Waterloo. It was stiff, haughty, contemptuous. It
+had prominent front teeth, a high nose, a long upper lip, a receding
+jaw; it had dull, cold, stupid, selfish green eyes, like a pike's, that
+swerved neither to right nor left, but looked steadily over peoples'
+heads as it stalked along in its pride of impeccable British
+self-righteousness.
+
+At the sudden sight of it (especially on Sundays) all the cardinal
+virtues became hateful on the spot and respectability a thing to run
+away from. Even that smooth, close-shaven cleanliness was so
+Puritanically aggressive as to make one abhor the very idea of soap.
+
+Its accent, when it spoke French (in shops), instead of being musical
+and sweet and sympathetic, like Madame Seraskier's, was barbarous and
+grotesque, with dreadful "ongs," and "angs," and "ows," and "ays"; and
+its manner overbearing, suspicious, and disdainful; and then we could
+hear its loud, insolent English asides; and though it was tall and
+straight and not outwardly deformed, it looked such a kill-joy skeleton
+at a feast, such a portentous carnival mask of solemn emptiness, such a
+dreary, doleful, unfunny figure of fun, that one felt Waterloo might
+some day be forgiven, even in Passy; but the Prendergasts, _never_!
+
+I have lived so long away from the world that, for all I know, this
+ancient British type, this "grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous
+bird of yore," may have become extinct, like another, but less
+unprepossessing bird--the dodo; whereby our state is the more gracious.
+
+But in those days, and generalizing somewhat hastily as young people
+are apt to do, we grew to think that England must be full of
+Prendergasts, and did not want to go there.
+
+To this universal English beastliness of things we made a few
+exceptions, it is true, but the list was not long: tea, mustard,
+pickles, gingerbread-nuts, and, of all things in the world, the English
+loaf of household bread that came to us once a week as a great treat and
+recompense for our virtues, and harmonized so well with Passy butter. It
+was too delicious! But there was always a difficulty, a dilemma--whether
+to eat it with butter alone, or with "cassonade" (French brown
+sugar) added.
+
+Mimsey knew her own mind, and loved it with French brown sugar, and if
+she were not there I would save for her half of my slices, and carefully
+cassonade them for her myself.
+
+On the other hand, we thought everything French the reverse of
+beastly--except all the French boys we knew, and at M. Saindou's there
+were about two hundred; then there were all the boys in Passy (whose
+name was legion, and who _did not_ go to M. Saindou's), and we knew all
+the boys in Passy. So that we were not utterly bereft of material for
+good, stodgy, crusty, patriotic English prejudice.
+
+Nor did the French boys fail to think us beastly in return, and
+sometimes to express the thought; especially the little vulgar boys,
+whose playground was the street--the _voyous de Passy_. They hated our
+white silk chimney-pot hats and large collars and Eton jackets, and
+called us "sacred godems," as their ancestors used to call ours in the
+days of Joan of Arc. Sometimes they would throw stones, and then there
+were collisions, and bleedings of impertinent little French noses, and
+runnings away of cowardly little French legs, and dreadful wails of "O
+là, là! O, là, là--maman!" when they were overtaken by English ones.
+
+Not but what _our_ noses were made to bleed now and then,
+unvictoriously, by a certain blacksmith--always the same young
+blacksmith--Boitard!
+
+It is always a young blacksmith who does these things--or a young
+butcher.
+
+Of course, for the honor of Great Britain, one of us finally licked him
+to such a tune that he has never been able to hold up his head since. It
+was about a cat. It came off at dusk, one Christmas Eve, on the "Isle of
+Swans," between Passy and Grenelle (too late to save the cat).
+
+I was the hero of this battle. "It's now or never," I thought, and saw
+scarlet, and went for my foe like a maniac. The ring was kept by Alfred
+and Charlie helped, oddly enough, by a couple of male Prendergasts, who
+so far forgot themselves as to take an interest in the proceedings.
+Madge and Mimsey looked on, terrified and charmed.
+
+It did not last long, and was worthy of being described by Homer, or
+even in _Bell's Life_. That is one of the reasons why I will not
+describe it. The two Prendergasts seemed to enjoy it very much while it
+lasted, and when it was over they remembered themselves again, and said
+nothing, and stalked away.
+
+As we grew older and wiser we had permission to extend our explorations
+to Meudon, Versailles, St. Germain, and other delightful places; to ride
+thither on hired horses, after having duly learned to ride at the famous
+"School of Equitation," in the Rue Duphot.
+
+[Illustration: "OMINOUS BIRDS OF YORE."]
+
+Also, we swam in those delightful summer baths in the Seine, that are so
+majestically called "Schools of Natation," and became past masters in
+"la coupe" (a stroke no other Englishman but ourselves has ever been
+quite able to manage), and in all the different delicate "nuances" of
+header-taking--"la coulante," "la hussarde," "la tête-bêche," "la tout
+ce que vous voudrez."
+
+Also, we made ourselves at home in Paris, especially old Paris.
+
+For instance, there was the island of St. Louis, with its stately old
+mansions _entre cour et jardin,_ behind grim stone portals and high
+walls where great magistrates and lawyers dwelt in dignified
+seclusion--the nobles of the rove: but where once had dwelt, in days
+gone by, the greater nobles of the sword-crusaders, perhaps, and knights
+templars, like Brian de Bois Guilbert.
+
+And that other more famous island, la Cité, where Paris itself was born,
+where Notre Dame reared its twin towers above the melancholy, gray,
+leprous walls and dirty brown roofs of the Hôtel-Dieu.
+
+Pathetic little tumble down old houses, all out of drawing and
+perspective, nestled like old spiders' webs between the buttresses of
+the great cathedral and on two sides of the little square in front (the
+Place du Parvis Notre Dame) stood ancient stone dwellings, with high
+slate roofs and elaborately wrought iron balconies. They seemed to have
+such romantic histories that I never tired of gazing at them, and
+wondering what the histories could be; and now I think of it, one of
+these very dwellings must have been the Hôtel de Gondelaurier, where,
+according to the most veracious historian that ever was, poor Esmeralda
+once danced and played the tambourine to divert the fair damsel
+Fleur-de-Lys de Gondelaurier and her noble friends, all of whom she so
+transcended in beauty, purity, goodness, and breeding (although she was
+but an untaught, wandering gypsy girl, out of the gutter); and there,
+before them all and the gay archer, she was betrayed to her final
+undoing by her goat, whom she had so imprudently taught how to spell
+the beloved name of "Phébus."
+
+Close by was the Morgue, that grewsome building which the great etcher
+Méryon has managed to invest with some weird fascination akin to that it
+had for me in those days--and has now, as I see it with the charmed
+eyes of Memory.
+
+La Morgue! what a fatal twang there is about the very name!
+
+[Illustration: SETTLING AN OLD SCORE.]
+
+After gazing one's fill at the horrors within (as became a
+healthy-minded English boy) it was but a step to the equestrian statue
+of Henri Quatre, on the Pont-Neuf (the oldest bridge in Paris, by the
+way); there, astride his long-tailed charger, he smiled, _le roy vert et
+galant,_ just midway between either bank of the historic river, just
+where it was most historic; and turned his back on the Paris of the
+Bourgeois King with the pear-shaped face and the mutton-chop whiskers.
+
+And there one stood, spellbound in indecision, like the ass of Buridan
+between two sacks of oats; for on either side, north or south of the
+Pont-Neuf, were to be found enchanting slums, all more attractive the
+ones than the others, winding up and down hill and roundabout and in and
+out, like haunting illustrations by Gustave Doré to _Drolatick Tales_ by
+Balzac (not seen or read by me till many years later, I beg to say).
+
+Dark, narrow, silent, deserted streets that would turn up afterwards in
+many a nightmare--with the gutter in the middle and towerlets and stone
+posts all along the sides; and high fantastic walls (where it was
+_défendre d'afficher_), with bits of old battlement at the top, and
+overhanging boughs of sycamore and lime, and behind them gray old
+gardens that dated from the days of Louis le Hutin and beyond! And
+suggestive names printed in old rusty iron letters at the street
+corners--"Rue Videgousset," "Rue Coupe-gorge," "Rue de la Vieille
+Truanderie," "Impasse de la Tour de Nesle," etc., that appealed to the
+imagination like a chapter from Hugo or Dumas.
+
+And the way to these was by long, tortuous, busy thoroughfares, most
+irregularly flagged, and all alive with strange, delightful people in
+blue blouses, brown woollen tricots, wooden shoes, red and white cotton
+nightcaps, rags and patches; most graceful girls, with pretty,
+self-respecting feet, and flashing eyes, and no head-dress but their own
+hair; gay, fat hags, all smile; thin hags, with faces of appalling
+wickedness or misery; precociously witty little gutter-imps of either
+sex; and such cripples! jovial hunchbacks, lusty blind beggars, merry
+creeping paralytics, scrofulous wretches who joked and punned about
+their sores; light-hearted, genial, mendicant monsters without arms or
+legs, who went ramping through the mud on their bellies from one
+underground wine-shop to another; and blue-chinned priests and
+barefooted brown monks and demure Sisters of Charity, and here and there
+a jolly chiffonnier with his hook, and his knap-basket behind; or a
+cuirassier, or a gigantic carbineer, or gay little "Hunter of Africa,"
+or a couple of bold gendarmes riding abreast, with their towering black
+_bonnets à poil;_ or a pair of pathetic little red-legged soldiers,
+conscripts just fresh from the country, with innocent light eyes and
+straw-coloured hair and freckled brown faces, walking hand in hand, and
+staring at all the pork-butchers' shops--and sometimes at the
+pork-butcher's wife!
+
+Then a proletarian wedding procession--headed by the bride and
+bridegroom, an ungainly pair in their Sunday best--all singing noisily
+together. Then a pauper funeral, or a covered stretcher, followed by
+sympathetic eyes on its way to the Hôtel-Dieu; or the last sacrament,
+with bell and candle, bound for the bedside of some humble agonizer _in
+extremis_--and we all uncovered as it went by.
+
+And then, for a running accompaniment of sound the clanging chimes, the
+itinerant street cries, the tinkle of the _marchand de coco,_ the drum,
+the _cor de chasse,_ the organ of Barbary, the ubiquitous pet parrot,
+the knife-grinder, the bawling fried-potato monger, and, most amusing of
+all, the poodle-clipper and his son, strophe and antistrophe, for every
+minute the little boy would yell out in his shrill treble that "his
+father clipped poodles for thirty sous, and was competent also to
+undertake the management of refractory tomcats," upon which the father
+would growl in his solemn bass, "My son speaks the truth"--_L'enfant
+dit vrai!_
+
+And rising above the general cacophony the din of the eternally cracking
+whip, of the heavy carwheel jolting over the uneven stones, the stamp
+and neigh of the spirited little French cart-horse and the music of his
+many bells, and the cursing and swearing and _hue! dià!_ of his driver!
+It was all entrancing.
+
+Thence home--to quite, innocent, suburban Passy--by the quays, walking
+on the top of the stone parapet all the way, so as to miss nothing (till
+a gendarme was in sight), or else by the Boulevards, the Rue de Rivoli,
+the Champs Élysées, the Avenue de St. Cloud, and the Chaussée de la
+Muette. What a beautiful walk! Is there another like it anywhere as it
+was then, in the sweet early forties of this worn-out old century, and
+before this poor scribe had reached his teens?
+
+Ah! it is something to have known that Paris, which lay at one's feet as
+one gazed from the heights of Passy, with all its pinnacles and spires
+and gorgeously-gilded domes, its Arch of Triumph, its Elysian Fields,
+its Field of Mars, its Towers of our Lady, its far-off Column of July,
+its Invalids, and Vale of Grace, and Magdalen, and Place of the Concord,
+where the obelisk reared its exotic peak by the beautiful unforgettable
+fountains.
+
+There flowed the many-bridged winding river, always the same way, unlike
+our tidal Thames, and always full; just beyond it was spread that
+stately, exclusive suburb, the despair of the newly rich and recently
+ennobled, where almost every other house bore a name which read like a
+page of French history; and farther still the merry, wicked Latin
+quarter and the grave Sorbonne, the Pantheon, the Garden of Plants; on
+the hither side, in the middle distance, the Louvre, where the kings of
+France had dwelt for centuries; the Tuileries, where "the King of the
+French" dwelt then, and just for a little while yet.
+
+Well I knew and loved it all; and most of all I loved it when the sun
+was setting at my back, and innumerable distant windows reflected the
+blood-red western flame. It seemed as though half Paris were on fire,
+with the cold blue east for a background.
+
+Dear Paris!
+
+Yes, it is something to have roamed over it as a small boy--a small
+English boy (that is, a small boy unattended by his mother or his
+nurse), curious, inquisitive, and indefatigable; full of imagination;
+all his senses keen with the keenness that belongs to the morning of
+life: the sight of a hawk, the hearing of a bat, almost the scent of
+a hound.
+
+Indeed, it required a nose both subtle and unprejudiced to understand
+and appreciate and thoroughly enjoy that Paris--not the Paris of M. le
+Baron Haussmann, lighted by gas and electricity, and flushed and drained
+by modern science; but the "good old Paris" of Balzac and Eugène Sue and
+_Les Mystères_--the Paris of dim oil-lanterns suspended from iron
+gibbets (where once aristocrats had been hung); of water-carriers who
+sold water from their hand-carts, and delivered it at your door (_au
+cinquème_) for a penny a pail--to drink of, and wash in, and cook
+with, and all.
+
+There were whole streets--and these by no means the least fascinating
+and romantic--where the unwritten domestic records of every house were
+afloat in the air outside it--records not all savory or sweet, but
+always full of interest and charm!
+
+One knew at a sniff as one passed the _porte cochère_ what kind of
+people lived behind and above; what they ate and what they drank, and
+what their trade was; whether they did their washing at home, and burned
+tallow or wax, and mixed chicory with their coffee, and were over-fond
+of Gruyère cheese--the biggest, cheapest, plainest, and most formidable
+cheese in the world; whether they fried with oil or butter, and liked
+their omelets overdone and garlic in their salad, and sipped
+black-currant brandy or anisette as a liqueur; and were overrun with
+mice, and used cats or mouse-traps to get rid of them, or neither; and
+bought violets, or pinks, or gillyflowers in season, and kept them too
+long; and fasted on Friday with red or white beans, or lentils, or had a
+dispensation from the Pope--or, haply, even dispensed with the Pope's
+dispensation.
+
+For of such a telltale kind were the overtones in that complex, odorous
+clang.
+
+I will not define its fundamental note--ever there, ever the same; big
+with a warning of quick-coming woe to many households; whose unheeded
+waves, slow but sure, and ominous as those that rolled on great
+occasions from le Bourdon de Notre Dame (the Big Ben of Paris), drove
+all over the gay city and beyond, night and day--penetrating every
+corner, overflowing the most secret recesses, drowning the very incense
+by the altar-steps.
+
+     "_Le pauvre en sa cabane où le chaume le couvre
+         Est sujet à ses lois;
+     Et la garde qui veille aux barrières du Louvre
+         N'en défend point nos rois_."
+
+And here, as I write, the faint, scarcely perceptible, ghost-like
+suspicion of a scent--a mere nostalgic fancy, compound, generic,
+synthetic and all-embracing--an abstract olfactory symbol of the "Tout
+Paris" of fifty years ago, comes back to me out of the past; and fain
+would I inhale it in all its pristine fulness and vigour. For scents,
+like musical sounds, are rare sublimaters of the essence of memory (this
+is a prodigious fine phrase--I hope it means something), and scents
+need not be seductive in themselves to recall the seductions of scenes
+and days gone by.
+
+Alas! scents cannot be revived at will, like an
+
+     "_Air doux et tendre
+         Jadis aimé_!"
+
+Oh, that I could hum or whistle an old French smell! I could evoke all
+Paris, sweet, prae-imperial Paris, in a single whiff!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In such fashion did we three small boys, like the three musketeers (the
+fame of whose exploits was then filling all France), gather and pile up
+sweet memories, to chew the cud thereof in after years, when far away
+and apart.
+
+Of all that _bande joyeuse_--old and young and middle-aged, from M. le
+Major to Mimsey Seraskier--all are now dead but me--all except dear
+Madge, who was so pretty and light-hearted; and I have never seen
+her since.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thus have I tried, with as much haste as I could command (being one of
+the plodding sort) to sketch that happy time, which came to an end
+suddenly and most tragically when I was twelve years old.
+
+My dear and jovial happy-go-lucky father was killed in a minute by the
+explosion of a safety lamp of his own invention, which was to have
+superseded Sir Humphry Davy's, and made our fortune! What a brutal
+irony of fate.
+
+So sanguine was he of success, so confident that his ship had come home
+at last, that he had been in treaty for a nice little old manor in Anjou
+(with a nice little old castle to match), called la Marière, which had
+belonged to his ancestors, and from which we took our name (for we were
+Pasquier de la Marière, of quite a good old family); and there we were
+to live on our own land, as _gentilshommes campagnards_, and be French
+for evermore, under a paternal, pear-faced bourgeois king as a temporary
+_pis-aller_ until Henri Cinq, Comte de Chambord, should come to his own
+again, and make us counts and barons and peers of France--Heaven
+knows what for!
+
+My mother, who was beside herself with grief, went over to London, where
+this miserable accident had occurred, and had barely arrived there when
+she was delivered of a still-born child, and died almost immediately;
+and I became an orphan in less than a week, and a penniless one. For it
+turned out that my father had by this time spent every penny of his own
+and my mother's capital, and had, moreover, died deeply in debt. I was
+too young and too grief-stricken to feel anything but the terrible
+bereavement, but it soon became patent to me that an immense alteration
+was to be made in my mode of life.
+
+A relative of my mother's, Colonel Ibbetson (who was well off) came to
+Passy to do his best for me, and pay what debts had been incurred in the
+neighborhood, and settle my miserable affairs.
+
+After a while it was decided by him and the rest of the family that I
+should go back with him to London, there to be disposed of for the
+best, according to his lights.
+
+And on a beautiful June Morning, redolent of lilac and syringa, gay with
+dragon-flies and butterflies and bumblebees, my happy childhood ended as
+it had begun. My farewells were heartrending (to me), but showed that I
+could inspire affection as well as feel it, and that was some
+compensation for my woe.
+
+"Adieu, cher Monsieur Gogo. Bonne chance, et le Bon Dieu vous bénisse,"
+said le Père et la Mère François. Tears trickled down the Major's hooked
+nose on to his mustache, now nearly white.
+
+Madame Seraskier strained me to her kind heart, and blessed and kissed
+me again and again, and rained her warm tears on my face; and hers was
+the last figure I saw as our fly turned into the Rue de la Tour on our
+way to London, Colonel Ibbetson exclaiming--
+
+"Gad! who's the lovely young giantess that seems so fond of you, you
+little rascal, hey? By George! you young Don Giovanni, I'd have given
+something to be in your place! And who's that nice old man with the long
+green coat and the red ribbon? A _vieille moustache_, I suppose: almost
+like a gentleman. Precious few Frenchmen can do that!"
+
+Such was Colonel Ibbetson.
+
+And then and there, even as he spoke, a little drop of sullen, chill
+dislike to my guardian and benefactor, distilled from his voice, his
+aspect, the expression of his face, and his way of saying things,
+suddenly trickled into my consciousness--never to be whiped away!
+
+As for so poor Mimsey, her grief was so overwhelming that she could not
+come out and wish me goodbye like the others; and it led, as I
+afterwards heard, to a long illness, the worst she ever had; and when
+she recovered it was to find that her beautiful mother was no more.
+
+[Illustration:]
+
+Madame Seraskier died of the cholera, and so did le Père et la Mère
+François, and Madame Pelé, and one of the Napoleonic prisoners (not M.
+le Major), and several other people we had known, including a servant of
+our own, Thérèse, the devoted Thérèse, to whom we were all devoted in
+return. That malodorous tocsin, which I have compared to the big bell of
+Notre Dame, had warned, and warned, and warned in vain.
+
+The _maison de santé_ was broken up. M. le Major and his friends went
+and roosted on parole elsewhere, until a good time arrived for them,
+when their lost leader came back and remained--first as President of the
+French Republic, then as Emperor of the French themselves. No more
+parole was needed after that.
+
+My grandmother and Aunt Plunket and her children fled in terror to
+Tours, and Mimsey went to Russia with her father.
+
+Thus miserably ended that too happy septennate, and so no more at
+present of
+
+     "_Le joli lieu de ma naissance_!"
+
+
+
+
+Part Two
+
+
+The next decade of my outer life is so uninteresting, even to myself,
+that I will hurry through it as fast as I can. It will prove dull
+reading, I fear.
+
+[Illustration:]
+
+My Uncle Ibbetson (as I now called him) took to me and arranged to
+educate and start me in life, and make "a gentleman" of me--an "English
+gentleman." But I had to change my name and adopt his; for some reason I
+did not know, he seemed to hate my father's very name. Perhaps it was
+because he had injured my father through life in many ways, and my
+father had always forgiven him; a very good reason! Perhaps it was
+because he had proposed to my mother three times when she was a girl,
+and had been thrice refused! (After the third time, he went to India for
+seven years, and just before his departure my father and mother were
+married, and a year after that I was born.)
+
+So Pierre Pasquier de la Marière, _alias_ Monsieur Gogo, became Master
+Peter Ibbetson, and went to Bluefriars, the gray-coat school, where he
+spent six years--an important slice out of a man's life, especially
+at that age.
+
+I hated the garb, I hated the surroundings--the big hospital at the
+back, and that reek of cruelty, drunkenness, and filth, the
+cattle-market--where every other building was either a slaughter-house,
+a gin-palace, or a pawnbroker's shop, more than all I hated the gloomy
+jail opposite, where they sometimes hanged a man in public on a Monday
+morning. This dismal prison haunted my dreams when I wanted to dream of
+Passy, of my dear dead father and mother and Madame Seraskier.
+
+For the first term or two they were ever in my thoughts, and I was
+always trying to draw their profiles on desks and slates and copybooks,
+till at last all resemblance seemed to fade out of them; and then I drew
+M. le Major till his side face became quite demoralized and impossible,
+and ceased to be like anything in life. Then I fell back on others: le
+Père François, with his eternal _bonnet de colon_ and sabots stuffed
+with straw; the dog Médor, the rocking-horse, and all the rest of the
+menagerie; the diligence that brought me away from Paris; the heavily
+jack-booted couriers in shiny hats and pigtails, and white breeches, and
+short-tailed blue coats covered with silver buttons, who used to ride
+through Passy, on their way to and fro between the Tuileries and St.
+Cloud, on little, neighing, gray stallions with bells round their necks
+and tucked-up tails, and beautiful heads like the horses' heads in the
+Elgin Marbles.
+
+In my sketches they always looked and walked and trotted the same way:
+to the left, or westward as it would be on the map. M. le Major, Madame
+Seraskier, Médor, the diligences and couriers, were all bound westward
+by common consent--all going to London, I suppose, to look after me, who
+was so dotingly fond of them.
+
+Some of the boys used to admire these sketches and preserve them--some
+of the bigger boys would value my idealized (!) profiles of Madame
+Seraskier, with eyelashes quite an inch in length, and an eye three
+times the size of her mouth; and thus I made myself an artistic
+reputation for a while. But it did not last long, for my vein was
+limited; and soon another boy came to the school, who surpassed me in
+variety and interest of subject, and could draw profiles looking either
+way with equal ease; he is now a famous Academician, and seems to have
+preserved much of his old facility.[A]
+
+[Footnote A: _Note_.--I have here omitted several pages, containing a
+description in detail of my cousin's life "at Bluefriars"; and also the
+portraits (not always flattering) which he has written of masters and
+boys, many of whom are still alive, and some of whom have risen to
+distinction; but these sketches would be without special interest unless
+the names were given as well, and that would be unadvisable for many
+reasons. Moreover, there is not much in what I have left out that has
+any bearing on his subsequent life, or the development of his character.
+MADGE PLUNKET.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thus, on the whole, my school career was neither happy nor unhappy, nor
+did I distinguish myself in any way, nor (though I think I was rather
+liked than otherwise) make any great or lasting friendships; on the
+other hand. I did not in any way disgrace myself, nor make a single
+enemy that I knew of. Except that I grew our of the common tall and
+very strong, a more commonplace boy than I must have seemed (after my
+artistic vein gad run itself dry) never went to a public school. So much
+for my outer life at Bluefriars.
+
+[Illustration: A DREAM OF CHIVALRY]
+
+But I had an inner world of my own, whose capital was Passy, whose fauna
+and flora were not to be surpassed by anything in Regent's Park or the
+Zoological Gardens.
+
+It was good to think of it by day, to dream of it by night, _although I
+had not yet learned how to dream!_
+
+There were soon other and less exclusive regions, however, which I
+shared with other boys of that bygone day. Regions of freedom and
+delight, where I heard the ominous crack of Deerslayer's rifle, and was
+friends with Chingachgook and his noble son--the last, alas! of the
+Mohicans: where Robin Hood and Friar Tuck made merry, and exchanged
+buffets with Lion-hearted Richard under the green-wood tree: where
+Quentin Durward, happy squire of dames, rode midnightly by their side
+through the gibbet-and-gipsy-haunted forests of Touraine.... Ah! I had
+my dream of chivalry!
+
+Happy times and climes! One must be a gray-coated school-boy, in the
+heart of foggy London, to know that nostalgia.
+
+Not, indeed, but what London has its merits. Sam Weller lived there, and
+Charley Bates, and the irresistible Artful Dodger--and Dick Swiveller,
+and his adorable Marchioness, who divided my allegiance with Rebecca of
+York and sweet Diana Vernon.
+
+It was good to be an English boy in those days, and care for such
+friends as these! But it was good to be a French boy also; to have known
+Paris, to possess the true French feel of things--and the language.
+
+Indeed, bilingual boys--boys double-tongued from their very birth
+(especially in French and English)--enjoy certain rare privileges. It is
+not a bad thing for a school-boy (since a school-boy he must be) to hail
+from two mother-countries if he can, and revel now and then in the
+sweets of homesickness for that of his two mother-countries in which he
+does not happen to be; and read _Les Trois Mousquetaires_ in the
+cloisters of Bluefriars, or _Ivanhoe_ in the dull, dusty prison-yard
+that serves for a playground in so many a French _lycée_!
+
+Without listening, he hears all round him the stodgy language of every
+day, and the blatant shouts of his school-fellows, in the voices he
+knows so painfully well--those shrill trebles, those cracked barytones
+and frog-like early basses! There they go, bleating and croaking and
+yelling; Dick, Tom, and Harry, or Jules, Hector, and Alphonse! How
+vaguely tiresome and trivial and commonplace they are--those too
+familiar sounds; yet what an additional charm they lend to that so
+utterly different but equally familiar word-stream that comes silently
+flowing into his consciousness through his rapt eyes! The luxurious
+sense of mental exclusiveness and self-sequestration is made doubly
+complete by the contrast!
+
+And for this strange enchantment to be well and thoroughly felt, both
+his languages must be native; not acquired, however perfectly. Every
+single word must have its roots deep down in a personal past so remote
+for him as to be almost unremembered; the very sound and printed aspect
+of each must be rich in childish memories of home; in all the countless,
+nameless, priceless associations that make it sweet and fresh and
+strong, and racy of the soil.
+
+Oh! Porthos, Athos, and D'Artagnan--how I loved you, and your immortal
+squires, Planchet, Grimaud, Mousqueton! How well and wittily you spoke
+the language I adored--better even than good Monsieur Lallemand, the
+French master at Bluefriars, who could wield the most irregular
+subjunctives as if they had been mere feathers--trifles light as air.
+
+Then came the Count of Monte-Cristo, who taught me (only too well) his
+terrible lesson of hatred and revenge; and _Les Mystères de Paris, Le
+Juif Errant_, and others.
+
+But no words that I can think of in either mother-tongue can express
+what I felt when first, through these tear-dimmed eyes of mine, and deep
+into my harrowed soul, came silently flowing the never-to-be-forgotten
+history of poor Esmeralda,[A] my first love! whose cruel fate filled
+with pity, sorrow, and indignation the last term of my life at school.
+It was the most important, the most solemn, the most epoch-making event
+of my school life. I read it, reread it, and read it again. I have not
+been able to read it since; it is rather long! but how well I remember
+it, and how short it seemed then! and oh! how short those
+well-spent hours!
+
+[Footnote A: Notre Dame de Paris, par Victor Hugo.]
+
+That mystic word [Greek: Anagkae]! I wrote it on the flyleaf of all my
+books. I carved it on my desk. I intoned it in the echoing cloisters! I
+vowed I would make a pilgrimage to Notre Dame some day, that I might
+hunt for it in every hole and corner there, and read it with my own
+eyes, and feel it with my own forefinger.
+
+And then that terrible prophetic song the old hag sings in the dark
+slum--how it haunted me, too! I could not shake it out of my troubled
+consciousness for months:
+
+     _Grouille, grève, grève, grouille,
+     File, File, ma quenouille:_
+
+     _File sa corde au bourreau
+     Qui siffle dans le préau.
+
+     [Greek:"'Anagkae!'Anagkae!'Anagkae_!"]
+
+Yes; it was worth while having been a little French boy just for a few
+years.
+
+I especially found it so during the holidays, which I regularly spent at
+Bluefriars; for there was a French circulating library in Holborn, close
+by--a paradise. It was kept by a delightful old French lady who had seen
+better days, and was very kind to me, and did not lend me all the books
+I asked for!
+
+Thus irresistibly beguiled by these light wizards of our degenerate age,
+I dreamed away most of my school life, utterly deaf to the voices of the
+older enchanters--Homer, Horace, Virgil--whom I was sent to school on
+purpose to make friends with; a deafness I lived to deplore, like other
+dunces, when it was too late.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And I was not only given to dream by day--I dreamed by night; my sleep
+was full of dreams--terrible nightmares, exquisite visions, strange
+scenes full of inexplicable reminiscence; all vague and incoherent, like
+all men's dreams that have hitherto been; _for I had not yet learned how
+to dream_.
+
+A vast world, a dread and beautiful chaos, an ever-changing kaleidoscope
+of life, too shadowy and dim to leave any lasting impression on the
+busy, waking mind; with here and there more vivid images of terror or
+delight, that one remembered for a few hours with a strange wonder and
+questioning, as Coleridge remembered his Abyssinian maid who played
+upon the dulcimer (a charming and most original combination).
+
+The whole cosmos is in a man's brains--as much of it, at least, as a
+man's brains will hold; perhaps it is nowhere else. And when sleep
+relaxes the will, and there are no earthly surroundings to distract
+attention--no duty, pain, or pleasure to compel it--riderless Fancy
+takes the bit in its teeth, and the whole cosmos goes mad and has its
+wild will of us.
+
+[Illustration: "NOTRE DAME DE PARIS."]
+
+Ineffable false joys, unspeakable false terror and distress, strange
+phantoms only seen as in a glass darkly, chase each other without rhyme
+or reason, and play hide-and-seek across the twilit field and through
+the dark recesses of our clouded and imperfect consciousness.
+
+And the false terrors and distress, however unspeakable, are no worse
+than such real terrors and distress as are only too often the waking lot
+of man, or even so bad; but the ineffable false joys transcend all
+possible human felicity while they last, and a little while it is! We
+wake, and wonder, and recall the slight foundation on which such
+ultra-human bliss has seemed to rest. What matters the foundation if but
+the bliss be there, and the brain has nerves to feel it?
+
+Poor human nature, so richly endowed with nerves of anguish, so
+splendidly organized for pain and sorrow, is but slenderly equipped
+for joy.
+
+What hells have we not invented for the afterlife! Indeed, what hells we
+have often made of this, both for ourselves and others, and at really
+such a very small cost of ingenuity, after all!
+
+Perhaps the biggest and most benighted fools have been the best
+hell-makers.
+
+Whereas the best of our heavens is but a poor perfunctory conception,
+for all that the highest and cleverest among us have done their very
+utmost to decorate and embellish it, and make life there seem worth
+living. So impossible it is to imagine or invent beyond the sphere of
+our experience.
+
+Now, these dreams of mine (common to many) of the false but ineffable
+joys, are they not a proof that there exist in the human brain hidden
+capacities, dormant potentialities of bliss, unsuspected hitherto, to
+be developed some day, perhaps, and placed within the reach of all,
+wakers and sleepers alike?
+
+A sense of ineffable joy, attainable at will, and equal in intensity and
+duration to (let us say) an attack of sciatica, would go far to equalize
+the sorrowful, one-sided conditions under which we live.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But there is one thing which, as a school-boy, I never dreamed--namely,
+that I, and one other holding a torch, should one day, by common
+consent, find our happiness in exploring these mysterious caverns of the
+brain; and should lay the foundations of order where only misrule had
+been before: and out of all those unreal, waste, and transitory realms
+of illusion, evolve a real, stable, and habitable world, which all who
+run may reach.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At last I left school for good, and paid a visit to my Uncle Ibbetson in
+Hopshire, where he was building himself a lordly new pleasure-house on
+his own land, as the old one he had inherited a year or two ago was no
+longer good enough for him.
+
+It was an uninteresting coast on the German Ocean, without a rock, or a
+cliff, or a pier, or a tree; even without cold gray stones for the sea
+to break on--nothing but sand!--a bourgeois kind of sea, charmless in
+its best moods, and not very terrible in its wrath, except to a few
+stray fishermen whom it employed, and did not seem to reward very
+munificently.
+
+Inland it was much the same. One always thought of the country as gray,
+until one looked and found that it was green; and then, if one were old
+and wise, one thought no more about it, and turned one's gaze inward.
+Moreover, it seemed to rain incessantly.
+
+But it was the country and the sea, after Bluefriars and the
+cloisters--after Newgate, St. Bartholomew, and Smithfield.
+
+And one could fish and bathe in the sea after all, and ride in the
+country, and even follow the hounds, a little later; which would have
+been a joy beyond compare if one had not been blessed with an uncle who
+thought one rode like a French tailor, and told one so, and mimicked
+one, in the presence of charming young ladies who rode in perfection.
+
+In fact, it was heaven itself by comparison, and would have remained so
+longer but for Colonel Ibbetson's efforts to make a gentleman of me--an
+English gentleman.
+
+What is a gentleman? It is a grand old name; but what does it mean?
+
+At one time, to say of a man that he is a gentleman, is to confer on him
+the highest title of distinction we can think of; even if we are
+speaking of a prince.
+
+At another, to say of a man that he is _not_ a gentleman is almost to
+stigmatize him as a social outcast, unfit for the company of his
+kind--even if it is only one haberdasher speaking of another.
+
+_Who_ is a gentleman, and yet who _is not_?
+
+The Prince of Darkness was one, and so was Mr. John Halifax, if we are
+to believe those who knew them best; and so was one "Pelham," according
+to the late Sir Edward Bulwer, Earl of Lytton, etc.; and it certainly
+seemed as if _he_ ought to know.
+
+And I was to be another, according to Roger Ibbetson, Esquire, of
+Ibbetson Hall, late Colonel of the--, and it certainly seemed as if
+he ought to know too! The word was as constantly on his lips (when
+talking to _me_) as though, instead of having borne her Majesty's
+commission, he were a hairdresser's assistant who had just come into an
+independent fortune.
+
+This course of tuition began pleasantly enough, before I left London, by
+his sending me to his tailors, who made me several beautiful suits;
+especially an evening suit, which has lasted me for life, alas; and
+these, after the uniform of the gray-coat school, were like an
+initiation to the splendors of freedom and manhood.
+
+Colonel Ibbetson--or Uncle Ibbetson, as I used to call him--was my
+mother's first cousin; my grandmother, Mrs. Biddulph, was the sister of
+his father, the late Archdeacon Ibbetson, a very pious, learned, and
+exemplary divine, of good family.
+
+But his mother (the Archdeacon's second wife) had been the only child
+and heiress of an immensely rich pawnbroker, by name Mendoza; a
+Portuguese Jew, with a dash of colored blood in his veins besides, it
+was said; and, indeed, this remote African strain still showed itself in
+Uncle Ibbetson's thick lips, wide open nostrils, and big black eyes with
+yellow whites--and especially in his long, splay, lark-heeled feet,
+which gave both himself and the best bootmaker in London a great deal
+of trouble.
+
+Otherwise, and in spite of his ugly face, he was not without a certain
+soldier-like air of distinction, being very tall and powerfully built.
+He wore stays, and an excellent wig, for he was prematurely bald; and he
+carried his hat on one side, which (in my untutored eyes) made him look
+very much like a "_swell_," but not quite like a _gentleman_.
+
+To wear your hat jauntily cocked over one eye, and yet "look like a
+gentleman!"
+
+It can be done, I am told; and has been, and is even still! It is not,
+perhaps, a very lofty achievement--but such as it is, it requires a
+somewhat rare combination of social and physical gifts in the wearer;
+and the possession of either Semitic or African blood does not seem to
+be one of these.
+
+[Illustration: "PORTRAIT CHARMANT, PORTRAIT DE MON AMIE ..."]
+
+Colonel Ibbetson could do a little of everything--sketch (especially a
+steam-boat on a smooth sea, with beautiful thick smoke reflected in the
+water), play the guitar, sing chansonnettes and canzonets, write society
+verses, quote De Musset--
+
+     _"Avez-vous vu dans Barcelone
+     Une Andalouse au sein bruni?"_
+
+He would speak French whenever he could, even to an English ostler, and
+then recollect himself suddenly, and apologize for his thoughtlessness;
+and even when he spoke English, he would embroider it with little
+two-penny French tags and idioms: "Pour tout potage"; "Nous avons changé
+tout cela"; "Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galère?" etc.; or
+Italian, "Chi lo sa?" "Pazienza!" "Ahimè!" or even Latin, "Eheu
+fugaces," and "Vidi tantum!" for he had been an Eton boy. It must have
+been very cheap Latin, for I could always understand it myself! He drew
+the line at German and Greek; fortunately, for so do I. He was a
+bachelor, and his domestic arrangements had been irregular, and I will
+not dwell upon them; but his house, as far as it went, seemed to promise
+better things.
+
+His architect, Mr. Lintot, an extraordinary little man, full of genius
+and quite self-made, became my friend and taught me to smoke, and drink
+gin and water.
+
+He did his work well; but of an evening he used to drink more than was
+good for him, and rave about Shelley, his only poet. He would recite
+"The Skylark" (his only poem) with uncertain _h_'s, and a rather
+cockney accent--
+
+     "'_Ail to thee blythe sperrit!
+     Bird thou never wert,
+     That from 'eaven, or near it
+     Po'rest thy full 'eart
+     In profuse strains of hunpremeditated hart_."
+
+As the evening wore on his recitations became "low comic," and quite
+admirable for accent and humour. He could imitate all the actors in
+London (none of which I had seen) so well as to transport me with
+delight and wonder; and all this with nobody but me for an audience, as
+we sat smoking and drinking together in his room at the "Ibbetson Arms."
+
+I felt grateful to adoration.
+
+Later still, he would become sentimental again; and dilate to me on the
+joys of his wedded life, on the extraordinary of intellect and beauty of
+Mrs. Lintot. First he would describe to me the beauties of her mind, and
+compare her to "L.E.L." and Felicia Hemans. Then he would fall back on
+her physical perfections; there was nobody worthy to be compared to her
+in these--but I draw the veil.
+
+He was very egotistical. Whatever he did, whatever he liked, whatever
+belonged to him, was better than anything else in world; and he was
+cleverer than any one else, except Mrs. Lintot, to whom he yielded the
+palm; and then he would cheer up and become funny again.
+
+In fact his self-satisfaction was quite extraordinary; and what is more
+extraordinary still, it was not a bit offensive--at least, to me;
+perhaps because he was such a tiny little man; or because much of this
+vanity of his seemed to have no very solid foundation, for it was not of
+the gifts I most admired in him that he was vainest; or because it came
+out most when he was most tipsy, and genial tipsiness redeems so much;
+or else because he was most vain about things I should never have been
+vain about myself; and the most unpardonable vanity in others is that
+which is secretly our own, whether we are conscious of it or not.
+
+[Illustration: "I FELT GRATEFUL TO ADORATION."]
+
+And then he was the first funny man I had ever met. What a gift it is!
+He was always funny when he tried to be, whether one laughed with him or
+at him, and I loved him for it. Nothing on earth is more pathetically
+pitiable than the funny man when he still tries and succeeds no longer.
+
+The moment Lintot's vein was exhausted, he had the sense to leave off
+and begin to cry, which was still funny; and then I would jump out of
+his clothes and into his bed and be asleep in a second, with the tears
+still trickling down his little nose--and even that was funny!
+
+But next morning he was stern and alert and indefatiguable, as though
+gin and poetry and conjugal love had never been, and fun were a
+capital crime.
+
+Uncle Ibbetson thought highly of him as an architect, but not otherwise;
+he simply made use of him.
+
+"He's a terrible little snob, of course, and hasn't got an _h_ in his
+head" (as if _that_ were a capital crime); "but he's very clever--look
+at that campanile--and then he's cheap, my boy, cheap."
+
+There were several fine houses in fine parks not very far from Ibbetson
+Hall; but although Uncle Ibbetson appeared in name and wealth and social
+position to be on a par with their owners, he was not on terms of
+intimacy with any of them, or even of acquaintance, as far as I know,
+and spoke of them with contempt, as barbarians--people with whom he had
+nothing in common. Perhaps they, too, had found out this
+incompatibility, especially the ladies; for, school-boy as I was, I was
+not long in discovering that his manner towards those of the other sex
+was not always such as to please either of them or their husbands or
+fathers or brothers. The way he looked at them was enough. Indeed, most
+of his lady-friends and acquaintances through life had belonged to the
+_corps de ballet_, the _demi-monde_, etc.--not, I should imagine, the
+best school of manners in the world.
+
+On the other hand, he was very friendly with some families in the town;
+the doctor's, the rector's, his own agent's (a broken-down brother
+officer and bosom friend, who had ceased to love him since he received
+his pay); and he used to take Mr. Lintot and me to parties there; and he
+was the life of those parties.
+
+He sang little French songs, with no voice, but quite a good French
+accent, and told little anecdotes with no particular point, but in
+French and Italian (so that the point was never missed); and we all
+laughed and admired without quite knowing why, except that he was the
+lord of the manor.
+
+On these festive occasions poor Lintot's confidence and power of amusing
+seemed to desert him altogether; he sat glum in a corner.
+
+Though a radical and a sceptic, and a peace-at-any-price man, he was
+much impressed by the social status of the army and the church.
+
+Of the doctor, a very clever and accomplished person, and the best
+educated man for miles around, he thought little; but the rector, the
+colonel, the poor captain, even, now a mere land-steward, seemed to fill
+him with respectful awe. And for his pains he was cruelly snubbed by
+Mrs. Captain and Mrs. Rector and their plain daughters, who little
+guessed what talents he concealed, and thought him quite a common little
+man, hardly fit to turn over the leaves of their music.
+
+It soon became pretty evident that Ibbetson was very much smitten with
+a Mrs. Deane, the widow of a brewer, a very handsome woman indeed, in
+her own estimation and mine, and everybody else's, except Mr. Lintot's,
+who said, "Pooh, you should see my wife!"
+
+Her mother, Mrs. Glyn, excelled us all in her admiration of Colonel
+Ibbetson.
+
+For instance, Mrs. Deane would play some common little waltz of the
+cheap kind that is never either remembered or forgotten, and Mrs. Glyn
+would exclaim, "_Is_ not that _lovely_?"
+
+And Ibbetson would say: "Charming! charming! Whose is it? Rossini's?
+Mozart's?"
+
+"Why, no, my dear colonel. Don't you remember? _It's your own_!"
+
+"Ah, so it is! I had quite forgotten." And general laughter and applause
+would burst forth at such a natural mistake on the part of our
+great man.
+
+Well, I could neither play nor sing, and found it far easier by this
+time to speak English than French, especially to English people who were
+ignorant of any language but their own. Yet sometimes Colonel Ibbetson
+would seem quite proud of me.
+
+"Deux mètres, bien sonnés!" he would say, alluding to my stature, "et le
+profil d'Antinoüs!" which he would pronounce without the two little dots
+on the _u_.
+
+And afterwards, if he had felt his evening a pleasant one, if he had
+sung all he knew, if Mrs. Deane had been more than usually loving and
+self-surrendering, and I had distinguished myself by skilfully turning
+over the leaves when her mother had played the piano, he would tell me,
+as we walked home together, that I "did credit to his name, and that I
+would make an excellent figure in the world as soon as I had _décrassé_
+myself; that I must get another dress-suit from his tailor, just an
+eighth of an inch longer in the tails; that I should have a commission
+in his old regiment (the Eleventeenth Royal Bounders), a deuced crack
+cavalry regiment; and see the world and break a few hearts (it is not
+for nothing that our friends have pretty wives and sisters); and finally
+marry some beautiful young heiress of title, and make a home for him
+when he was a poor solitary old fellow. Very little would do for him: a
+crust of bread, a glass of wine and water, and a clean napkin, a couple
+of rooms, and an old piano and a few good books. For, of course,
+Ibbetson Hall would be mine and every penny he possessed in the world."
+
+[Illustration:]
+
+All this in confidential French--lest the very clouds should hear
+us--and with the familiar thee and thou of blood-relationship, which I
+did not care to return.
+
+It did not seem to bode very serious intentions towards Mrs. Deane, and
+would scarcely have pleased her mother.
+
+Or else, if something had crossed him, and Mrs. Deane had flirted
+outrageously with somebody else, and he had not been asked to sing (or
+somebody else had), he would assure me in good round English that I was
+the most infernal lout that ever disgraced a drawing-room, or ate a man
+out of house and home, and that he was sick and ashamed of me. "Why
+can't you sing, you d--d French milksop? The d--d roulade-monger of a
+father of yours could sing fast enough, if he could do nothing else,
+confound him! Why can't you talk French, you infernal British booby? Why
+can't you hand round the tea and muffins, confound you! Why, twice Mrs.
+Glyn dropped her pocket-handkerchief and had to pick it up herself!
+What, 'at the other end of the room,' were you? Well, you should have
+skipped _across_ the room, and picked it up, and handed it to her with a
+pretty speech, like a gentleman! When I was your age I was _always_ on
+the lookout for ladies' pocket-handkerchiefs to drop--or their fans! I
+never missed _one_!"
+
+Then he would take me out to shoot with him (for it was quite essential
+that an English gentleman should be a sportsman)--a terrible ordeal to
+both of us.
+
+A snipe that I did not want to kill in the least would sometimes rise
+and fly right and left like a flash of lightning, and I would miss
+it--always; and he would d--n me for a son of a confounded French
+Micawber, and miss the next himself, and get into a rage and thrash his
+dog, a pointer that I was very fond of. Once he thrashed her so cruelly
+that I saw scarlet, and nearly yielded to the impulse of emptying both
+my barrels in his broad back. If I had done so it would have passed for
+a mere mishap, after all, and saved many future complications.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One day he pointed out to me a small bird pecking in a field--an
+extremely pretty bird--I think it was a skylark--and whispered to me in
+his most sarcastic manner--
+
+"Look here, you Peter without any salt, do you think, if you were to
+kneel down and rest your gun comfortably on this gate without making a
+noise, and take a careful aim, you could manage to shoot that bird
+_sitting_? I've heard of some Frenchmen who would be equal to _that_!"
+
+I said I would try, and, resting my gun as he told me, I carefully aimed
+a couple of yards above the bird's head, and mentally ejaculating,
+
+     "'_All to thee blythe sperrit_!"
+
+I fired both barrels (for fear of any after-mishap to Ibbetson), and the
+bird naturally flew away.
+
+After this he never took me out shooting with him again; and, indeed, I
+had discovered to my discomfiture that I, the friend and admirer and
+would-be emulator of Natty Bumppo the Deerslayer, I, the familiar of the
+last of the Mohicans and his scalp-lifting father, could not bear the
+sight of blood--least of all, of blood shed by myself, and for my own
+amusement.
+
+The only beast that ever fell to my gun during those shootings with
+Uncle Ibbetson was a young rabbit, and that more by accident than
+design, although I did not tell Uncle Ibbetson so.
+
+As I picked it off the ground, and felt its poor little warm narrow
+chest, and the last beats of its heart under its weak ribs, and saw the
+blood on its fur, I was smitten with pity, shame, and remorse; and
+settled with myself that I would find some other road to English
+gentlemanhood than the slaying of innocent wild things whose happy life
+seems so well worth living.
+
+[Illustration: "'AIL TO THEE BLYTHE SPERRIT!"]
+
+I must eat them, I suppose, but I would never shoot them any more; my
+hands, at least, should be clean of blood henceforward.
+
+Alas, the irony of fate!
+
+The upshot of all this was that he confided to Mrs. Deane the task of
+licking his cub of a nephew into shape. She took me in hand with right
+good-will, began by teaching me how to dance, that I might dance with
+her at the coming hunt ball; and I did so nearly all night, to my
+infinite joy and triumph, and to the disgust of Colonel Ibbetson, who
+could dance much better than I--to the disgust, indeed, of many smart
+men in red coats and black, for she was considered the belle of
+the evening.
+
+[Illustration: THE DANCING LESSON.]
+
+Of course I fell, or fancied I fell, in love with her. To her mother's
+extreme distress, she gave me every encouragement, partly for fun,
+partly to annoy Colonel Ibbetson, whom she had apparently grown to hate.
+And, indeed, from the way he spoke of her to me (this trainer of English
+gentlemen), he well deserved that she should hate him. He never had the
+slightest intention of marrying her--that is certain; and yet he had
+made her the talk of the place.
+
+And here I may state that Ibbetson was one of those singular men who go
+through life afflicted with the mania that they are fatally
+irresistible to women.
+
+He was never weary of pursuing them--not through any special love of
+gallantry for its own sake, I believe, but from the mere wish to appear
+as a Don Giovanni in the eyes of others. Nothing made him happier than
+to be seen whispering mysteriously in corners with the prettiest woman
+in the room. He did not seem to perceive that for one woman silly or
+vain or vulgar enough to be flattered by his idiotic persecution, a
+dozen would loathe the very sight of him, and show it plainly enough.
+
+This vanity had increased with years and assumed a very dangerous form.
+He became indiscreet, and, more disastrous still, he told lies! The very
+dead--the honored and irreproachable dead--were not even safe in their
+graves. It was his revenge for unforgotten slights.
+
+He who kisses and tells, he who tells even though he has not
+kissed--what can be said for him, what should be done to him?
+
+Ibbetson one day expiated this miserable craze with his life, and the
+man who took it--more by accident than design, it is true--has not yet
+found it in his heart to feel either compunction or regret.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So there was a great row between Ibbetson and myself. He d----d and
+confounded and abused me in every way, and my father before me, and
+finally struck me; and I had sufficient self-command not to strike him
+back, but left him then and there with as much dignity as I
+could muster.
+
+Thus unsuccessfully ended my brief experience of English country life--a
+little hunting and shooting and fishing, a little dancing and flirting;
+just enough of each to show me I was unfit for all.
+
+A bitter-sweet remembrance, full of humiliation, but not altogether
+without charm. There was the beauty of sea and open sky and changing
+country weather; and the beauty of Mrs. Deane, who made a fool of me to
+revenge herself on Colonel Ibbetson for trying to make a fool of her,
+whereby he became the laughing-stock of the neighborhood for at least
+nine days.
+
+And I revenged myself on both--heroically, as I thought; though where
+the heroism comes in, and where the revenge, does not appear
+quite patent.
+
+For I ran away to London, and enlisted in her Majesty's Household
+Cavalry, where I remained a twelvemonth, and was happy enough, and
+learned a great deal more good than harm.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Then I was bought out and articled to Mr. Lintot, architect and
+surveyor: a conclave of my relatives agreeing to allow me ninety pounds
+a year for three years; then all hands were to be washed of me
+altogether.[A]
+
+[Footnote A: _Note_.--I have thought it better to leave out, in its
+entirety, my cousin's account of his short career as a private soldier.
+It consists principally of personal descriptions that are not altogether
+unprejudiced; he seems never to have quite liked those who were placed
+in authority above him, either at school or in the army. MADGE PLUNKET.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So I took a small lodging in Pentonville, to be near Mr. Lintot, and
+worked hard at my new profession for three years, during which nothing
+of importance occurred in my outer life. After this Lintot employed me
+as a salaried clerk, and I do not think he had any reason to complain of
+me, nor did he make any complaint. I was worth my hire, I think, and
+something over; which I never got and never asked for.
+
+Nor did I complain of him; for with all his little foibles of vanity,
+irascibility, and egotism, and a certain close-fistedness, he was a good
+fellow and a very clever one.
+
+His paragon of a wife was by no means the beautiful person he had made
+her out to be, nor did anybody but he seem to think her so.
+
+She was a little older than himself; very large and massive, with stern
+but not irregular features, and a very high forehead; she had a slight
+tendency to baldness, and colorless hair that she wore in an austere
+curl on each side of her face, and a menacing little topknot on her
+occiput. She had been a Unitarian and a governess, was fond of good long
+words, like Dr. Johnson, and very censorious.
+
+But one of my husband's intimate friends, General----, who was cornet in
+the Life Guards in my poor cousin's time, writes me that "he remembers
+him well, as far and away the tallest and handsomest lad in the whole
+regiment, of immense physical strength, unimpeachable good conduct, and
+a thorough gentleman from top to toe."
+
+Her husband's occasional derelictions in the matter of grammar and
+accent must have been very trying to her!
+
+[Illustration: PENTONVILLE.]
+
+She knew her own mind about everything under the sun, and expected that
+other people should know it, too, and be of the same mind as herself.
+And yet she was not proud; indeed, she was a very dragon of humility,
+and had raised injured meekness to the rank of a militant virtue. And
+well she knew how to be master and mistress in her own house!
+
+But with all this she was an excellent wife to Mr. Lintot and a devoted
+mother to his children, who were very plain and subdued (and adored
+their father); so that Lintot, who thought her Venus and Diana and
+Minerva in one, was the happiest man in all Pentonville.
+
+And, on the whole, she was kind and considerate to me, and I always did
+my best to please her.
+
+Moreover (a gift for which I could never be too grateful), she presented
+me with an old square piano, which had belonged to her mother, and had
+done duty in her school-room, till Lintot gave her a new one (for she
+was a highly cultivated musician of the severest classical type). It
+became the principal ornament of my small sitting-room, which it nearly
+filled, and on it I tried to learn my notes, and would pick out with one
+finger the old beloved melodies my father used to sing, and my mother
+play on the harp.
+
+To sing myself was, it seems, out of the question; my voice (which I
+trust was not too disagreeable when I was content merely to speak)
+became as that of a bull-frog under a blanket whenever I strove to
+express myself in song; my larynx refused to produce the notes I held so
+accurately in my mind, and the result was disaster.
+
+On the other hand, in my mind I could sing most beautifully. Once on a
+rainy day, inside an Islington omnibus, I mentally sang "Adelaida" with
+the voice of Mr. Sims Reeves--an unpardonable liberty to take; and
+although it is not for me to say so, I sang it even better than he, for
+I made myself shed tears--so much so that a kind old gentleman sitting
+opposite seemed to feel for me very much.
+
+I also had the faculty of remembering any tune I once heard, and would
+whistle it correctly ever after--even one of Uncle Ibbetson's waltzes!
+
+As an instance of this, worth recalling, one night I found myself in
+Guildford Street, walking in the same direction as another belated
+individual (only on the other side of the road), who, just as the moon
+came out of a cloud, was moved to whistle.
+
+He whistled exquisitely, and, what was more, he whistled quite the most
+beautiful tune I had ever heard. I felt all its changes and modulations,
+its majors and minors, just as if a whole band had been there to play
+the accompaniment, so cunning and expressive a whistler was he.
+
+And so entranced was I that I made up my mind to cross over and ask him
+what it was--"Your melody or your life!" But he suddenly stopped at No.
+48, and let himself in with his key before I could prefer my
+humble request.
+
+Well, I went whistling that tune all next day, and for many days after,
+without ever finding out what it was; till one evening, happening to be
+at the Lintots. I asked Mrs. Lintot (who happened to be at the piano) if
+she knew it, and began to whistle it once more. To my delight and
+surprise she straightway accompanied it all through (a wonderful
+condescension in so severe a purist), and I did not make a single
+wrong note.
+
+"Yes," said Mrs. Lintot, "it's a pretty, catchy little tune--of a kind
+to achieve immediate popularity."
+
+Now, I apologize humbly to the reader for this digression; but if he be
+musical he will forgive me, for that tune was the "Serenade" of
+Schubert, and I had never even heard Schubert's name!
+
+And having thus duly apologized, I will venture to transgress and
+digress anew, and mention here a kind of melodic malady, a singular
+obsession to which I am subject, and which I will call unconscious
+musical cerebration.
+
+I am never without some tune running in my head--never for a moment; not
+that I am always aware of it; existence would be insupportable if I
+were. What part of my brain sings it, or rather in what part of my brain
+it sings itself, I cannot imagine--probably in some useless corner full
+of cobwebs and lumber that is fit for nothing else.
+
+But it never leaves off; now it is one tune, now another; now a song
+_without_ words, now _with_; sometimes it is near the surface, so to
+speak, and I am vaguely conscious of it as I read or work, or talk or
+think; sometimes to make sure it is there I have to dive for it deep
+into myself, and I never fail to find it after a while, and bring it up
+to the top. It is the "Carnival of Venice," let us say; then I let it
+sink again, and it changes without my knowing; so that when I take
+another dive the "Carnival of Venice" has become "Il Mio Tesoro," or the
+"Marseillaise," or "Pretty Little Polly Perkins of Paddington Green."
+And Heaven knows what tunes, unheard and unperceived, this internal
+barrel-organ has been grinding meanwhile.
+
+Sometimes it intrudes itself so persistently as to become a nuisance,
+and the only way to get rid of it is to whistle or sing myself. For
+instance, I may be mentally reciting for my solace and delectation some
+beloved lyric like "The Waterfowl," or "Tears, Idle Tears," or "Break,
+Break, Break"; and all the while, between the lines, this fiend of a
+subcerebral vocalist, like a wandering minstrel in a distant square,
+insists on singing, "Cheer, Boys, Cheer," or, "Tommy, make room for
+your uncle" (tunes I cannot abide), with words, accompaniment, and all,
+complete, and not quite so refined an accent as I could wish; so that I
+have to leave off my recitation and whistle "J'ai du Bon Tabac" in quite
+a different key to exorcise it.
+
+But this, at least, I will say for this never still small voice of mine:
+its intonation is always perfect; it keeps ideal time, and its quality,
+though rather thin and somewhat nasal and quite peculiar, is not
+unsympathetic. Sometimes, indeed (as in that Islington omnibus), I can
+compel it to imitate, _à s'y méprendre_, the tones of some singer I have
+recently heard, and thus make for myself a ghostly music which is not to
+be despised.
+
+Occasionally, too, and quite unbidden, it would warble little impromptu
+inward melodies of my own composition, which often seemed to me
+extremely pretty, old-fashioned, and quaint; but one is not a fair judge
+of one's own productions, especially during the heat of inspiration; and
+I had not the means of recording them, as I had never learned the
+musical notes. What the world has lost!
+
+Now whose this small voice was I did not find out till many years later,
+_for it was not mine_!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In spite of such rare accomplishments and resources within myself, I was
+not a happy or contented young man; nor had my discontent in it anything
+of the divine.
+
+I disliked my profession, for which I felt no particular aptitude, and
+would fain have followed another--poetry, science, literature, music,
+painting, sculpture; for all of which I most unblushingly thought myself
+better fitted by the gift of nature.
+
+I disliked Pentonville, which, although clean, virtuous, and
+respectable, left much to be desired on the score of shape, color,
+romantic tradition, and local charm; and I would sooner have lived
+anywhere else: in the Champs-Élysées, let us say--yes, indeed, even on
+the fifth branch of the third tree on the left-hand side as you leave
+the Arc de Triomphe, like one of those classical heroes in Henri
+Murger's _Vie de Bohème_.
+
+I disliked my brother apprentices, and did not get on well with them,
+especially a certain very clever but vicious and deformed youth called
+Judkins, who seemed to have conceived an aversion for me from the first;
+he is now an associate of the Royal Academy. They thought I gave myself
+airs because I did not share in their dissipations; such dissipations as
+I could have afforded would have been cheap and nasty indeed.
+
+Yet such pothouse dissipation seemed to satisfy them, since they took
+not only a pleasure in it, but a pride.
+
+They even took a pride in a sick headache, and liked it, if it were the
+result of a debauch on the previous night; and were as pompously
+mock-modest about a black eye, got in a squabble at the Argyll Rooms, as
+if it had been the Victoria Cross. To pass the night in a police cell
+was such glory that it was worth while pretending they had done so when
+it was untrue.
+
+They looked upon me as a muff, a milksop, and a prig, and felt the
+greatest contempt for me; and if they did not openly show it, it was
+only because they were not quite so fond of black eyes as they made out.
+
+So I left them to their inexpensive joys, and betook myself to pursuits
+of my own, among others to the cultivation of my body, after methods I
+had learned in the Life Guards. I belonged to a gymnastic and fencing
+and boxing club, of which I was a most assiduous frequenter; a more
+persevering dumb-beller and Indian-clubber never was, and I became in
+time an all-round athlete, as wiry and lean as a greyhound, just under
+fifteen stone, and four inches over six feet in height, which was
+considered very tall thirty years ago; especially in Pentonville, where
+the distinction often brought me more contumely than respect.
+
+Altogether a most formidable person; but that I was of a timid nature,
+afraid to hurt, and the peacefulest creature in the world.
+
+My old love for slums revived, and I found out and haunted the worst in
+London. They were very good slums, but they were not the slums of
+Paris--they manage these things better in France.
+
+Even Cow Cross (where the Metropolitan Railway now runs between King's
+Cross and Farringdon Street)--Cow Cross, that whilom labyrinth of
+slaughter-houses, gin-shops, and thieves' dens, with the famous Fleet
+Ditch running underneath it all the while, lacked the fascination and
+mystery of mediaeval romance. There were no memories of such charming
+people as Le roi des Truands and Gringoire and Esmeralda; with a sigh
+one had to fall back on visions of Fagin and Bill Sykes and Nancy.
+
+_Quelle dégringolade_!
+
+And as to the actual denizens! One gazed with a dull, wondering pity at
+the poor, pale, rickety children; the slatternly, coarse women who never
+smiled (except when drunk); the dull, morose, miserable men. How they
+lacked the grace of French deformity, the ease and lightness of French
+depravity, the sympathetic distinction of French grotesqueness. How
+unterrible they were, who preferred the fist to the noiseless and
+insidious knife! who fought with their hands instead of their feet,
+quite loyally; and reserved the kicks of their hobnailed boots for their
+recalcitrant wives!
+
+And then there was no Morgue; one missed one's Morgue badly.
+
+And Smithfield! It would split me truly to the heart (as M. le Major
+used to say) to watch the poor beasts that came on certain days to make
+a short station in that hideous cattle-market, on their way to the
+slaughter-house.
+
+What bludgeons have I seen descend on beautiful, bewildered, dazed, meek
+eyes, so thickly fringed against the country sun; on soft, moist, tender
+nostrils that clouded the poisonous reek with a fragrance of the far-off
+fields! What torture of silly sheep and genially cynical pigs!
+
+The very dogs seemed demoralized, and brutal as their masters. And there
+one day I had an adventure, a dirty bout at fisticuffs, most humiliating
+in the end for me and which showed that chivalry is often its own
+reward, like virtue, even when the chivalrous are young and big and
+strong, and have learned to box.
+
+A brutal young drover wantonly kicked a sheep, and, as I thought, broke
+her hind-leg, and in my indignation I took him by the ear and flung him
+round onto a heap of mud and filth. He rose and squared at me in a most
+plucky fashion; he hardly came up to my chin, and I refused to fight
+him. A crowd collected round us, and as I tried to explain to the
+by-standers the cause of our quarrel, he managed to hit me in the face
+with a very muddy fist.
+
+"Bravo, little 'un!" shouted the crowd, and he squared up again. I felt
+wretchedly ashamed and warded off all his blows, telling him that I
+could not hit him or I should kill him.
+
+"Yah!" shouted the crowd again; "go it, little un! Let 'im 'ave it! The
+long un's showing the white feather," etc., and finally I gave him a
+slight backhander that made his nose bleed and seemed to demoralize him
+completely. "Yah!" shouted the crowd; "'it one yer own size!"
+
+I looked round in despair and rage, and picking out the biggest man I
+could see, said, "Are _you_ big enough?" The crowd roared with laughter.
+
+"Well, guv'ner, I dessay I might do at a pinch," he replied; and I tried
+to slap his face, but missed it, and received such a tremendous box on
+the ear that I was giddy for a second or two, and when I recovered I
+found him still grinning at me. I tried to hit him again and again, but
+always missed; and at last, without doing me any particular damage, he
+laid me flat three times running onto the very heap where I had flung
+the drover, the crowd applauding madly. Dazed, hatless, and panting, and
+covered with filth, I stared at him in hopeless impotence. He put out
+his hand, and said, "You're all right, ain't yer, guv'ner? I 'ope I
+'aven't 'urt yer! My name's Tom Sayers. If you'd a 'it me, I should 'a'
+gone down like a ninepin, and I ain't so sure as I should ever 'ave got
+up again."
+
+He was to become the most famous fighting-man in England!
+
+I wrung his hand and thanked him, and offered him a sovereign, which he
+refused; and then he led me into a room in a public-house close by,
+where he washed and brushed me down, and insisted on treating me to a
+glass of brandy-and-water.
+
+I have had a fondness for fighting-men ever since, and a respect for the
+noble science I had never felt before. He was many inches shorter than
+I, and did not look at all the Hercules he was.
+
+He told me I was the strongest built man for a youngster that he had
+ever seen, barring that I was "rather leggy." I do not know if he was
+sincere or not, but no possible compliment could have pleased me more.
+Such is the vanity of youth.
+
+And here, although it savors somewhat of vaingloriousness, I cannot
+resist the temptation of relating another adventure of the same kind,
+but in which I showed to greater advantage.
+
+It was on a boxing-day (oddly enough), and I was returning with Lintot
+and one of his boys from a walk in the Highgate Fields. As we plodded our
+dirty way homeward through the Caledonian Road we were stopped by a
+crowd outside a public-house. A gigantic drayman (they always seem
+bigger than they really are) was squaring up to a poor drunken lout of a
+navvy not half his size, who had been put up to fight him, and who was
+quite incapable of even an attempt it self-defence; he could scarcely
+lift his arms, I thought at first it was only horse-play; and as little
+Joe Lintot wanted to see, I put him up on my shoulder, just as the
+drayman, who had been drinking, but was not drunk, and had a most
+fiendishly brutal face, struck the poor tipsy wretch with all his might
+between the eyes, and felled him (it was like pole-axing a bullock), to
+the delight of the crowd.
+
+Little Joe, a very gentle and sensitive boy, began to cry; and his
+father, who had the pluck of a bull-terrier, wanted to interfere, in
+spite of his diminutive stature. I was also beside myself with
+indignation, and pulling off my coat and hat, which I gave to Lintot,
+made my way to the drayman, who was offering to fight any three men in
+the crowd, an offer that met with no response.
+
+"Now, then, you cowardly skunk!" I said, tucking up my shirt-sleeves;
+"stand up, and I will knock every tooth down your ugly throat."
+
+His face went the colors of a mottled Stilton cheese, and he asked what
+I meddled with him for. A ring formed itself, and I felt the sympathy of
+the crowd _with_ me this time--a very agreeable sensation!
+
+"Now, then, up with your arms! I'm going to kill you!"
+
+"I ain't going to fight you, mister; I ain't going to fight _nobody_.
+Just you let me alone!"
+
+[Illustration:]
+
+"Oh yes, you are, or you're going on your marrow-bones to be pardon for
+being a brutal, cowardly skunk"; and I gave him a slap on the face that
+rang like a pistol-shot--a most finished, satisfactory, and successful
+slap this time. My finger-tips tingle at the bare remembrance.
+
+He tried to escape, but was held opposite to me. He began to snivel and
+whimper, and said he had never meddled with me, and asked what should I
+meddle with him for?
+
+"Then down on your knees--quick--this instant!" and I made as if I were
+going to begin serious business at once, and no mistake.
+
+So down he plumped on his knees, and there he actually fainted from
+sheer excess of emotion.
+
+As I was helped on with my coat, I tasted, for once in my life the
+sweets of popularity, and knew what it was to be the idol of a mob.
+
+Little Joey Lintot and his brothers and sisters, who had never held me
+in any particular regard before that I knew of, worshipped me from that
+day forward.
+
+And I should be insincere if I did not confess that on that one occasion
+I was rather pleased with myself, although the very moment I stood
+opposite the huge, hulking, beer-sodden brute (who had looked so
+formidable from afar) I felt, with a not unpleasant sense of relief,
+that he did not stand a chance. He was only big, and even at that I
+beat him.
+
+The real honors of the day belonged to Lintot, who, I am convinced, was
+ready to act the David to that Goliath. He had the real stomach for
+fighting, which I lacked, as very tall men are often said to do.
+
+And that, perhaps, is why I have made so much of my not very wonderful
+prowess on that occasion; not, indeed, that I am physically a coward--at
+least, I do not think so. If I thought I were I should avow it with no
+more shame than I should avow that I had a bad digestion, or a weak
+heart, which makes cowards of us all.
+
+It is that I hate a row, and violence, and bloodshed, even from a
+nose--any nose, either my own or my neighbor's.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There are slums at the east end of London that many fashionable people
+know something of by this time; I got to know them by heart. In addition
+to the charm of the mere slum, there was the eternal fascination of the
+seafaring element; of Jack ashore--a lovable creature who touches
+nothing but what he adorns it in his own peculiar fashion.
+
+I constantly haunted the docks, where the smell of tar and the sight of
+ropes and masts filled me with unutterable longings for the sea--for
+distant lands--for anywhere but where it was my fate to be.
+
+I talked to ship captains and mates and sailors, and heard many
+marvellous tales, as the reader may well believe, and framed for myself
+visions of cloudless skies, and sapphire seas, and coral reefs, and
+groves of spice, and dusky youths in painted plumage roving, and
+friendly isles where a lovely half-clad, barefooted Neuha would wave her
+torch, and lead me, her Torquil, by the hand through caverns of bliss!
+
+Especially did I haunt a wharf by London Bridge, from whence two
+steamers--the _Seine_ and the _Dolphin_, I believe--started on alternate
+days for Boulogne-sur-Mer.
+
+I used to watch the happy passengers bound for France, some of them, in
+their holiday spirits, already fraternizing together on the sunny deck,
+and fussing with camp-stools and magazines and novels and bottles
+of bitter beer, or retiring before the funnel to smoke the pipe of
+peace.
+
+[Illustration: THE BOULOGNE STEAMER.]
+
+The sound of the boiler getting up steam--what delicious music it was!
+Would it ever get up steam for me? The very smell of the cabin, the very
+feel of the brass gangway and the brass-bound, oil-clothed steps were
+delightful; and down-stairs, on the snowy cloth, were the cold beef and
+ham, the beautiful fresh mustard, the bottles of pale ale and stout. Oh,
+happy travellers, who could afford all this, and France into
+the bargain!
+
+Soon would a large white awning make the after-deck a paradise, from
+which, by-and-by, to watch the quickly gliding panorama of the Thames.
+The bell would sound for non-passengers like me to go ashore--"Que
+diable allait-il faire dans cette galère!" as Uncle Ibbetson would have
+said. The steamer, disengaging itself from the wharf with a pleasant
+yoho-ing of manly throats and a slow, intermittent plashing of the
+paddle-wheels, would carefully pick its sunny, eastward way among the
+small craft of the river, while a few handkerchiefs were waved in a
+friendly, make-believe farewell--_auf wiedersehen_!
+
+Oh, to stand by that unseasonably sou'-westered man at the wheel, and
+watch St. Paul's and London Bridge and the Tower of London fade out of
+sight--never, never to see them again. No _auf wiedersehen_ for me!
+
+Sometimes I would turn my footsteps westward and fill my hungry, jealous
+eyes with a sight of the gay summer procession in Hyde Park, or listen
+to the band in Kensington Gardens, and see beautiful, welldressed
+women, and hear their sweet, refined voices and happy laughter; and a
+longing would come into my heart more passionate than my longing for the
+sea and France and distant lands, and quite as unutterable. I would even
+forget Neuha and her torch.
+
+After this it was a dreary downfall to go and dine for tenpence all by
+myself, and finish up with a book at my solitary lodgings in
+Pentonville. The book would not let itself be read; it sulked and had to
+be laid down, for "beautiful woman! beautiful girl!" spelled themselves
+between me and the printed page. Translate me those words into French, O
+ye who can even render Shakespeare into French Alexandrines--"Belle
+femme? Belle fille?" Ha! ha!
+
+If you want to get as near it as you can, you will have to write, "Belle
+Anglaise," or "Belle Américaine;" only then will you be understood, even
+in France!
+
+Ah! elle était bien belle, Madame Seraskier!
+
+At other times, more happily inspired, I would slake my thirst for
+nature by long walks into the country. Hampstead was my Passy--the
+Leg-of-Mutton Pond my Mare d'Auteuil; Richmond was my St. Cloud, with
+Kew Gardens for a Bois de Boulogne; and Hampton Court made a very fair
+Versailles--how incomparably fairer, even a pupil of Lintot's
+should know.
+
+And after such healthy fatigue and fragrant impressions the tenpenny
+dinner had a better taste, the little front parlor in Pentonville was
+more like a home, the book more like a friend.
+
+For I read all I could get in English or French.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Novels, travels, history, poetry, science--everything came as grist to
+that most melancholy mill, my mind.
+
+I tried to write; I tried to draw; I tried to make myself an inner life
+apart from the sordid, commonplace ugliness of my outer one--a private
+oasis of my own; and to raise myself a little, if only mentally, above
+the circumstances in which it had pleased the Fates to place me.[A]
+
+[Footnote A: _Note_--It Is with great reluctance that I now come to my
+cousin's account of deplorable opinions he held, at that period of his
+life, on the most important subject that can ever engross the mind of
+man. I have left out _much_, but I feel that in suppressing it
+altogether, I should rob his sad story of all its moral significance;
+for it cannot be doubted that most of his unhappiness is attributable to
+the defective religious training of his childhood, and that his parents
+(otherwise the best and kindest people I have ever known) incurred a
+terrible responsibility when they determined to leave him "unbiased," as
+he calls it, at that tender and susceptible age when the mind is
+     "Wax to receive, marble to retain."
+                                 Madge Plunket.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It goes without saying that, like many thoughtful youths of a melancholy
+temperament, impecunious and discontented with their lot, and much given
+to the smoking of strong tobacco (on an empty stomach), I continuously
+brooded on the problems of existence--free-will and determinism, the
+whence and why and whither of man, the origin of evil, the immortality
+of the soul, the futility of life, etc., and made myself very miserable
+over such questions.
+
+Often the inquisitive passer-by, had he peeped through the blinds of
+No.--Wharton Street, Pentonville, late at night, would have been
+rewarded by the touching spectacle of a huge, rawboned ex-private in her
+Majesty's Life Guards, with his head bowed over the black and yellow
+key-board of a venerable square piano-forte (on which he could not
+play), dropping the bitter tear of loneliness and _Weltschmertz_ combined.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+It never once occurred to me to seek relief in the bosom of any Church.
+
+Some types are born and not made. I was a born "infidel;" if ever there
+was a congenital agnostic, one agnostically constituted from his very
+birth, it was I. Not that I had ever heard such an expression as
+agnosticism; it is an invention of late years....
+
+     "_J'avais fait de la prose toute ma vie sans le savoir!_"
+
+But almost the first conscious dislike I can remember was for the black
+figure of the priest, and there were several of these figures in Passy.
+
+Monsieur le Major called them _maîtres corbeaux_, and seemed to hold
+them in light esteem. Dr. Seraskier hated them; his gentle Catholic wife
+had grown to distrust them. My loving, heretic mother loved them not; my
+father, a Catholic born and bred, had an equal aversion. They had
+persecuted his gods--the thinkers, philosophers, and scientific
+discoverers--Galileo, Bruno, Copernicus; and brought to his mind the
+cruelties of the Holy Inquisition, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew; and
+I always pictured them as burning little heretics alive if they had
+their will--Eton jackets, white chimney-pot hats, and all!
+
+I have no doubt they were in reality the best and kindest of men.
+
+The parson (and parsons were not lacking in Pentonville) was not so
+insidiously repellent as the blue-cheeked, blue-chinned Passy priest;
+but he was by no means to me a picturesque or sympathetic apparition,
+with his weddedness, his whiskers, his black trousers, his frock-coat,
+his tall hat, his little white tie, his consciousness of being a
+"gentleman" by profession. Most unattractive, also, were the cheap,
+brand-new churches wherein he spoke the word to his dreary-looking,
+Sunday-clad flock, with scarcely one of whom his wife would have sat
+down to dinner--especially if she had been chosen from among them.
+
+[Illustration: SUNDAY IN PENTONVILLE.]
+
+To watch that flock pouring in of a Sunday morning, or afternoon, or
+evening, at the summons of those bells, and pouring out again after the
+long service, and banal, perfunctory sermon, was depressing. Weekdays,
+in Pentonville, were depressing enough; but Sundays were depressing
+beyond words, though nobody seemed to think so but myself. Early
+training had acclimatized them.
+
+I have outlived those physical antipathies of my salad days; even the
+sight of an Anglican bishop is no longer displeasing to me, on the
+contrary; and I could absolutely rejoice in the beauty of a cardinal.
+
+Indeed, I am now friends with both a parson and a priest, and do not
+know which of the two I love and respect the most. They ought to hate
+me, but they do not; they pity me too much, I suppose. I am too negative
+to rouse in either the deep theological hate; and all the little hate
+that the practice of love and charity has left in their kind hearts is
+reserved for each other--an unquenchable hate in which they seem to
+glory, and which rages all the more that it has to be concealed. It
+saddens me to think that I am a bone of contention between them.
+
+And yet, for all my unbelief, the Bible was my favorite book, and the
+Psalms my adoration; and most truly can I affirm that my mental attitude
+has ever been one of reverence and humility.
+
+But every argument that has ever been advanced against Christianity (and
+I think I know them all by this time) had risen spontaneously and
+unprompted within me, and they have all seemed to me unanswerable, and
+indeed, as yet, unanswered. Nor had any creed of which I ever heard
+appeared to me either credible or attractive or even sensible, but for
+the central figure of the Deity--a Deity that in no case could ever
+be mine.
+
+The awe-inspiring and unalterable conception that had wrought itself
+into my consciousness, whether I would or no, was that of a Being
+infinitely more abstract, remote, and inaccessible than any the genius
+of mankind has ever evolved after its own image and out of the needs of
+its own heart--inscrutable, unthinkable, unspeakable; above all human
+passions, beyond the reach of any human appeal; One upon whose
+attributes it was futile to speculate--One whose name was _It_,
+not _He_.
+
+The thought of total annihilation was uncongenial, but had no terror.
+
+Even as a child I had shrewdly suspected that hell was no more than a
+vulgar threat for naughty little boys and girls, and heaven than a
+vulgar bribe, from the casual way in which either was meted out to me as
+my probable portion, by servants and such people, according to the way I
+behaved. Such things were never mentioned to me by either my father or
+mother, or M. le Major, or the Seraskiers--the only people in whom
+I trusted.
+
+But for the bias against the priest, I was left unbiassed at that tender
+and susceptible age. I had learned my catechism and read my Bible, and
+used to say the Lord's Prayer as I went to bed, and "God bless papa and
+mamma" and the rest, in the usual perfunctory manner.
+
+Never a word against religion was said in my hearing by those few on
+whom I had pinned my childish faith; on the other hand, no such
+importance was attached to it, apparently, as was attached to the
+virtues of truthfulness, courage, generosity, self-denial, politeness,
+and especially consideration for others, high or low, human and
+animal alike.
+
+I imagine that my parents must have compromised the matter between them,
+and settled that I should work out all the graver problems of existence
+for myself, when I came to a thinking age, out of my own conscience,
+and such knowledge of life as I should acquire, and such help as they
+would no doubt have given me, according to their lights, had
+they survived.
+
+I did so, and made myself a code of morals to live by, in which religion
+had but a small part.
+
+For me there was but one sin, and that was cruelty, because I hated it;
+though Nature, for inscrutable purposes of her own, almost teaches it as
+a virtue. All sins that did not include cruelty were merely sins against
+health, or taste, or common-sense, or public expediency.
+
+Free-will was impossible. We could only _seem_ to will freely, and that
+only within the limits of a small triangle, whose sides were heredity,
+education, and circumstance--a little geometrical arrangement of my own,
+of which I felt not a little proud, although it does not quite go on
+all-fours--perhaps because it is only a triangle.
+
+That is, we could will fast enough--_too_ fast; but could not will _how_
+to will--fortunately, for we were not fit as yet, and for a long time to
+come, to be trusted, constituted as we are!
+
+Even the characters of a novel must act according to the nature,
+training, and motives their creator the novelist has supplied them with,
+or we put the novel down and read something else; for human nature must
+be consistent with itself in fiction as well as in fact. Even in its
+madness there must be a method, so how could the will be free?
+
+To pray for any personal boon or remission of evil--to bend the knee, or
+lift one's voice in praise or thanksgiving for any earthly good that had
+befallen one, either through inheritance, or chance, or one's own
+successful endeavor--was in my eyes simply futile; but, putting its
+futility aside, it was an act of servile presumption, of wheedling
+impertinence, not without suspicion of a lively sense of favors to come.
+
+It seemed to me as though the Jews--a superstitious and business-like
+people, who know what they want and do not care how they get it--must
+have taught us to pray like that.
+
+It was not the sweet, simple child innocently beseeching that to-morrow
+might be fine for its holiday, or that Santa Claus would be generous; it
+was the cunning trader, fawning, flattering, propitiating, bribing with
+fulsome, sycophantic praise (an insult in itself), as well as
+burnt-offerings, working for his own success here and hereafter, and his
+enemy's confounding.
+
+It was the grovelling of the dog, without the dog's single-hearted love,
+stronger than even its fear or its sense of self-interest.
+
+What an attitude for one whom God had made after His own image--even
+towards his Maker!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The only permissible prayer was a prayer for courage or resignation; for
+that was a prayer turned inward, an appeal to what is best in
+ourselves--our honor, our stoicism, our self-respect.
+
+And for a small detail, grace before and after meals seemed to me
+especially self-complacent and iniquitous, when there were so many with
+scarcely ever a meal to say grace for. The only decent and proper grace
+was to give half of one's meal away--not, indeed, that I was in the
+habit of doing so! But at least I had the grace to reproach myself for
+my want of charity, and that was my only grace.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Fortunately, since we had no free-will of our own, the tendency that
+impelled us was upward, like the sparks, and bore us with it
+willy-nilly--the good and the bad, and the worst and the best.
+
+By seeing this clearly, and laying it well to heart, the motive was
+supplied to us for doing all we could in furtherance of that upward
+tendency--_pour aider le bon Dieu_--that we might rise the faster and
+reach Him the sooner, if He were! And when once the human will has been
+set going, like a rocket or a clock or a steam-engine, and in the right
+direction, what can it not achieve?
+
+We should in time control circumstance instead of being controlled
+thereby; education would day by day become more adapted to one
+consistent end; and, finally, conscience-stricken, we should guide
+heredity with our own hands instead of leaving it to blind chance;
+unless, indeed, a well-instructed paternal government wisely took the
+reins, and only sanctioned the union of people who were thoroughly in
+love with each other, after due and careful elimination of the unfit.
+
+Thus, cruelty should at least be put into harness, and none of its
+valuable energy wasted on wanton experiments, as it is by Nature.
+
+And thus, as the boy is father to the man, should the human race one
+day be father to--what?
+
+That is just where my speculations would arrest themselves; that was the
+X of a sum in rule of three, not to be worked out by Peter Ibbetson,
+Architect and Surveyor, Wharton Street, Pentonville.
+
+As the orang-outang is to Shakespeare, so is Shakespeare to ... X?
+
+As the female chimpanzee is to the Venus of Milo, so is the Venus of
+Milo to ... X?
+
+Finally, multiply these two X's by each other, and try to conceive the
+result!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Such was, crudely, the simple creed I held at this time; and, such as it
+was, I had worked it all out for myself, with no help from outside--a
+poor thing, but mine own; or, as I expressed it in the words of De
+Musset, "Mon verre n'est pas grand--mais je bois dans mon verre."
+
+For though such ideas were in the air, like wholesome clouds, they had
+not yet condensed themselves into printed words for the million. People
+did not dare to write about these things, as they do at present, in
+popular novels and cheap magazines, that all who run may read, and learn
+to think a little for themselves, and honestly say what they think,
+without having to dread a howl of execration, clerical and lay.
+
+And it was not only that I thought like this and could not think
+otherwise; it was that I felt like this and could not feel otherwise;
+and I should have appeared to myself as wicked, weak, and base had I
+ever even _desired_ to think or feel otherwise, however personally
+despairing of this life--a traitor to what I jealously guarded as my
+best instincts.
+
+And yet to me the faith of others, if but unaggressive, humble, and
+sincere, had often seemed touching and pathetic, and sometimes even
+beautiful, as childish things seem sometimes beautiful, even in those
+who are no longer children, and should have put them away. It had caused
+many heroic lives, and rendered many obscure lives blameless and happy;
+and then its fervor and passion seemed to burn with a lasting flame.
+
+At brief moments now and then, and especially in the young, unfaith can
+be as fervent and as passionate as faith, and just as narrow and
+unreasonable, as _I_ found; but alas! its flame was intermittent, and
+its light was not a kindly light.
+
+It had no food for babes; it could not comfort the sick or sorry, nor
+resolve into submissive harmony the inner discords of the soul; nor
+compensate us for our own failures and shortcomings, nor make up to us
+in any way for the success and prosperity of others who did not choose
+to think as we did.
+
+It was without balm for wounded pride, or stay for weak despondency, or
+consolation for bereavement; its steep and rugged thoroughfares led to
+no promised land of beatitude, and there were no soft resting-places
+by the way.
+
+Its only weapon was steadfastness; its only shield, endurance; its
+earthly hope, the common weal; its earthly prize, the opening of all
+roads to knowledge, and the release from a craven inheritance of fear;
+its final guerdon--sleep? Who knows?
+
+Sleep was not bad.
+
+So that simple, sincere, humble, devout, earnest, fervent, passionate,
+and over-conscientious young unbelievers like myself had to be very
+strong and brave and self-reliant (which I was not), and very much in
+love with what they conceived to be the naked Truth (a figure of
+doubtful personal attractions at first sight), to tread the ways of life
+with that unvarying cheerfulness, confidence, and serenity which the
+believer claims as his own special and particular appanage.
+
+So much for my profession of unfaith, shared (had I but known it) by
+many much older and wiser and better educated than I, and only reached
+by them after great sacrifice of long-cherished illusions, and terrible
+pangs of soul-questioning--a struggle and a wrench that I was spared
+through my kind parents' thoughtfulness when I was a little boy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It thus behooved me to make the most of this life; since, for all I
+knew, or believed, or even hoped to the contrary, to-morrow we must die.
+
+Not, indeed, that I might eat and drink and be merry; heredity and
+education had not inclined me that way, I suppose, and circumstances did
+not allow it; but that I might try and live up to the best ideal I could
+frame out of my own conscience and the past teaching of mankind. And
+man, whose conception of the Infinite and divine has been so inadequate,
+has furnished us with such human examples (ancient and modern, Hebrew,
+Pagan, Buddhist, Christian, Agnostic, and what not) as the best of us
+can only hope to follow at a distance.
+
+I would sometimes go to my morning's work, my heart elate with lofty
+hope and high resolve.
+
+How easy and simple it seemed to lead a life without fear, or reproach,
+or self-seeking, or any sordid hope of personal reward, either here or
+hereafter!--a life of stoical endurance, invincible patience and
+meekness, indomitable cheerfulness and self-denial!
+
+After all, it was only for another forty or fifty years at the most, and
+what was that? And after that--_que sçais-je?_
+
+The thought was inspiring indeed!
+
+By luncheon-time (and luncheon consisted of an Abernethy biscuit and a
+glass of water, and several pipes of shag tobacco, cheap and rank) some
+subtle change would come over the spirit of my dream.
+
+Other people did not have high resolves. Some people had very bad
+tempers, and rubbed one very much the wrong way.
+
+What a hideous place was Pentonville to slave away one's life in! ...
+
+What a grind it was to be forever making designs for little new shops in
+Rosoman Street, and not making them well, it seemed! ...
+
+Why should a squinting, pock-marked, bowlegged, hunch-backed little
+Judkins (a sight to make a recruiting-sergeant shudder) forever taunt
+one with having enlisted as a private soldier? ...
+
+And then why should one be sneeringly told to "hit a fellow one's own
+size," merely because, provoked beyond endurance, one just grabbed him
+by the slack of his trousers and gently shook him out of them onto the
+floor, terrified but quite unhurt? ...
+
+And so on, and so on; constant little pin-pricks, sordid humiliations,
+ugliness, meannesses, and dirt, that called forth in resistance all that
+was lowest and least commendable in one's self.
+
+One has attuned one's nerves to the leading of a forlorn hope, and a
+gnat gets into one's eye, or a little cinder grit, and there it sticks;
+and there is no question of leading any forlorn hope, after all, and
+never will be; all _that_ was in the imagination only: it is always
+gnats and cinder grits, gnats and cinder grits.
+
+By the evening I had ignominiously broken down, and was plunged in the
+depths of an exasperated pessimism too deep even for tears, and would
+have believed myself the meanest and most miserable of mankind, but that
+everybody else, without exception, was even meaner and miserabler
+than myself.
+
+They could still eat and drink and be merry. I could not, and did not
+even want to.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And so on, day after day, week after week, for months and years....
+
+Thus I grew weary in time of my palling individuality, ever the same
+through all these uncontrollable variations of mood.
+
+Oh, that alternate ebb and flow of the spirits! It is a disease, and,
+what is most distressing, it is no real change; it is more sickeningly
+monotonous than absolute stagnation itself. And from that dreary seesaw
+I could never escape, except through the gates of dreamless sleep, the
+death in life; for even in our dreams we are still ourselves. There
+was no rest!
+
+I loathed the very sight of myself in the shop-windows as I went by; and
+yet I always looked for it there, in the forlorn hope of at least
+finding some alteration, even for the worse. I passionately longed to be
+somebody else; and yet I never met anybody else I could have borne to be
+for a moment.
+
+And then the loneliness of us!
+
+Each separate unit of our helpless race is inexorably bounded by the
+inner surface of his own mental periphery, a jointless armor in which
+there is no weak place, never a fault, never a single gap of egress for
+ourselves, of ingress for the nearest and dearest of our fellow-units.
+At only five points can we just touch each other, and all that is--and
+that only by the function of our poor senses--from the outside. In vain
+we rack them that we may get a little closer to the best beloved and
+most implicitly trusted; ever in vain, from the cradle to the grave.
+
+Why should so fantastic a thought have persecuted me so cruelly? I knew
+nobody with whom I should have felt such a transfusion of soul even
+tolerable for a second. I cannot tell! But it was like a gadfly which
+drove me to fatigue my body that I should have by day the stolid peace
+of mind that comes of healthy physical exhaustion; that I should sleep
+at night the dreamless sleep--the death in life!
+
+"Of such materials wretched men are made!" Especially wretched young
+men; and the wretcheder one is, the more one smokes; and the more one
+smokes, the wretcheder one gets--a vicious circle!
+
+Such was my case. I grew to long for the hour of my release (as I
+expressed it pathetically to myself), and caressed the idea of suicide.
+I even composed for myself a little rhymed epitaph in French which I
+thought very neat--
+
+     Je n'étais point. Je fus.
+         Je ne suis plus.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Oh, to perish in some noble cause--to die saving another's life, even
+another's worthless life, to which he clung!
+
+I remember formulating this wish, in all sincerity, one moonlit night as
+I walked up Frith Street, Soho. I came upon a little group of excited
+people gathered together at the foot of a house built over a shop. From
+a broken window-pane on the second floor an ominous cloud of smoke rose
+like a column into the windless sky. An ordinary ladder was placed
+against the house, which, they said, was densely inhabited; but no
+fire-engine or fire-escape had arrived as yet, and it appeared useless
+to try and rouse the inmates by kicking and beating at the door
+any longer.
+
+A brave man was wanted--a very brave man, who would climb the ladder,
+and make his way into the house through the broken window. Here was a
+forlorn hope to lead at last!
+
+Such a man was found. To my lasting shame and contrition, it was not I.
+
+He was short and thick and middle-aged, and had a very jolly red face
+and immense whiskers--quite a common sort of man, who seemed by no means
+tired of life.
+
+His heroism was wasted, as it happened; for the house was an empty one,
+as we all heard, to our immense relief, before he had managed to force a
+passage into the burning room. His whiskers were not even singed!
+
+Nevertheless, I slunk home, and gave up all thoughts of
+self-destruction--even in a noble cause; and there, in penance, I
+somewhat hastily committed to flame the plodding labor of many
+midnights--an elaborate copy in pen and ink, line for line, of Retel's
+immortal wood-engraving "Der Tod als Freund," which Mrs. Lintot had been
+kind enough to lend me--and under which I had written, in beautiful
+black Gothic letters and red capitals (and without the slightest sense
+of either humor or irreverence), the following poem, which had cost me
+infinite pains:
+
+               I.
+
+        _F, i, fi--n, i, ni!
+     Bon dieu Père, j'ai fini...
+     Vous qui m'avez lant puni,
+       Dans ma triste vie,
+     Pour tant d'horribles forfaits
+     Que je ne commis jamais
+     Laissez-moi jouir en paix
+       De mon agonie!_
+
+               II.
+
+     _Les faveurs que je Vous dois,
+     Je les compte sur mes doigts:_
+     _Tout infirme que je sois,
+        Ça se fait bien vite!
+     Prenez patience, et comptez
+     Tous mes maux--puis computez
+     Toutes Vos sévérités--
+       Vous me tiendrez quitte!_
+
+               III.
+
+     _Né pour souffrir, et souffrant--
+     Bas, honni, bête, ignorant,
+     Vieux, laid, chétif--et mourant
+        Dans mon trou sans plainte,
+     Je suis aussi sans désir
+     Autre que d'en bien finir--
+     Sans regret, sans repentir--
+        Sans espoir ni crainte!_
+
+               IV.
+
+     _Père inflexible et jaloux,
+     Votre Fils est mort pour nous!
+     Aussi, je reste envers Vous
+         Si bien sans rancune,
+     Que je voudrais, sans façon,
+     Faire, au seuil de ma prison,
+     Quelque petite oraison ...
+         Je n'en sais pas une!_
+
+               V.
+
+     _J'entends sonner l'Angélus
+     Qui rassemble Vos Elus:
+     Pour moi, du bercail exclus.
+         C'est la mort qui sonne!
+     Prier ne profite rien ...
+     Pardonner est le seul bien:_
+     _C'est le Vôtre, et c'est le mien:
+        Moi, je Vous pardonne!_
+
+               VI.
+
+     _Soyez d'un égard pareil!
+     S'il est quelque vrai sommeil
+     Sans ni rêve, ni réveil,
+        Ouvrez-m'en la porte--
+     Faites que l'immense Oubli
+     Couvre, sous un dernier pli,
+     Dans mon corps enséveli,
+        Ma conscience morte!_
+
+Oh me duffer! What a hopeless failure was I in all things, little and
+big.
+
+
+
+
+Part Three
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+I had no friends but the Lintots and their friends. "Les amis de nos
+amis sont nos amis!"
+
+My cousin Alfred had gone into the army, like his father before him. My
+cousin Charlie had gone into the Church, and we had drifted completely
+apart. My grandmother was dead. My Aunt Plunket, a great invalid, lived
+in Florence. Her daughter, Madge, was in India, happily married to a
+young soldier who is now a most distinguished general.
+
+The Lintots held their heads high as representatives of a liberal
+profession, and an old Pentonville family. People were generally
+exclusive in those days--an exclusiveness that was chiefly kept up by
+the ladies. There were charmed circles even in Pentonville.
+
+Among the most exclusive were the Lintots. Let us hope, in common
+justice, that those they excluded were at least able to exclude others.
+
+I have eaten their bread and salt, and it would ill become me to deny
+that their circle was charming as well as charmed. But I had no gift for
+making friends, although I was often attracted by people the very
+opposite of myself; especially by little, clever, quick, but not too
+familiar men; but even if they were disposed to make advances, a
+miserable shyness and stiffness of manner on my part, that I could not
+help, would raise a barrier of ice between us.
+
+They were most hospitable people, these good Lintots, and had many
+friends, and gave many parties, which my miserable shyness prevented me
+from enjoying to the full. They were both too stiff and too free.
+
+In the drawing-room, Mrs. Lintot and one or two other ladies, severely
+dressed, would play the severest music in a manner that did not mitigate
+its severity. They were merciless! It was nearly always Bach, or Hummel,
+or Scarlatti, each of whom, they would say, could write both like an
+artist and a gentleman--a very rare but indispensable combination,
+it seemed.
+
+Other ladies, young and middle-aged, and a few dumb-struck youths like
+myself, would be suffered to listen, but never to retaliate--never to
+play or sing back again.
+
+If one ventured to ask for a song without words by Mendelssohn--or a
+song with words, even by Schubert, even with German words--one was
+rebuked and made to blush for the crime of musical frivolity.
+
+Meanwhile, in Lintot's office (built by himself in the back garden),
+grave men and true, pending the supper hour, would smoke and sip
+spirits-and-water, and talk shop; formally at first, and with much
+politeness. But gradually, feeling their way, as it were, they would
+relax into social unbuttonment, and drop the "Mister" before each
+other's names (to be resumed next morning), and indulge in lively
+professional chaff, which would soon become personal and free and
+boisterous--a good-humored kind of warfare in which I did not shine, for
+lack of quickness and repartee. For instance, they would ask one whether
+one would rather be a bigger fool than one looked, or look a bigger fool
+than one was; and whichever way one answered the question, the retort
+would be that "that was impossible!" amid roars of laughter from all
+but one.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+So that I would take a middle course, and spend most of the evening on
+the stairs and in the hall, and study (with an absorbing interest much
+too well feigned to look natural) the photographs of famous cathedrals
+and public buildings till supper came; when, by assiduously attending on
+the ladies, I would cause my miserable existence to be remembered, and
+forgiven; and soon forgotten again, I fear.
+
+I hope I shall not be considered an overweening coxcomb for saying that,
+on the whole, I found more favor with the ladies than with the
+gentlemen; especially at supper-time.
+
+After supper there would be a change--for the better, some thought.
+Lintot, emboldened by good-cheer and good-fellowship, would become
+unduly, immensely, uproariously funny, in spite of his wife. He had a
+genuine gift of buffoonery. His friends would whisper to each other
+that Lintot was "on," and encourage him. Bach and Hummel and Scarlatti
+were put on the shelf, and the young people would have a good time.
+There were comic songs and negro melodies, with a chorus all round.
+Lintot would sing "Vilikins and his Dinah," in the manner of Mr. Robson,
+so well that even Mrs. Lintot's stern mask would relax into indulgent
+smiles. It was irresistible. And when the party broke up, we could all
+(thanks to our host) honestly thank our hostess "for a very pleasant
+evening," and cheerfully, yet almost regretfully, wish her good-night.
+
+It is good to laugh sometimes--wisely if one can; if not, _quocumque
+modo_! There are seasons when even "the crackling of thorns under a pot"
+has its uses. It seems to warm the pot--all the pots--and all the
+emptiness thereof, if they be empty.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Once, indeed, I actually made a friend, but he did not last me very
+long.
+
+It happened thus: Mrs. Lintot gave a grander party than usual. One of
+the invited was Mr. Moses Lyon, the great picture-dealer--a client of
+Lintot's; and he brought with him young Raphael Merridew, the already
+famous painter, the most attractive youth I had ever seen. Small and
+slight, but beautifully made, and dressed in the extreme of fashion,
+with a handsome face, bright and polite manners, and an irresistible
+voice, he became his laurels well; he would have been sufficiently
+dazzling without them. Never had those hospitable doors in Myddelton
+Square been opened to so brilliant a guest.
+
+I was introduced to him, and he discovered that the bridge of my nose
+was just suited for the face of the sun-god in his picture of "The
+Sun-god and the Dawn-maiden," and begged I would favor him with a
+sitting or two.
+
+Proud indeed was I to accede to such a request, and I gave him many
+sittings. I used to rise at dawn to sit, before my work at Lintot's
+began; and to sit again as soon as I could be spared.
+
+It seems I not only had the nose and brow of a sun-god (who is not
+supposed to be a very intellectual person), but also his arms and his
+torso; and sat for these, too. I have been vain of myself ever since.
+
+During these sittings, which he made delightful, I grew to love him as
+David loved Jonathan.
+
+We settled that we would go to the Derby together in a hansom. I engaged
+the smartest hansom in London days beforehand. On the great Wednesday
+morning I was punctual with it at his door in Charlotte Street. There
+was another hansom there already--a smarter hansom still than mine, for
+it was a private one--and he came down and told me he had altered his
+mind, and was going with Lyon, who had asked him the evening before.
+
+"One of the first picture-dealers in London, my dear fellow. Hang it
+all, you know, I couldn't refuse--awfully sorry!"
+
+So I drove to the Derby in solitary splendor, but the bright weather,
+the humors of the road, all the gay scenes were thrown away upon me,
+such was the bitterness of my heart.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+In the early afternoon I saw Merridew lunching on the top of a drag,
+among some men of smart and aristocratic appearance. He seemed to be the
+life of the party, and gave me a good-humored nod as I passed. I soon
+found Lyon sitting disconsolate in his hansom, scowling and solitary; he
+invited me to lunch with him, and disembosomed himself of a load of
+bitterness as intense as mine (which I kept to myself). The shrewd
+Hebrew tradesman was sunk in the warm-hearted, injured friend. Merridew
+had left Lyon for the Earl of Chiselhurst, just as he had left me
+for Lyon.
+
+That was a dull Derby for us both!
+
+A few days later I met Merridew, radiant as ever. All he said was:
+
+"Awful shame of me to drop old Lyon for Chiselhurst, eh? But an earl, my
+dear fellow! Hang it all, you know! Poor old Mo had to get back in his
+hansom all by himself, but he's bought the 'Sun-god' all the same."
+
+Merridew soon dropped me altogether, to my great sorrow, for I forgave
+him his Derby desertion as quickly as Lyon did, and would have forgiven
+him anything. He was one of those for whom allowances are always being
+made, and with a good grace.
+
+He died before he was thirty, poor boy! but his fame will never die. The
+"Sun-god" (even with the bridge of that nose which had been so wofully
+put out of joint) is enough by itself to place him among the immortals.
+Lyon sold it to Lord Chiselhurst for three thousand pounds--it had cost
+him five hundred. It is now in the National Gallery.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Poetical justice was satisfied!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Nor was I more fortunate in love than in friendship.
+
+All the exclusiveness in the world cannot exclude good and beautiful
+maidens, and these were not lacking, even in Pentonville.
+
+There is always one maiden much more beautiful and good than all the
+others--like Esmeralda among the ladies of the Hôtel de Gondelaurier.
+There was such a maiden in Pentonville, or rather Clerkenwell, close by.
+But her station was so humble (like Esmeralda's) that even the least
+exclusive would have drawn the line at _her!_ She was one of a large
+family, and they sold tripe and pig's feet, and food for cats and dogs,
+in a very small shop opposite the western wall of the Middlesex House of
+Detention. She was the eldest, and the busy, responsible one at this
+poor counter. She was one of Nature's ladies, one of Nature's
+goddesses--a queen! Of that I felt sure every time I passed her shop,
+and shyly met her kind, frank, uncoquettish gaze. A time was approaching
+when I should have to overcome my shyness, and tell her that she of all
+women was the woman for me, and that it was indispensable, absolutely
+indispensable, that we two should be made one--immediately! at
+once! forever!
+
+But before I could bring myself to this she married somebody else, and
+we had never exchanged a single word!
+
+If she is alive now she is an old woman--a good and beautiful old woman,
+I feel sure, wherever she is, and whatever her rank in life. If she
+should read this book, which is not very likely, may she accept this
+small tribute from an unknown admirer; for whom, so many years ago, she
+beautified and made poetical the hideous street that still bounds the
+Middlesex House of Detention on its western side; and may she try to
+think not the less of it because since then its writer has been on the
+wrong side of that long, blank wall, of that dreary portal where the
+agonized stone face looks down on the desolate slum:
+
+     "_Per me si va tra la perduta gente_ ...!"
+
+After this disappointment I got myself a big dog (like Byron, Bismarck,
+and Wagner), but not in the spirit of emulation. Indeed, I had never
+heard of either Bismarck or Wagner in those days, or their dogs, and I
+had lost my passion for Byron and any wish to emulate him in any way; it
+was simply for the want of something to be fond of, and that would be
+sure to love me back again.
+
+He was not a big dog when I bought him, but just a little ball of
+orange-tawny fluff that I could carry with one arm. He cost me all the
+money I had saved up for a holiday trip to Passy. I had seen his father,
+a champion St. Bernard, at a dog-show, and felt that life would be well
+worth living with such a companion; but _his_ price was five hundred
+guineas. When I saw the irresistible son, just six weeks old, and heard
+that he was only one-fiftieth of his sire's value, I felt Passy must
+wait, and became his possessor.
+
+[Illustration: PORTHOS AND HIS ATTENDANT SQUIRE.]
+
+I gave him of the best that money could buy--real milk at fivepence a
+quart, three quarts a day, I combed his fluff every morning, and washed
+him three times a week, and killed all his fleas one by one--a labour of
+love. I weighed him every Saturday, and found he increased at the rate
+of six to nine weekly; and his power of affection increased as the
+square of his weight. I christened him Porthos, because he was so big
+and fat and jolly; but in his noble puppy face and his beautiful
+pathetic eyes I already foresaw for his middle age that distinguished
+and melancholy grandeur which characterized the sublime Athos, Comte
+de la Fère.
+
+He was a joy. It was good to go to sleep at night and know he would be
+there in the morning. Whenever we took our walks abroad, everybody
+turned round to look at him and admire, and to ask if he was
+good-tempered, and what his particular breed was, and what I fed him on.
+He became a monster in size--a beautiful, playful, gracefully
+galumphing, and most affectionate monster, and I, his happy
+Frankenstein, congratulated myself on the possession of a treasure that
+would last twelve years at least, or even fourteen, with the care I
+meant to take of him. But he died of distemper when he was eleven
+months old.
+
+I do not know if little dogs cause as large griefs when they die as big
+ones; but I settled there should be no more dogs--big or little--for me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After this I took to writing verses and sending them to magazines, where
+they never appeared. They were generally about my being reminded, by a
+tune, of things that had happened a long time ago: my poetic, like my
+artistic vein, was limited.
+
+Here are the last I made, thirty years back. My only excuse for giving
+them is that they are so _singularly prophetic_.
+
+The reminding tune (an old French chime which my father used to sing)
+is very simple and touching; and the old French words run thus:
+
+     _"Orléans, Beaugency!
+     Notre Dame de Cléry!
+       Vendôme! Vendôme!
+     Quel chagrin, quel ennui
+     De compter toute la nuit
+       Les heures--Les heures!"_
+
+That is all. They are supposed to be sung by a mediaeval prisoner who
+cannot sleep; and who, to beguile the tediousness of his insomnia, sets
+any words that come into his head to the tune of the chime which marks
+the hours from a neighboring belfry. I tried to fancy that his name was
+Pasquier de la Marière, and that he was my ancestor.
+
+     THE CHIME.
+
+       _There is an old French air,
+     A little song of loneliness and grief--
+     Simple as nature, sweet beyond compare--
+       And sad--past all belief!
+
+       Nameless is he that wrote
+     The melody--but this I opine:
+     Whoever made the words was some remote
+       French ancestor of mine.
+
+       I know the dungeion deep
+     Where long he lay--and why he lay therein;
+     And all his anguish, that he could not sleep
+       For conscience of a sin._
+
+       I see his cold, hard bed;
+     I hear the chimes that jingled in his ears
+     As he pressed nightly, with that wakeful head,
+       A pillow wet with tears.
+
+       Oh, restless little chime!
+     It never changed--but rang its roundelay
+     For each dark hour of that unhappy time
+       That sighed itself away.
+
+       And ever, more and more,
+     Its burden grew of his lost self a part--
+     And mingled with his memories, and wore
+       Its way into his heart.
+
+       And there it wove the name
+     Of many a town he loved, for one dear sake,
+     Into its web of music; thus he came
+       His little song to make.
+
+       Of all that ever heard
+     And loved it for its sweetness, none but I
+     Divined the clew that, as a hidden word,
+       The notes doth underlie.
+
+       That wail from lips long dead
+     Has found its echo in this breast alone!
+     Only to me, by blood-remembrance led,
+       Is that wild story known!
+
+       And though 'tis mine, by right
+     Of treasure-trove, to rifle and lay bare--
+     A heritage of sorrow and delight
+       The world would gladly share--
+
+       Yet must I not unfold
+     For evermore, nor whisper late or soon,
+     The secret that a few slight bars thus hold
+       Imprisoned in a tune.
+
+       For when that little song
+     Goes ringing in my head, I know that he,
+     My luckless lone forefather, dust so long,
+       Relives his life in me!
+
+I sent them to ----'s Magazine, with the six French lines on at the
+which they were founded at the top. ----'s _Magazine_ published only the
+six French lines--the only lines in my handwriting that ever got into
+print. And they date from the fifteenth century!
+
+Thus was my little song lost to the world, and for a time to me. But
+long, long afterwards, I found it again, where Mr. Longfellow once found
+a song of _his_: "in the heart of a friend"--surely the sweetest bourne
+that can ever be for any song!
+
+Little did I foresee that a day was not far off when real blood
+remembrance would carry me--but that is to come.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Poetry, friendship and love having failed, I sought for consolation in
+art, and frequented the National Gallery, Marlborough House (where the
+Vernon collection was), the British Museum, the Royal Academy, and other
+exhibitions.
+
+I prostrated myself before Titian, Rembrandt, Velasquez, Veronese, Da
+Vinci, Botticelli, Signorelli--the older the better; and tried my best
+to honestly feel the greatness I knew and know to be there; but for
+want of proper training I was unable to reach those heights, and, like
+most outsiders, admired them for the wrong things, for the very beauties
+they lack--such transcendent, ineffable beauties of feature, form, and
+expression as an outsider always looks for in an old master, and often
+persuades himself he finds there--and oftener still, _pretends_ he does!
+
+I was far more sincerely moved (although I did not dare to say so) by
+some works of our own time--for instance, by the "Vale of Rest," the
+"Autumn Leaves," "The Huguenot" of young Mr. Millais--just as I found
+such poems as _Maud_ and _In Memoriam_, by Mr. Alfred Tennyson,
+infinitely more precious and dear to me than Milton's _Paradise Lost_
+and Spenser's _Faerie Queene_.
+
+Indeed, I was hopelessly modern in those days--quite an every-day young
+man; the names I held in the warmest and deepest regard were those of
+then living men and women. Darwin, Browning, and George Eliot did not,
+it is true, exist for me as yet; but Tennyson, Thackeray, Dickens,
+Millais, John Leech, George Sand, Balzac, the old Dumas, Victor Hugo,
+and Alfred de Musset!
+
+I have never beheld them in the flesh; but, like all the world, I know
+their outer aspect well, and could stand a pretty stiff examination in
+most they have ever written, drawn, or painted.
+
+Other stars of magnitude have risen since, but of the old galaxy four at
+least still shine out of the past with their ancient lustre undimmed in
+my eyes--Thackeray; dear John Leech, who still has power to make me
+laugh as I like to laugh; and for the two others it is plain that the
+Queen, the world, and I are of a like mind as to their deserts, for one
+of them is now an ornament to the British peerage, the other a baronet
+and a millionaire; only I would have made dukes of them straight off,
+with precedence over the Archbishop of Canterbury, if they would care to
+have it so.
+
+It is with a full but humble heart that I thus venture to record my long
+indebtedness, and pay this poor tribute, still fresh from the days of my
+unquestioning hero-worship. It will serve, at least, to show my reader
+(should I ever have one sufficiently interested to care) in what mental
+latitudes and longitudes I dwelt, who was destined to such singular
+experience--a kind of reference, so to speak--that he may be able to
+place me at a glance, according to the estimation in which he holds
+these famous and perhaps deathless names.
+
+It will be admitted, at least, that my tastes were normal, and shared by
+a large majority--the tastes of an every-day young man at that
+particular period of the nineteenth century--one much given to athletics
+and cold tubs, and light reading and cheap tobacco, and endowed with the
+usual discontent; the last person for whom or from whom or by whom to
+expect anything out of the common.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But the splendor of the Elgin Marbles! I understood that at
+once--perhaps because there is not so much to understand. Mere
+physically beautiful people appeal to us all, whether they be in flesh
+or marble.
+
+By some strange intuition, or natural instinct, I _knew_ that people
+ought to be built like that, before I had ever seen a single statue in
+that wondrous room. I had divined them--so completely did they realize
+an aesthetic ideal I had always felt.
+
+I had often, as I walked the London streets, peopled an imaginary world
+of my own with a few hundreds of such beings, made flesh and blood, and
+pictured them as a kind of beneficent aristocracy seven feet high, with
+minds and manners to match their physique, and set above the rest of the
+world for its good; for I found it necessary (so that my dream should
+have a point) to provide them with a foil in the shape of millions of
+such people as we meet every day. I was egotistic and self-seeking
+enough, it is true, to enroll myself among the former, and had chosen
+for my particular use and wear just such a frame as that of the Theseus,
+with, of course, the nose and hands and feet (of which time has bereft
+him) restored, and all mutilations made good.
+
+And for my mistress and companion I had duly selected no less a person
+than the Venus of Milo (no longer armless), of which Lintot possessed a
+plaster-cast, and whose beauties I had foreseen before I ever beheld
+them with the bodily eye.
+
+"Monsieur n'est pas dégoûté!" as Ibbetson would have remarked.
+
+But most of all did I pant for the music which is divine.
+
+Alas, that concerts and operas and oratorios should not be as free to
+the impecunious as the National Gallery and the British Museum--a
+privilege which is not abused!
+
+Impecunious as I was, I sometimes had pence enough to satisfy this
+craving, and discovered in time such realms of joy as I had never
+dreamed of; such monarchs as Mozart, Handel, and Beethoven, and others,
+of whom my father knew apparently so little; and yet they were more
+potent enchanters than Grétry, Hérold, and Boieldieu, whose music he
+sang so well.
+
+I discovered, moreover, that they could do more than charm--they could
+drive my weary self out of my weary soul, and for a space fill that
+weary soul with courage, resignation, and hope. No Titian, no
+Shakespeare, no Phidias could ever accomplish that--not even Mr. William
+Makepeace Thackeray or Mr. Alfred Tennyson.
+
+My sweetest recollections of this period of my life (indeed, the only
+sweet recollections) are of the music I heard, and the places where I
+heard it; it was an enchantment! With what vividness I can recall it
+all! The eager anticipation for days; the careful selection, beforehand,
+from such an _embarras de richesses_ as was duly advertised; then the
+long waiting in the street, at the doors reserved for those whose
+portion is to be the gallery. The hard-won seat aloft is reached at
+last, after a selfish but good-humored struggle up the long stone
+staircase (one is sorry for the weak, but a famished ear has no
+conscience). The gay and splendid house is crammed; the huge chandelier
+is a golden blaze; the delight of expectation is in the air, and also
+the scent of gas, and peppermint, and orange-peel, and music-loving
+humanity, whom I have discovered to be of sweeter fragrance than the
+common herd.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+The orchestra fills, one by one; instruments tune up--a familiar
+cacophony, sweet with seductive promise. The conductor takes his
+seat--applause--a hush--three taps--the baton waves once, twice,
+thrice--the eternal fountain of magic is let loose, and at the
+very first jet
+
+     "_The cares that infest the day
+     Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,
+     And as silently steal away_."
+
+Then lo! the curtain rises, and straightway we are in Seville--Seville,
+after Pentonville! Count Alma-viva, lordly, gallant, and gay beneath his
+disguise, twangs his guitar, and what sounds issue from it! For every
+instrument that was ever invented is in that guitar--the whole
+orchestra!
+
+"_Ecco ridente il cielo_....," so sings he (with the most beautiful male
+voice of his time) under Rosina's balcony; and soon Rosina's voice (the
+most beautiful female voice of hers) is heard behind her curtains--so
+girlish, so innocent, so young and light-hearted, that the eyes fill
+with involuntary tears.
+
+Thus encouraged, he warbles that his name is Lindoro, that he would fain
+espouse her; that he is not rich in the goods of this world, but gifted
+with an inordinate, inexhaustible capacity for love (just like Peter
+Ibbetson); and vows that he will always warble to her, in this wise,
+from dawn till when daylight sinks behind the mountain. But what matter
+the words?
+
+"Go on, my love, go on, _like this_!" warbles back Rosina--and no
+wonder--till the dull, despondent, commonplace heart of Peter Ibbetson
+has room for nothing else but sunny hope and love and joy! And yet it is
+all mere sound--impossible, unnatural, unreal nonsense!
+
+Or else, in a square building, decent and well-lighted enough, but not
+otherwise remarkable--the very chapel of music--four business-like
+gentlemen, in modern attire and spectacles, take their places on an
+unpretentious platform amid refined applause; and soon the still air
+vibrates to the trembling of sixteen strings--only that and
+nothing more!
+
+But in that is all Beethoven, or Schubert, or Schumann has got to say to
+us for the moment, and what a say it is! And with what consummate
+precision and perfection it is said--with what a mathematical certainty,
+and yet with what suavity, dignity, grace, and distinction!
+
+They are the four greatest players in the world, perhaps; but they
+forget themselves, and we forget them (as it is their wish we should),
+in the master whose work they interpret so reverently, that we may yearn
+with his mighty desire and thrill with his rapture and triumph, or ache
+with his heavenly pain and submit with his divine resignation.
+
+Not all the words in all the tongues that ever were--dovetail them,
+rhyme them, alliterate them, torture them as you will--can ever pierce
+to the uttermost depths of the soul of man, and let in a glimpse of the
+Infinite, as do the inarticulate tremblings of those sixteen strings.
+
+Ah, songs without words are the best!
+
+Then a gypsy-like little individual, wiry and unkempt, who looks as if
+he had spent his life listening to the voices of the night in Heaven
+knows what Lithuanian forests, with wolves and wild-boars for his
+familiars, and the wind in the trees for his teacher, seats himself at
+the great brass-bound oaken Broadwood piano-forte. And under his
+phenomenal fingers, a haunting, tender, world-sorrow, full of
+questionings--a dark mystery of moonless, starlit nature--exhales itself
+in nocturnes, in impromptus, in preludes--in mere waltzes and mazourkas
+even! But waltzes and mazourkas such as the most frivolous would never
+dream of dancing to. A capricious, charming sorrow--not too deep for
+tears, if one be at all inclined to shed them--so delicate, so fresh,
+and yet so distinguished, so ethereally civilized and worldly and
+well-bred that it has crystallized itself into a drawing-room ecstasy,
+to last forever. It seems as though what was death (or rather
+euthanasia) to him who felt it, is play for us--surely an immortal
+sorrow whose recital will never, never pall--the sorrow of Chopin.
+
+Though why Chopin should have been so sorry we cannot even guess; for
+mere sorrow's sake, perhaps; the very luxury of woe--the real sorrow
+which has no real cause (like mine in those days); and that is the best
+and cheapest kind of sorrow to make music of, after all!
+
+And this great little gypsy pianist, who plays his Chopin so well;
+evidently he has not spent his life in Lithuanian forests, but hard at
+the key-board, night and day; and he has had a better master than the
+wind in the trees--namely, Chopin himself (for it is printed in the
+programme). It was his father and mother before him, and theirs, who
+heard the voices of the night; but he remembers it all, and puts it all
+into his master's music, and makes us remember it, too.
+
+Or else behold the chorus, rising tier upon tier, and culminating in the
+giant organ. But their thunder is just hushed.
+
+Some Liliputian figure, male or female, as the case may be, rises on its
+little legs amid the great Liliputian throng, and through the sacred
+stillness there peals forth a perfect voice (by no means Liliputian). It
+bids us "Rest in the Lord," or else it tells us that "He was despised
+and rejected of men"; but, again, what matter the words? They are almost
+a hinderance, beautiful though they be.
+
+The hardened soul melts at the tones of the singer, at the unspeakable
+pathos of the sounds that cannot lie; one almost believes--one believes
+at least in the belief of others. At last one understands, and is purged
+of intolerance and cynical contempt, and would kneel with the rest, in
+sheer human sympathy!
+
+Oh, wretched outsider that one is (if it all be true)--one whose
+heart, so hopelessly impervious to the written word, so helplessly
+callous to the spoken message, can be reached only by the organized
+vibrations of a trained larynx, a metal pipe, a reed, a
+fiddle-string--by invisible, impalpable, incomprehensible little
+air-waves in mathematical combination, that beat against a tiny drum at
+the back of one's ear. And these mathematical combinations and the laws
+that govern them have existed forever, before Moses, before Pan, long
+before either a larynx or a tympanum had been evolved. They
+are absolute!
+
+Oh, mystery of mysteries!
+
+Euterpe, Muse of Muses, what a personage hast thou become since first
+thou sattest for thy likeness (with that ridiculous lyre in thy untaught
+hands) to some Greek who could carve so much better than thou
+couldst play!
+
+Four strings; but not the fingerable strings of Stradivarius. Nay, I beg
+thy pardon--five; for thy scale was pentatonic, I believe. Orpheus
+himself had no better, it is true. It was with just such an instrument
+that he all but charmed his Eurydice out of Hades. But, alas, she went
+back; on second thoughts, she liked Hades best!
+
+Couldst thou fire and madden and wring the heart, and then melt and
+console and charm it into the peace that passeth all understanding, with
+those poor five rudimentary notes, and naught between?
+
+Couldst thou, out of those five sounds of fixed, unalterable pitch,
+make, not a sixth sound, but a star?
+
+What were they, those five sounds? "Do, re, mi, fa, sol?" What must thy
+songs without words have been, if thou didst ever make any?
+
+Thou wast in very deed a bread-and-butter miss in those days, Euterpe,
+for all that thy eight twin sisters were already grown up, and out; and
+now thou toppest them all by half a head, at least. "Tu leur mangerais
+des petits pâtés sur la tête--comme Madame Seraskier!"
+
+And oh, how thou beatest them all for beauty! In _my_ estimation, at
+least--like--like Madame Seraskier again!
+
+And hast thou done growing at last?
+
+Nay, indeed; thou art not even yet a bread-and-butter miss--thou art but
+a sweet baby, one year old, and seven feet high, tottering midway
+between some blessed heaven thou hast only just left and the dull home
+of us poor mortals.
+
+The sweet one-year-old baby of our kin puts its hands upon our knees and
+looks up into our eyes with eyes full of unutterable meaning. It has so
+much to say! It can only say "ga-ga" and "ba-ba"; but with oh! how
+searching a voice, how touching a look--that is, if one is fond of
+babies! We are moved to the very core; we want to understand, for it
+concerns us all; we were once like that ourselves--the individual and
+the race--but for the life of us we cannot _remember_.
+
+And what canst _thou_ say to us yet, Euterpe, but thy "ga-ga" and thy
+"ba-ba," the inarticulate sweetness whereof we feel and cannot
+comprehend? But how beautiful it is--and what a look thou hast, and
+what a voice--that is, if one is fond of music!
+
+     "Je suis las des mois--je suis d'entendre
+        Ce qui peut mentir;
+      J'aime mieux les sons, qu'au lieu de comprendre
+        je n'ai qu'à sentir."
+
+Next day I would buy or beg or borrow the music that had filled me with
+such emotion and delight, and take it home to my little square piano,
+and try to finger it all out for myself. But I had begun too late
+in life.
+
+To sit, longing and helpless, before an instrument one cannot play, with
+a lovely score one cannot read! Even Tantalus was spared such an
+ordeal as that.
+
+It seemed hard that my dear father and mother, so accomplished in music
+themselves, should not even have taught me the musical notes, at an age
+when it was so easy to learn them; and thus have made me free of that
+wonder-world of sound in which I took such an extraordinary delight, and
+might have achieved distinction--perhaps.
+
+But no, my father had dedicated me to the Goddess of Science from before
+my very birth; that I might some day be better equipped than he for the
+pursuit, capture, and utilization of Nature's sterner secrets. There
+must be no dallying with light Muses. Alas! I have fallen between
+two stools!
+
+And thus, Euterpe absent, her enchantment would pass away; her
+handwriting was before me, but I had not learned how to decipher it, and
+my weary self would creep back into its old prison--my soul.
+
+[Illustration: (no caption)]
+
+Self-sickness-_selbstschmerz, le mal do soi!_ What a disease! It is not
+to be found in any dictionary, medical or otherwise.
+
+I ought to have been whipped for it, I know; but nobody was big enough,
+or kind enough, to whip me!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At length there came a day when that weary, weak, and most ridiculous
+self of mine was driven out--and exorcised for good--by a still more
+potent enchanter than even Handel or Beethoven or Schubert!
+
+There was a certain Lord Cray, for whom Lintot had built some laborers'
+cottages in Hertfordshire, and I sometimes went there to superintend the
+workmen. When the cottages were finished, Lord Cray and his wife (a very
+charming, middle-aged lady) came to see them, and were much pleased with
+all that had been done, and also seemed to be much interested in _me_,
+of all people in the world! and a few days later I received a card of
+invitation to their house in town for a concert.
+
+At first I felt much too shy to go; but Mr. Lintot insisted that it was
+my duty to do so, as it might lead to business; so that when the night
+came, I screwed up my courage to the sticking-place, and went.
+
+That evening was all enchantment, or would have been but for the
+somewhat painful feeling that I was such an outsider.
+
+But I was always well content to be the least observed of all observers,
+and felt happy in the security that here I should at least be left
+alone; that no perfect stranger would attempt to put me at my ease by
+making me the butt of his friendly and familiar banter; that no gartered
+duke, or belted earl (I have no doubt they were as plentiful there as
+blackberries, though they did not wear their insignia) would pat me on
+the back and ask me if I would sooner look a bigger fool than I was, or
+be a bigger fool than I looked. (I have not found a repartee for that
+insidious question yet; that is why it rankles so.)
+
+I had always heard that the English were a stiff people. There seemed to
+be no stiffness at Lady Cray's; nor was there any facetiousness; it put
+one at one's ease merely to look at them. They were mostly big, and
+strong, and healthy, and quiet, and good-humored, with soft and
+pleasantly-modulated voices. The large, well-lighted rooms were neither
+hot nor cold; there were beautiful pictures on the walls, and an
+exquisite scent of flowers came from an immense conservatory. I had
+never been to such a gathering before; all was new and a surprise, and
+very much to my taste, I confess. It was my first glimpse of "Society;"
+and last--but one!
+
+There were crowds of people--but no crowd; everybody seemed to know
+everybody else quite intimately, and to resume conversations begun an
+hour ago somewhere else.
+
+Presently these conversations were hushed, and Grisi and Mario sang! It
+was as much as I could do to restrain my enthusiasm and delight. I could
+have shouted out loud--I could almost have sung myself!
+
+In the midst of the applause that followed that heavenly duet, a lady
+and gentleman came into the room, and at the sight of that lady a new
+interest came into my life; and all the old half-forgotten sensations of
+mute pain and rapture that the beauty of Madame Seraskier used to make
+me feel as a child were revived once more; but with a depth and
+intensity, in comparison, that were as a strong man's barytone to a
+small boy's treble.
+
+It was the quick, sharp, cruel blow, the _coup de poignard_, that beauty
+of the most obvious, yet subtle, consummate, and highly-organized order
+can deal to a thoroughly prepared victim.
+
+And what a thoroughly prepared victim was I! A poor, shy,
+over-susceptible, virginal savage--Uncas, the son of Chingachgook,
+astray for the first time in a fashionable London drawing-room.
+
+A chaste mediaeval knight, born out of his due time, ascetic both from
+reverence and disgust, to whom woman in the abstract was the one
+religion; in the concrete, the cause of fifty disenchantments a day!
+
+A lusty, love-famished, warm-blooded pagan, stranded in the middle of
+the nineteenth century; in whom some strange inherited instinct had
+planted a definite, complete, and elaborately-finished conception of
+what the ever-beloved shape of woman should be--from the way the hair
+should grow on her brow and her temples and the nape of her neck, down
+to the very rhythm that should regulate the length and curve and
+position of every single individual toe! and who had found, to his pride
+and delight, that his preconceived ideal was as near to that of Phidias
+as if he had lived in the time of Pericles and Aspasia.
+
+For such was this poor scribe, and such he had been from a child, until
+this beautiful lady first swam into his ken.
+
+She was so tall that her eyes seemed almost on a level with mine, but
+she moved with the alert lightness and grace of a small person. Her
+thick, heavy hair was of a dark coppery brown, her complexion clear and
+pale, her eyebrows and eyelashes black, her eyes a light bluish gray.
+Her nose was short and sharp, and rather tilted at the tip, and her red
+mouth large and very mobile; and here, deviating from my preconceived
+ideal, she showed me how tame a preconceived ideal can be. Her perfect
+head was small, and round her long, thick throat two slight creases went
+parallel, to make what French sculptors call _le collier de Vénus;_ the
+skin of her neck was like a white camellia, and slender and
+square-shouldered as she was, she did not show a bone. She was that
+beautiful type the French define as _la fausse maigre_, which does not
+mean a "false, thin woman."
+
+She seemed both thoughtful and mirthful at once, and genial as I had
+never seen any one genial before--a person to confide in, to tell all
+one's troubles to, without even an introduction! When she laughed she
+showed both top and bottom teeth, which were perfect, and her eyes
+nearly closed, so that they could no longer be seen for the thick lashes
+that fringed both upper and under eyelids; at which time the expression
+of her face was so keenly, cruelly sweet that it went through one like a
+knife. And then the laugh would suddenly cease, her full lips would
+meet, and her eyes beam out again like two mild gray suns, benevolently
+humorous and kindly inquisitive, and full of interest in everything and
+everybody around her. But there--I cannot describe her any more than one
+can describe a beautiful tune.
+
+Out of those magnificent orbs kindness, kindness, kindness was shed like
+a balm; and after a while, by chance, that balm was shed for a few
+moments on me, to my sweet but terrible confusion. Then I saw that she
+asked my hostess who I was, and received the answer; on which she shed
+her balm on me for one moment more, and dismissed me from her thoughts.
+
+Madame Grisi sang again--Desdemona's song from _Othello_--and the
+beautiful lady thanked the divine singer, whom she seemed to know quite
+intimately; and I thought her thanks--Italian thanks--even diviner than
+the song--not that I could quite understand them or even hear them
+well--I was too far; but she thanked with eyes and hands and shoulders--
+slight, happy movements--as well as words; surely the sweetest and
+sincerest words ever spoken.
+
+She was much surrounded and made up to--evidently a person of great
+importance; and I ventured to ask another shy man standing in my corner
+who she was, and he answered--
+
+"The Duchess of Towers."
+
+She did not stay long, and when she departed all turned dull and
+commonplace that had seemed so bright before she came; and seeing that
+it was not necessary to bid my hostess good-night and thank her for a
+pleasant evening, as we did in Pentonville, I got myself out of the
+house and walked back to my lodgings an altered man.
+
+I should probably never meet that lovely young duchess again, and
+certainly never know her; but her shaft had gone straight and true into
+my very heart, and I felt how well barbed it was, beyond all possibility
+of its ever being torn out of that blessed wound; might this never heal;
+might it bleed on forever!
+
+She would be an ideal in my lonely life, to live up to in thought and
+word and deed. An instinct which I felt to be infallible told me she was
+as good as she was fair--
+
+    _"Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, the love of
+    love."_
+
+[Illustration: THE DUCHESS OP TOWERS.]
+
+And just as Madame Seraskier's image was fading away, this new star had
+arisen to guide me by its light, though seen but for a moment; breaking
+once, through a parted cloud, I knew in which portion of the heavens it
+dwelt and shone apart, among the fairest constellations; and ever after
+turned my face that way. Nevermore in my life would I do or say or think
+a mean thing, or an impure, or an unkind one, if I could help it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Next day, as we walked to the Foundling Hospital for divine service,
+Mrs. Lintot severely deigned--under protest, as it were--to
+cross-examine me on the adventures of the evening.
+
+I did not mention the Duchess of Towers, nor was I able to describe the
+different ladies' dresses; but I described everything else in a manner I
+thought calculated to interest her deeply--the flowers, the splendid
+pictures and curtains and cabinets, the beautiful music, the many lords
+and ladies gay.
+
+She disapproved of them all.
+
+Existence on such an opulent scale was unconducive to any qualities of
+real sterling value, either moral or intellectual. Give _her_, for one,
+plain living and high thinking!
+
+"By-the-way," she asked, "what kind of supper did they give you?
+Something extremely _recherché_, I have no doubt. Ortolans,
+nightingales' tongues, pearls dissolved in wine?"
+
+Candor obliged me to confess there had been no supper, or that if there
+had I had managed to miss it. I suggested that perhaps everybody had
+dined late; and all the pearls, I told her, were on the ladies' necks
+and in their hair; and not feeling hungry, I could not wish them
+anywhere else; and the nightingales' tongues were in their throats to
+sing heavenly Italian duets with.
+
+"And they call that hospitality!" exclaimed Lintot, who loved his
+supper; and then, as he was fond of summing up and laying down the law
+when once his wife had given him the lead, he did so to the effect that
+though the great were all very well in their superficial way, and might
+possess many external charms for each other, and for all who were so
+deplorably weak as to fall within the sphere of their attraction, there
+was a gulf between the likes of them and the likes of us, which it would
+be better not to try and bridge if one wished to preserve one's
+independence and one's self-respect; unless, of course, it led to
+business; and this, he feared, it would never do with me.
+
+"They take you up one day and they drop you like a 'ot potato the next;
+and, moreover, my dear Peter," he concluded, affectionately linking his
+arm in mine, as was often his way when we walked together (although he
+was twelve good inches shorter than myself), "inequality of social
+condition is a bar to any real intimacy. It is something like disparity
+of physical stature. One can walk arm in arm only with a man of about
+one's own size."
+
+This summing up seemed so judicious, so incontrovertible, that feeling
+quite deplorably weak enough to fall within the sphere of Lady Cray's
+attraction if I saw much of her, and thereby losing my self-respect, I
+was deplorably weak enough not to leave a card on her after the happy
+evening I had spent at her house.
+
+Snob that I was, I dropped her--"like a 'ot potato" for fear of her
+dropping me.
+
+Besides which I had on my conscience a guilty, snobby feeling that in
+merely external charms at least these fine people were more to my taste
+than the charmed circle of my kind old friends the Lintots, however
+inferior they might be to these (for all that I knew) in sterling
+qualities of the heart and head--just as I found the outer aspect of
+Park Lane and Piccadilly more attractive than that of Pentonville,
+though possibly the latter may have been the more wholesome for such as
+I to live in.
+
+But people who can get Mario and Grisi to come and sing for them (and
+the Duchess of Towers to come and listen); people whose walls are
+covered with beautiful pictures; people for whom the smooth and
+harmonious ordering of all the little external things of social life has
+become a habit and a profession--such people are not to be dropped
+without a pang.
+
+So with a pang I went back to my usual round as though nothing had
+happened; but night and day the face of the Duchess of Towers was ever
+present to me, like a fixed idea that dominates a life.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On reading and rereading these past pages, I find that I have been
+unpardonably egotistic, unconscionably prolix and diffuse; and with such
+small beer to chronicle!
+
+And yet I feel that if I strike out this, I must also strike out that;
+which would lead to my striking out all, in sheer discouragement; and I
+have a tale to tell which is more than worth the telling!
+
+Once having got into the way of it, I suppose, I must have found the
+temptation to talk about myself irresistible.
+
+It is evidently a habit easy to acquire, even in old age--perhaps
+especially in old age, for it has never been my habit through life. I
+would sooner have talked to you about yourself, reader, or about you to
+somebody else--your friend, or even your enemy; or about them to you.
+
+But, indeed, at present, and until I die, I am without a soul to talk to
+about anybody or anything worth speaking of, so that most of my talking
+is done in pen and ink--a one-sided conversation, O patient reader, with
+yourself. I am the most lonely old man in the world, although perhaps
+the happiest.
+
+Still, it is not always amusing where I live, cheerfully awaiting my
+translation to another sphere.
+
+There is the good chaplain, it is true, and the good priest; who talk to
+me about myself a little too much, methinks; and the doctor, who talks
+to me about the priest and the chaplain, which is better. He does not
+seem to like them. He is a very witty man.
+
+But, my brother maniacs!
+
+They are lamentably _comme tout le monde_, after all. They are only
+interesting when the mad fit seizes them. When free from their awful
+complaint they are for the most part very common mortals: conventional
+Philistines, dull dogs like myself, and dull dogs do not like
+each other.
+
+Two of the most sensible (one a forger, the other a kleptomaniac on an
+important scale) are friends of mine. They are fairly well educated,
+respectable city men, clean, solemn, stodgy, punctilious, and resigned,
+but they are both unhappy; not because they are cursed with the double
+brand of madness and crime, and have forfeited their freedom in
+consequence; but because they find there are so few "ladies and
+gentlemen" in a criminal lunatic asylum, and they have always been used
+to "the society of ladies and gentlemen." Were it not for this, they
+would be well content to live here. And each is in the habit of
+confiding to me that he considers the other a very high-minded,
+trustworthy fellow, and all that, but not altogether "quite a
+gentleman." I do not know what they consider me; they probably confide
+that to each other.
+
+Can anything be less odd, less eccentric or interesting?
+
+Another, when quite sane, speaks English with a French accent and
+demonstrative French gestures, and laments the lost glories of the old
+French régime, and affects to forget the simplest English words. He
+doesn't know a word of French, however. But when his madness comes on,
+and he is put into a strait-waistcoat, all his English comes back, and
+very strong, fluent, idiomatic English it is, of the cockneyest kind,
+with all its "h's" duly transposed.
+
+Another (the most unpleasant and ugliest person here) has chosen me for
+the confidant of his past amours; he gives me the names and dates and
+all. The less I listen the more he confides. He makes me sick. What can
+I do to prevent his believing that I believe him? I am tired of killing
+people for lying about women. If I call him a liar and a cad, it may
+wake in him Heaven knows what dormant frenzy--for I am quite in the dark
+as to the nature of his mental infirmity.
+
+Another, a weak but amiable and well-intentioned youth, tries to think
+that he is passionately fond of music; but he is so exclusive, if you
+please, that he can only endure Bach and Beethoven, and when he hears
+Mendelssohn or Chopin, is obliged to leave the room. If I want to please
+him I whistle "Le Bon Roi Dagobert," and tell him it is the _motif_ of
+one of Bach's fugues; and to get rid of him I whistle it again and tell
+him it is one of Chopin's impromptus. What his madness is I can never be
+quite sure, for he is very close, but have heard that he is fond of
+roasting cats alive; and that the mere sight of a cat is enough to rouse
+his terrible propensity, and drive all wholesome, innocent, harmless,
+natural affectation out of his head.
+
+There is a painter here who (like others one has met outside) believes
+himself the one living painter worthy of the name. Indeed, he has
+forgotten the names of all the others, and can only despise and abuse
+them in the lump. He triumphantly shows you his own work, which consists
+of just the kind of crude, half-clever, irresponsible, impressionist
+daubs you would expect from an amateur who talks in that way; and you
+wonder why on earth he should be in a lunatic asylum, of all places in
+the world. And (just as would happen outside, again) some of his
+fellow-sufferers take him at his own valuation and believe him a great
+genius; some of them want to kick him for an impudent impostor (but that
+he is so small); and the majority do not care.
+
+His mania is arson, poor fellow; and when the terrible wish comes over
+him to set the place on fire he forgets his artistic conceit, and his
+mean, weak, silly face becomes almost grand.
+
+And with the female inmates it is just the same. There is a lady who has
+spent twenty years of her life here. Her father was a small country
+doctor, called Snogget; her husband an obscure, hard-working curate; and
+she is absolutely normal, common-place, and even vulgar. For her hobby
+is to discourse of well-born and titled people and county families, with
+whom (and with no others) it has always been her hope and desire to mix;
+and is still, though her hair is nearly white, and she is still here.
+She thinks and talks and cares about nothing else but "smart people,"
+and has conceived a very warm regard for me, on account of
+Lieutenant-colonel Ibbetson, of Ibbetson Hall, Hopshire; not because I
+killed him and was sentenced to be hanged for it, or because he was a
+greater criminal than I (all of which is interesting enough); but
+because he was my relative, and that through him I must be distantly
+connected, she thinks, with the Ibbetsons of Lechmere--whoever they may
+be, and whom neither she nor I have ever met (indeed, I had never heard
+of them), but whose family history she knows almost by heart. What can
+be tamer, duller, more prosaic, more sordidly humdrum, more hopelessly
+sane, more characteristic of common, under-bred, provincial
+feminine cackle?
+
+And yet this woman, in a fit of conjugal jealousy, murdered her own
+children; and her father went mad in consequence, and her husband cut
+his throat.
+
+In fact, during their lucid intervals it would never enter one's mind
+that they were mad at all, they are so absolutely like the people one
+meets every day in the world--such narrow-minded idiots, such deadly
+bores! One might as well be back in Pentonville or Hopshire again, or
+live in Passionate Brompton (as I am told it is called); or even in
+Belgravia, for that matter!
+
+For we have a young lord and a middle-aged baronet--a shocking pair, who
+should not be allowed to live; but for family influence they would be
+doing their twenty years' penal servitude in jail, instead of living
+comfortably sequestered here. Like Ouida's high-born heroes, they "stick
+to their order," and do not mingle with the rest of us. They ignore us
+so completely that we cannot help looking up to them in spite of their
+vices--just as we should do outside.
+
+And we, of the middle class, we stick to our order, too, and do not
+mingle with the small shop-keepers--who do not mingle with the laborers,
+artisans, and mechanics--who (alas, for them!) have nobody to look down
+upon but each other--but they do not; and are the best-bred people in
+the place.
+
+Such are we! It is only when our madness is upon us that we cease to be
+commonplace, and wax tragical and great, or else original and grotesque
+and humorous, with that true deep humor that compels both our laughter
+and our tears, and leaves us older, sadder, and wiser than it found us.
+
+"_Sunt lacrimae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt_."
+
+(So much, if little more, can I recall of the benign Virgil.)
+
+And now to my small beer again, which will have more of a head to it
+henceforward.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thus did I pursue my solitary way, like Bryant's Water-fowl, only with a
+less definite purpose before me--till at last there dawned for me an
+ever-memorable Saturday in June.
+
+I had again saved up enough money to carry my long longed-for journey to
+Paris into execution. The _Seine's_ boiler got up its steam, the
+_Seine's_ white awning was put up for me as well as others; and on a
+beautiful cloudless English morning I stood by the man at the wheel, and
+saw St. Paul's and London Bridge and the Tower fade out of sight; with
+what hope and joy I cannot describe. I almost forgot that I was me!
+
+And next morning (a beautiful French morning) how I exulted as I went up
+the Champs Elysées and passed under the familiar Arc de Triomphe on my
+way to the Rue de la Pompe, Passy, and heard all around the familiar
+tongue that I still knew so well, and rebreathed the long-lost and
+half-forgotten, but now keenly remembered, fragrance of the _genius
+loci_; that vague, light, indescribable, almost imperceptible scent of a
+place, that is so heavenly laden with the past for those who have lived
+there long ago--the most subtly intoxicating ether that can be!
+
+When I came to the meeting of the Rue de la Tour and the Rue de la
+Pompe, and, looking in at the grocer's shop at the corner, I recognized
+the handsome mustachioed groceress, Madame Liard (whose mustache twelve
+prosperous years had turned gray), I was almost faint with emotion. Had
+any youth been ever so moved by that face before?
+
+There, behind the window (which was now of plate-glass), and among
+splendid Napoleonic wares of a later day, were the same old India-rubber
+balls in colored net-work; the same quivering lumps of fresh paste in
+brown paper, that looked so cool and tempting; the same three-sou boxes
+of water-colors (now marked seventy-five centimes), of which I had
+consumed so many in the service of Mimsey Seraskier! I went in and
+bought one, and resmelt with delight the smell of all my by-gone
+dealings there, and received her familiar sounding--
+
+"Merci, monsieur! faudrait-il autre chose?" as if it had been a
+blessing; but I was too shy to throw myself into her arms and tell her
+that I was the "lone, wandering, but not lost" Gogo Pasquier. She might
+have said--
+
+"Eh bien, et après?"
+
+The day had begun well.
+
+Like an epicure, I deliberated whether I should walk to the old gate in
+the Rue de la Pompe, and up the avenue and back to our old garden, or
+make my way round to the gap in the park hedge that we had worn of old
+by our frequent passage in and out, to and from the Bois de Boulogne.
+
+I chose the latter as, on the whole, the more promising in exquisite
+gradations of delight.
+
+The gap in the park hedge, indeed! The park hedge had disappeared, the
+very park itself was gone, cut up, demolished, all parcelled out into
+small gardens, with trim white villas, except where a railway ran
+through a deep cutting in the chalk. A train actually roared and panted
+by, and choked me with its filthy steam as I looked round in
+stupefaction on the ruins of my long-cherished hope.
+
+If that train had run over me and I had survived it, it could not have
+given me a greater shock; it all seemed too cruel and brutal an outrage.
+
+A winding carriage-road had been pierced through the very heart of the
+wilderness; and on this, neatly-paled little brand-new gardens abutted,
+and in these I would recognize, here and there, an old friend in the
+shape of some well-remembered tree that I had often climbed as a boy,
+and which had been left standing out of so many, but so changed by the
+loss of its old surroundings that it had a tame, caged, transplanted
+look--almost apologetic, and as if ashamed of being found out at last!
+
+Nothing else remained. Little hills and cliffs and valleys and
+chalk-pits that had once seemed big had been levelled up, or away, and I
+lost my bearings altogether, and felt a strange, creeping chill of
+blankness and bereavement.
+
+But how about the avenue and my old home? I hastened back to the Rue de
+la Pompe with the quick step of aroused anxiety. The avenue was
+gone--blocked within a dozen yards of the gate by a huge brick building
+covered with newly-painted trellis-work! My old house was no more, but
+in its place a much larger and smarter edifice of sculptured stone. The
+old gate at least had not disappeared, nor the porter's lodge; and I
+feasted my sorrowful eyes on these poor remains, that looked snubbed
+and shabby and out of place in the midst of all this new splendor.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Presently a smart concierge, with a beautiful pink ribboned cap, came
+out and stared at me for a while, and inquired if monsieur
+desired anything.
+
+I could not speak.
+
+"Est-ce que monsieur est indisposé? Cette chaleur! Monsieur ne parle pas
+le Français, peut-être?"
+
+When I found my tongue I explained to her that I had once lived there in
+a modest house overlooking the street, but which had been replaced by
+this much more palatial abode.
+
+"O, oui, monsieur--on a balayé tout ça!" she replied.
+
+"Balayé!" What an expression for _me_ to hear!
+
+And she explained how the changes had taken place, and how valuable the
+property had become. She showed me a small plot of garden, a fragment of
+my old garden, that still remained, and where the old apple-tree might
+still have been, but that it had been sawed away. I saw the stump; that
+did duty for a rustic table.
+
+Presently, looking over a new wall, I saw another small garden,
+and in it the ruins of the old shed where I had found the toy
+wheelbarrow--soon to disappear, as they were building there too.
+
+I asked after all the people I could think of, beginning with those of
+least interest--the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker.
+
+Some were dead; some had retired and had left their "commerce" to their
+children and children-in-law. Three different school-masters had kept
+the school since I had left. Thank Heaven, there was still the
+school--much altered, it is true. I had forgotten to look for it.
+
+[Illustration: THE OLD APPLE-TREE.]
+
+She had no remembrance of my name, or the Seraskiers'--I asked, with a
+beating heart. We had left no trace. Twelve short years had effaced all
+memory of us! But she told me that a gentleman, _décoré, mais tombé en
+enfance_, lived at a _maison de santé_ in the Chaussée de la Muette,
+close by, and that his name was le Major Duquesnois; and thither I
+went, after rewarding and warmly thanking her.
+
+I inquired for le Major Duquesnois, and I was told he was out for a
+walk, and I soon found him, much aged and bent, and leaning on the arm
+of a Sister of Charity. I was so touched that I had to pass him two or
+three times before I could speak. He was so small--so pathetically small!
+
+[Illustration: M. LE MAJOR.]
+
+It was a long time before I could give him an idea of who I was--Gogo
+Pasquier!
+
+Then after a while he seemed to recall the past a little.
+
+"Ha, ha! Gogo--gentil petit Gogo!--oui--oui--l'exercice? Portez ...
+arrrmes! arrmes ... bras? Et Mimsé? bonne petite Mimsé! toujours mal
+à la tête?"
+
+He could just remember Madame Seraskier; and repeated her name several
+times and said, "Ah! elle était bien belle, Madame Seraskier!"
+
+In the old days of fairy-tale telling, when he used to get tired and I
+still wanted him to go on, he had arranged that if, in the course of the
+story, he suddenly brought in the word "Cric," and I failed to
+immediately answer "Crac," the story would be put off till our next walk
+(to be continued in our next!) and he was so ingenious in the way he
+brought in the terrible word that I often fell into the trap, and had to
+forego my delight for that afternoon.
+
+I suddenly thought of saying "Cric!" and he immediately said "Crac!" and
+laughed in a touching, senile way--"Cric!--Crac! c'est bien ça!" and
+then he became quite serious and said--
+
+"Et la suite au prochain numéro!"
+
+After this he began to cough, and the good Sister said--
+
+"Je crains que monsieur ne le fatigue un peu!"
+
+So I had to bid him good-bye; and after I had squeezed and kissed his
+hand, he made me a most courtly bow, as though I had been a
+complete stranger.
+
+I rushed away, tossing up my arms like a madman in my pity and sorrow
+for my dear old friend, and my general regret and disenchantment. I
+made for the Bois de Boulogne, there to find, instead of the old
+rabbit-and-roebuck-haunted thickets and ferneries and impenetrable
+growth, a huge artificial lake, with row-boats and skiffs, and a rockery
+that would have held its own in Rosherville gardens. And on the way
+thither, near the iron gates in the fortifications, whom should I meet
+but one of my friends the couriers, on his way from St. Cloud to the
+Tuileries! There he rode with his arms jogging up and down, and his low
+glazed hat, and his immense jack-boots, just the same as ever, never
+rising in his stirrups, as his horse trotted to the jingle of the sweet
+little chime round its neck.
+
+[Illustration: GREEN AND GOLD]
+
+Alas! his coat was no longer the innocent, unsophisticated blue and
+silver livery of the bourgeois king, but the hateful green and gold of
+another régime.
+
+Farther on the Mare d'Auteuil itself had suffered change and become
+respectable--imperially respectable. No more frogs or newts or
+water-beetles, I felt sure; but gold and silver fish in vulgar
+Napoleonic profusion.
+
+No words that I can find would give any idea of the sadness and longing
+that filled me as I trod once more that sunlit grassy brink--the goal of
+my fond ambition for twelve long years.
+
+It was Sunday, and many people were about--many children, in their best
+Sunday clothes and on their best behavior, discreetly throwing crumbs to
+the fish. A new generation, much quieter and better dressed than my
+cousins and I, who had once so filled the solitude with the splashing of
+our nets, and the excited din of our English voices.
+
+As I sat down on a bench by the old willow (where the rat lived), and
+gazed and gazed, it almost surprised me that the very intensity of my
+desire did not of itself suffice to call up the old familiar faces and
+forms, and conjure away these modern intruders. The power to do this
+seemed almost within my reach; I willed and willed and willed with all
+my might, but in vain; I could not cheat my sight or hearing for a
+moment. There they remained, unconscious and undisturbed, those happy,
+well-mannered, well-appointed little French people, and fed the gold and
+silver fish; and there, with an aching heart, I left them.
+
+Oh, surely, surely, I cried to myself, we ought to find some means of
+possessing the past more fully and completely than we do. Life is not
+worth living for many of us if a want so desperate and yet so natural
+can never be satisfied. Memory is but a poor, rudimentary thing that we
+had better be without, if it can only lead us to the verge of
+consummation like this, and madden us with a desire it cannot slake. The
+touch of a vanished hand, the sound of a voice that is still, the tender
+grace of a day that is dead, should be ours forever, at out beck and
+call, by some exquisite and quite conceivable illusion of the senses.
+
+Alas! alas! I have hardly the hope of ever meeting my beloved ones again
+in another life. Oh, to meet their too dimly remembered forms in _this_,
+just as they once were, by some trick of my own brain! To see them with
+the eye, and hear them with the ear, and tread with them the old
+obliterated ways as in a waking dream! It would be well worth going mad
+to become such a self-conjurer as that.
+
+Thus musing sadly, I reached St. Cloud, and _that_, at least, and the
+Boulogne that led me to it, had not been very perceptibly altered, and
+looked as though I had only left them a week ago. The sweet aspect from
+the bridge, on either side and beyond, filled me with the old
+enchantment. There, at least, the glory had not departed.
+
+I hastened through the gilded gates and up the broad walk to the grand
+cascade. There, among the lovely wreathed urns and jars of geranium,
+still sat or reclined or gesticulated, the old, unalterable gods; there
+squatted the grimly genial monsters in granite and marble and bronze,
+still spouting their endless gallons for the delectation of hot Parisian
+eyes. Unchanged, and to all appearance unchangeable (save that they were
+not nearly so big as I had imagined), their cold, smooth, ironical
+patience shamed and braced me into better cheer. Beautiful, hideous,
+whatever you please, they seemed to revel in the very sense of their
+insensibility of their eternal stability--their stony scorn of time and
+wind and weather, and the peevish, weak-kneed, short-lived discontent of
+man. It was good to fondly pat them on the back once more--when one
+could reach them--and cling to them for a little while, after all the
+dust and drift and ruin I had been tramping through all day.
+
+Indeed, they woke in me a healthy craving for all but forgotten earthly
+joys--even for wretched meat and drink--so I went and ordered a
+sumptuous repast at the Tête Noire--a brand-new Tête Noire, alas! quite
+white, all in stone and stucco, and without a history!
+
+It was a beautiful sunset. Waiting for my dinner, I gazed out of the
+first-floor window, and found balm for my disappointed and regretful
+spirit in all that democratic joyousness of French Sunday life. I had
+seen it over and over again just like that in the old days; _this_, at
+least, was like coming back home to something I had known and loved.
+
+The cafés on the little "Place" between the bridge and the park were
+full to overflowing. People chatting over their _consommations_ sat
+right out, almost into the middle of the square, so thickly packed that
+there was scarcely room for the busy, lively, white-aproned waiters to
+move between them. The air was full of the scent of trodden grass and
+macaroons and French tobacco, blown from the park; of gay French
+laughter and the music of _mirlitons_; of a light dusty haze, shot with
+purple and gold by the setting sun. The river, alive with boats and
+canoes, repeated the glory of the sky, and the well-remembered,
+thickly-wooded hills rose before me, culminating in the Lanterne
+de Diogène.
+
+I could have threaded all that maze of trees blindfolded.
+
+Two Roman pifferari came on to the Place and began to play an
+extraordinary and most exciting melody that almost drew me out of the
+window; it seemed to have no particular form, no beginning or middle or
+end; it went soaring higher and higher, like the song of a lark, with
+never a pause for breath, to the time of a maddening jig--a tarantella,
+perhaps--always on the strain and stress, always getting nearer and
+nearer to some shrill climax of ecstasy quite high up and away, beyond
+the scope of earthly music; while the persistent drone kept buzzing of
+the earth and the impossibility to escape. All so gay, so sad, there is
+no name for it!
+
+Two little deformed and discarded-looking dwarfs, beggars, brother and
+sister, with large toothless gaps for mouths and no upper lip, began to
+dance; and the crowd laughed and applauded. Higher and higher, nearer
+and nearer to the impossible, rose the quick, piercing notes of the
+piffero. Heaven seemed almost within reach--the nirvana of music after
+its quick madness--the region of the ultra-treble that lies beyond
+the ken of ordinary human ears!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+A carriage and four, with postilions and "guides," came clattering
+royally down the road from the palace, and dispersed the crowd as it
+bowled on its way to the bridge. In it were two ladies and two
+gentlemen. One of the ladies was the young Empress of the French; the
+other looked up at my window--for a moment, as in a soft flash of summer
+lightning, her face seemed ablaze with friendly recognition--with a
+sweet glance of kindness and interest and surprise--a glance that
+pierced me like a sudden shaft of light from heaven.
+
+It was the Duchess of Towers!
+
+I felt as though the bagpipes had been leading up to this! In a moment
+more the carriage was out of sight, the sun had quite gone down, the
+pifferari had ceased to play and were walking round with the hat, and
+all was over.
+
+I dined, and made my way back to Paris on foot through the Bois de
+Boulogne, and by the Mare d'Auteuil, and saw my old friend the water-rat
+swim across it, trailing the gleam of his wake after him like a silver
+comet's tail.
+
+"Allons-nous-en, gens de la nous!
+Allons-nous-en chacun chez nous!"
+
+So sang a festive wedding-party as it went merrily
+arm in arm through the long high street of Passy,
+with a gleeful trust that would have filled the heart
+with envy but for sad experience of the vanity of
+human wishes.
+
+_Chacun chez nous!_ How charming it sounds!
+
+Was each so sure that when he reached his home
+he would find his heart's desire? Was the bridegroom
+himself so very sure?
+
+[Illustration: THE OLD WATER-RAT.]
+
+The heart's desire--the heart's regret! I flattered
+myself that I had pretty well sounded the uttermost
+depths of both on that eventful Sunday!
+
+
+
+
+Part Four
+
+[Illustration]
+
+I got back to my hotel in the Rue de la Michodière.
+
+Prostrate with emotion and fatigue, the tarantella still jingling in my
+ears, and that haunting, beloved face, with its ineffable smile still
+printed on the retina of my closed eyes, I fell asleep.
+
+And then I dreamed a dream, and the first phase of my real, inner life
+began!
+
+All the events of the day, distorted and exaggerated and jumbled
+together after the usual manner of dreams, wove themselves into a kind
+of nightmare and oppression. I was on my way to my old abode: everything
+that I met or saw was grotesque and impossible, yet had now the strange,
+vague charm of association and reminiscence, now the distressing sense
+of change and loss and desolation.
+
+As I got near to the avenue gate, instead of the school on my left there
+was a prison; and at the door a little thick-set jailer, three feet high
+and much deformed, and a little deformed jaileress no bigger than
+himself, were cunningly watching me out of the corners of their eyes,
+and toothlessly smiling. Presently they began to waltz together to an
+old, familiar tune, with their enormous keys dangling at their sides;
+and they looked so funny that I laughed and applauded. But soon I
+perceived that their crooked faces were not really funny; indeed, they
+were fatal and terrible in the extreme, and I was soon conscious that
+these deadly dwarfs were trying to waltz between me and the avenue gate
+for which I was bound--to cut me off, that they might run me into the
+prison, where it was their custom to hang people of a Monday morning.
+
+In an agony of terror I made a rush for the avenue gate, and there stood
+the Duchess of Towers, with mild surprise in her eyes and a kind
+smile--a heavenly vision of strength and reality.
+
+"You are not dreaming true!" she said. "Don't be afraid--those little
+people don't exist! Give me your hand and come in here."
+
+And as I did so she waved the troglodytes away, and they vanished; and
+I felt that this was no longer a dream, but something else--some strange
+thing that had happened to me, some new life that I had woke up to.
+
+For at the touch of her hand my consciousness, my sense of being I,
+myself, which hitherto in my dream (as in all previous dreams up to
+then) had been only partial, intermittent, and vague, suddenly blazed
+into full, consistent, practical activity--just as it is in life, when
+one is well awake and much interested in what is going on--only with
+perceptions far keener and more alert.
+
+I knew perfectly who I was and what I was, and remembered all the events
+of the previous day. I was conscious that my real body, undressed and in
+bed, now lay fast asleep in a small room on the fourth floor of an
+_hôtel garni_ in the Rue de la Michodière. I knew this perfectly; and
+yet here was my body, too, just as substantial, with all my clothes on;
+my boots rather dusty, my shirt-collar damp with the heat, for it was
+hot. With my disengaged hand I felt in my trousers-pocket; there were my
+London latch-keys, my purse, my penknife; my handkerchief in the
+breastpocket of my coat, and in its tail-pockets my gloves and
+pipe-case, and the little water-color box I had bought that morning. I
+looked at my watch; it was going, and marked eleven. I pinched myself, I
+coughed, I did all one usually does under the pressure of some immense
+surprise, to assure myself that I was awake; and I _was_, and yet here I
+stood, actually hand in hand with a great lady to whom I had never been
+introduced (and who seemed much tickled at my confusion); and staring
+now at her, now at my old school.
+
+The prison had tumbled down like a house of cards, and loi! in its place
+was M. Saindou's _maison d'éducation_, just as it had been of old. I
+even recognized on the yellow wall the stamp of a hand in dry mud, made
+fifteen years ago by a day boy called Parisot, who had fallen down in
+the gutter close by, and thus left his mark on getting up again; and it
+had remained there for months, till it had been whitewashed away in the
+holidays. Here it was anew, after fifteen years.
+
+The swallows were flying and twittering. A yellow omnibus was drawn up
+to the gates of the school; the horses stamped and neighed, and bit each
+other, as French horses always did in those days. The driver swore at
+them perfunctorily.
+
+A crowd was looking on--le Père et la Mère François, Madame Liard, the
+grocer's wife, and other people, whom I remembered at once with delight.
+Just in front of us a small boy and girl were looking on, like the rest,
+and I recognized the back and the cropped head and thin legs of Mimsey
+Seraskier.
+
+A barrel-organ was playing a pretty tune I knew quite well, and had
+forgotten.
+
+The school gates opened, and M. Saindou, proud and full of
+self-importance (as he always was), and half a dozen boys whose faces
+and names were quite familiar to me, in smart white trousers and shining
+boots, and silken white bands round their left arms, got into the
+omnibus, and were driven away in a glorified manner--as it seemed--to
+heaven in a golden chariot. It was beautiful to see and hear.
+
+I was still holding the duchess's hand, and felt the warmth of it
+through her glove; it stole up my arm like a magnetic current. I was in
+Elysium; a heavenly sense had come over me that at last my periphery had
+been victoriously invaded by a spirit other than mine--a most powerful
+and beneficent spirit. There was a blessed fault in my impenetrable
+armor of self, after all, and the genius of strength and charity and
+loving-kindness had found it out.
+
+"Now you're dreaming true," she said. "Where are those boys going?"
+
+"To church, to make their _première communion_," I replied.
+
+"That's right. You're dreaming true because I've got you by the hand. Do
+you know that tune?"
+
+I listened, and the words belonging to it came out of the past and I
+said them to her, and she laughed again, with her eyes screwed up
+deliciously.
+
+"Quite right--quite!" she exclaimed. "How odd that you should know them!
+How well you pronounce French for an Englishman! For you are Mr.
+Ibbetson, Lady Cray's architect?"
+
+I assented, and she let go my hand.
+
+The street was full of people--familiar forms and faces and voices,
+chatting together and looking down the road after the yellow omnibus;
+old attitudes, old tricks of gait and manner, old forgotten French ways
+of speech--all as it was long ago. Nobody noticed us, and we walked up
+the now deserted avenue.
+
+The happiness, the enchantment of it all! Could it be that I was dead,
+that I had died suddenly in my sleep, at the hotel in the Rue de la
+Michodière! Could it be that the Duchess of Towers was dead too--had
+been killed by some accident on her way from St. Cloud to Paris? and
+that, both having died so near each other, we had begun our eternal
+afterlife in this heavenly fashion?
+
+That was too good to be true, I reflected; some instinct told me that
+this was not death, but transcendent earthly life--and also, alas! that
+it would not endure forever!
+
+I was deeply conscious of every feature in her face, every movement of
+her body, every detail of her dress--more so then I could have been in
+actual life--and said to myself, "Whatever this is, it is no dream." But
+I felt there was about me the unspeakable elation which can come to us
+only in our waking moments when we are at our very best; and then only
+feebly, in comparison with this, and to many of us never, ft never had
+to me, since that morning when I had found the little wheelbarrow.
+
+I was also conscious, however, that the avenue itself had a slight touch
+of the dream in it. It was no longer quite right, and was getting out of
+drawing and perspective, so to speak. I had lost my stay--the touch
+of her hand.
+
+"Are you still dreaming true, Mr. Ibbetson?"
+
+"I am afraid not quite," I replied.
+
+"You must try by yourself a little--try hard. Look at this house; what
+is written on the portico?"
+
+I saw written in gold letters the words, "Tête Noire," and said so.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+She rippled with laughter, and said, "No; try again"; and just touched
+me with the tip of her finger for a moment.
+
+I tried again and said, "Parvis Notre Dame."
+
+"That's rather better," she said, and touched me again; and I read,
+"Parva sed Apta," as I had so often read there before in old days.
+
+"And now look at that old house over there," pointing to my old home;
+"how many windows are there in the top story?"
+
+I said seven.
+
+"No; there are five. Look again!" and there were five; and the whole
+house was exactly, down to its minutest detail, as it had been once upon
+a time. I could see Thérèse through one of the windows, making my bed.
+
+"That's better," said the duchess; "you will soon do it--it's very
+easy--_ce n'est que le premier pas!_ My father taught me; you must
+always sleep on your back with your arms above your head, your hands
+clasped under it and your feet crossed, the right one over the left,
+unless you are left-handed; and you must never for a moment cease
+thinking of where you want to be in your dream till you are asleep and
+get there; and you must never forget in your dream where and what you
+were when awake. You must join the dream on to reality. Don't forget.
+And now I will say good-bye; but before I go give me both hands and look
+round everywhere as far as your eyes can see."
+
+It was hard to look away from her; her face drew my eyes, and through
+them all my heart; but I did as she told me, and took in the whole
+familiar scene, even to the distant woods of Ville d'Avray, a glimpse
+of which was visible through an opening in the trees; even to the smoke
+of a train making its way to Versailles, miles off; and the old
+telegraph, working its black arms on the top of Mont Valérien.
+
+[Illustration: "It was hard to look away from her."]
+
+"Is it all right?" she asked. "That's well. Henceforward, whenever you
+come here, you will be safe as far as your sight can reach--from this
+spot--all through my introduction. See what it is to have a friend at
+court! No more little dancing jailers! And then you can gradually get
+farther by yourself.
+
+"Out there, through that park, leads to the Bois de Boulogne--there's a
+gap in the hedge you can get through; but mind and make everything plain
+in front of you--_true_, before you go a step farther, or else you'll
+have to wake and begin it all over again. You have only to will it, and
+think of yourself as awake, and it will come--on condition, of course,
+that you have been there before. And mind, also, you must take care how
+you touch things or people--you may hear, and see, and smell; but you
+mustn't touch, nor pick flowers or leaves, nor move things about. It
+blurs the dream, like breathing on a window-pane. I don't know why, but
+it does. You must remember that everything here is dead and gone by.
+With you and me it is different; we're alive and real--that is, _I_ am;
+and there would seem to be no mistake about your being real too, Mr.
+Ibbetson, by the grasp of your hands. But you're _not_; and why you are
+here, and what business you have in this, my particular dream, I cannot
+understand; no living person has ever come into it before. I can't make
+it out. I suppose it's because I saw your reality this afternoon,
+looking out of the window at the 'Tête Noire,' and you are just a stray
+figment of my overtired brain--a very agreeable figment, I admit; but
+you don't exist here just now--you can't possibly; you are somewhere
+else, Mr. Ibbetson; dancing at Mabille, perhaps, or fast asleep
+somewhere, and dreaming of French churches and palaces, and public
+fountains, like a good young British architect--otherwise I shouldn't
+talk to you like this, you may be sure!
+
+"Never mind. I am very glad to dream that I have been of use to you, and
+you are very welcome here, if it amuses you to come--especially as you
+are only a false dream of mine, for what else _can_ you be? And now I
+must leave you, so good-bye."
+
+She disengaged her hands, and laughed her angelic laugh, and then
+turned towards the park. I watched her tall, straight figure and blowing
+skirts, and saw her follow some ladies and children into a thicket that
+I remembered well, and she was soon out of sight.
+
+I felt as if all warmth had gone out of my life; as if a joy had taken
+flight; as if a precious something had withdrawn itself from my
+possession, and the gap in my periphery had closed again.
+
+Long I stood in thought, with my eyes fixed on the spot where she had
+disappeared; and I felt inclined to follow, but then considered this
+would not have been discreet. For although she was only a false dream of
+mine, a mere recollection of the exciting and eventful day, a stray
+figment of my overtired and excited brain--a _more_ than agreeable
+figment (what else _could_ she be!)--she was also a great lady, and had
+treated me, a perfect stranger and a perfect nobody, with singular
+courtesy and kindness; which I repaid, it is true, with a love so deep
+and strong that my very life was hers, to do what she liked with, and
+always had been since I first saw her, and always would be as long as
+there was breath in my body! But this did not constitute an acquaintance
+without a proper introduction, even in France--even in a dream. Even in
+dreams one must be polite, even to stray figments of one's tired,
+sleeping brain.
+
+And then what business had _she_, in _this_, _my_ particular dream--as
+she herself had asked of me?
+
+But _was_ it a dream? I remembered my lodgings at Pentonville, that I
+had left yesterday morning. I remembered what I was--why I came to
+Paris; I remembered the very bedroom at the Paris hotel where I was now
+fast asleep, its loudly-ticking clock, and all the meagre furniture. And
+here was I, broad awake and conscious, in the middle of an old avenue
+that had long ceased to exist--that had been built over by a huge brick
+edifice covered with newly-painted trellis-work. I saw it, this edifice,
+myself, only twelve hours ago. And yet here was everything as it had
+been when I was a child; and all through the agency of this solid
+phantom of a lovely young English duchess, whose warm gloved hands I had
+only this minute been holding in mine! The scent of her gloves was still
+in my palm. I looked at my watch; it marked twenty-three minutes to
+twelve. All this had happened in less than three-quarters of an hour!
+
+Pondering over all this in hopeless bewilderment, I turned my steps
+towards my old home, and, to my surprise, was just able to look over the
+garden wall, which I had once thought about ten feet high.
+
+Under the old apple-tree in full bloom sat my mother, darning small
+socks; with her flaxen side-curls (as it was her fashion to wear them)
+half-concealing her face. My emotion and astonishment were immense. My
+heart beat fast. I felt its pulse in my temples, and my breath
+was short.
+
+At a little green table that I remembered well sat a small boy, rather
+quaintly dressed in a by-gone fashion, with a frill round his wide
+shirt-collar, and his golden hair cut quite close at the top, and rather
+long at the sides and back. It was Gogo Pasquier. He seemed a very nice
+little boy. He had pen and ink and copy-book before him, and a
+gilt-edged volume bound in red morocco. I knew it at a glance; it was
+_Elegant Extracts_. The dog Médor lay asleep in the shade. The bees
+were droning among the nasturtiums and convolvulus.
+
+A little girl ran up the avenue from the porter's lodge and pushed the
+garden gate, which rang the bell as it opened, and she went into the
+garden, and I followed her; but she took no notice of me, nor did the
+others. It was Mimsey Seraskier.
+
+I went out and sat at my mother's feet, and looked long in her face.
+
+I must not speak to her, nor touch her--not even touch her busy hand
+with my lips, or I should "blur the dream."
+
+I got up and looked over the boy Gogo's shoulder. He was translating
+Gray's _Elegy_ into French; he had not got very far, and seemed to be
+stumped by the line--
+
+_"And leaves the world to darkness and to me."_
+
+Mimsey was silently looking over his other shoulder, her thumb in her
+mouth, one arm on the back of his chair. She seemed to be stumped also:
+it was an awkward line to translate.
+
+I stooped and put my hand to Médor's nose, and felt his warm breath. He
+wagged his rudiment of a tail, and whimpered in his sleep. Mimsey said--
+
+"Regarde Médor, comme il remue la queue! _C'est le Prince Charmant qui
+lui chatouille le bout du nez._"
+
+Said my mother, who had not spoken hitherto: "Do speak English, Mimsey,
+please."
+
+Oh, my God! My mother's voice, so forgotten, yet so familiar, so
+unutterably dear! I rushed to her, and threw myself on my knees at her
+feet, and seized her hand and kissed it, crying, "Mother, mother!"
+
+A strange blur came over everything; the sense of reality was lost. All
+became as a dream--a beautiful dream--but only a dream; and I woke.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I woke in my small hotel bedroom, and saw all the furniture, and my hat
+and clothes, by the light of a lamp outside, and heard the ticking of
+the clock on the mantel-piece, and the rumbling of a cart and cracking
+of a whip in the street, and yet felt I was not a bit more awake than I
+had been a minute ago in my strange vision--not so much!
+
+I heard my watch ticking its little tick on the mantel-piece by the side
+of the clock, like a pony trotting by a big horse. The clock struck
+twelve, I got up and looked at my watch by the light of the gas-lit
+streets; it marked the same. My dream had lasted an hour--I had gone to
+bed at half-past ten.
+
+I tried to recall it all, and did so to the smallest particular--all
+except the tune the organ had played, and the words belonging to it;
+they were on the tip of my tongue, and refused to come further, I got up
+again and walked about the room, and felt that it had not been like a
+dream at all; it was more "recollectable" than all my real adventures of
+the previous day. It had ceased to be like a dream, and had become an
+actuality from the moment I first touched the duchess's hand to the
+moment I kissed my mother's, and the blur came. It was an entirely new
+and utterly bewildering experience that I had gone through.
+
+In a dream there are always breaks, inconsistencies, lapses,
+incoherence, breaches of continuity, many links missing in the chain;
+only at points is the impression vivid enough to stamp itself afterwards
+on the waking mind, and even then it is never so really vivid as the
+impression of real life, although it ought to have seemed so in the
+dream: One remembers it well on awaking, but soon it fades, and then it
+is only one's remembrance of it that one remembers.
+
+[Illustration: "MOTHER, MOTHER!"]
+
+There was nothing of this in my dream.
+
+It was something like the "camera-obscura" on Ramsgate pier: one goes
+in and finds one's self in total darkness; the eye is prepared; one is
+thoroughly expectant and wide-awake.
+
+Suddenly there flashes on the sight the moving picture of the port and
+all the life therein, and the houses and cliffs beyond; and farther
+still the green hills, the white clouds, and blue sky.
+
+Little green waves chase each other in the harbor, breaking into crisp
+white foam. Sea-gulls wheel and dash and dip behind masts and ropes and
+pulleys; shiny brass fittings on gangway and compass flash in the sun
+without dazzling the eye; gay Liliputians walk and talk, their white
+teeth, no bigger than a pin's point, gleam in laughter, with never a
+sound; a steamboat laden with excursionists comes in, its paddles
+churning the water, and you cannot hear them. Not a detail is
+missed--not a button on a sailor's jacket, not a hair on his face. All
+the light and color of sea and earth and sky, that serve for many a
+mile, are here concentrated within a few square feet. And what color it
+is! A painter's despair! It is light itself, more beautiful than that
+which streams through old church windows of stained glass. And all is
+framed in utter darkness, so that the fully dilated pupils can see their
+very utmost. It seems as though all had been painted life-size and then
+shrunk, like a Japanese picture on crape, to a millionth of its natural
+size, so as to intensify and mellow the effect.
+
+It is all over: you come out into the open sunshine, and all seems
+garish and bare and bald and commonplace. All magic has faded out of
+the scene; everything is too far away from everything else; everybody
+one meets seems coarse and Brobdingnagian and too near. And one has been
+looking at the like of it all one's life!
+
+Thus with my dream, compared to common, waking, every-day experience;
+only instead of being mere flat, silent little images moving on a dozen
+square feet of Bristol-board, and appealing to the eye alone, the things
+and people in my dream had the same roundness and relief as in life, and
+were life-size; one could move among them and behind them, and feel as
+if one could touch and clasp and embrace them if one dared. And the ear,
+as well as the eye, was made free of this dark chamber of the brain: one
+heard their speech and laughter as in life. And that was not all, for
+soft breezes fanned the cheek, the sparrows twittered, the sun gave out
+its warmth, and the scent of many flowers made the illusion complete.
+
+And then the Duchess of Towers! She had been not only visible and
+audible like the rest, but tangible as well, to the fullest extent of
+the sensibility that lay in my nerves of touch; when my hands held hers
+I felt as though I were drawing all her life into mine.
+
+With the exception of that one figure, all had evidently been as it
+_had_ been in _reality_ a few years ago, to the very droning of an
+insect, to the very fall of a blossom!
+
+Had I gone mad by any chance? I had possessed the past, as I had longed
+to do a few hours before.
+
+What are sight and hearing and touch and the rest?
+
+Five senses in all.
+
+The stars, worlds upon worlds, so many billions of miles away, what are
+they for us but mere shiny specks on a net-work of nerves behind the
+eye? How does one _feel_ them there?
+
+The sound of my friend's voice, what is it? The clasp of his hand, the
+pleasant sight of his face, the scent of his pipe and mine, the taste of
+the bread and cheese and beer we eat and drink together, what are they
+but figments (stray figments, perhaps) of the brain--little thrills
+through nerves made on purpose, and without which there would be no
+stars, no pipe, no bread and cheese and beer, no voice, no friend,
+no me?
+
+And is there, perchance, some sixth sense embedded somewhere in the
+thickness of the flesh--some survival of the past, of the race, of our
+own childhood even, etiolated by disuse? or some rudiment, some effort
+to begin, some priceless hidden faculty to be developed into a future
+source of bliss and consolation for our descendants? some nerve that now
+can only be made to thrill and vibrate in a dream, too delicate as yet
+to ply its function in the light of common day?
+
+And was I, of all people in the world--I, Peter Ibbetson, architect and
+surveyor, Wharton Street, Pentonville--most futile, desultory, and
+uneducated dreamer of dreams--destined to make some great psychical
+discovery?
+
+Pondering deeply over these solemn things, I sent myself to sleep again,
+as was natural enough--but no more to dream. I slept soundly until late
+in the morning, and breakfasted at the Bains Deligny, a delightful
+swimming-bath near the Pont de la Concorde (on the other side), and
+spent most of the day there, alternately swimming, and dozing, and
+smoking cigarettes, and thinking of the wonders of the night before, and
+hoping for their repetition on the night to follow.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+I remained a week in Paris, loafing about by day among old haunts of my
+childhood--a melancholy pleasure--and at night trying to "dream true" as
+my dream duchess had called it. Only once did I succeed.
+
+I had gone to bed thinking most persistently of the "Mare d'Auteuil,"
+and it seemed to me that as soon as I was fairly asleep I woke up there,
+and knew directly that I had come into a "true dream" again, by the
+reality and the bliss. It was transcendent _life_ once more--a very
+ecstasy of remembrance made actual, and _such_ an exquisite surprise!
+
+There was M. le Major, in his green frock-coat, on his knees near a
+little hawthorn-tree by the brink, among the water-logged roots of which
+there dwelt a cunning old dytiscus as big as the bowl of a
+table-spoon--a prize we had often tried to catch in vain.
+
+M. le Major had a net in his hand, and was watching the water intently;
+the perspiration was trickling down his nose; and around him, in silent
+expectation and suspense, were grouped Gogo and Mimsey and my three
+cousins, and a good-humored freckled Irish boy I had quite forgotten,
+and I suddenly remembered that his name was Johnstone, that he was very
+combative, and that he lived in the Rue Basse (now Rue Raynouard).
+
+On the other side of the pond my mother was keeping Médor from the
+water, for fear of his spoiling the sport, and on the bench by the
+willow sat Madame Seraskier--lovely Madame Seraskier--deeply
+interested. I sat down by her side and gazed at her with a joy there is
+no telling.
+
+An old woman came by, selling conical wafer-cakes, and singing--"_V'lâ
+l'plaisir, mesdames--V'lâ l'plaisir!_" Madame Seraskier bought ten sous'
+worth--a mountain!
+
+M. le Major made a dash with his net--unsuccessfully, as usual. Médor
+was let loose, and plunged with a plunge that made big waves all round
+the mare, and dived after an imaginary stone, amid general shouts and
+shrieks of excitement. Oh, the familiar voices! I almost wept.
+
+Médor came out of the water without his stone and shook himself,
+twisting and barking and grinning and gyrating, as was his way, quite
+close to me. In my delight and sympathy I was ill-advised enough to try
+and stroke him, and straight the dream was "blurred"--changed to an
+ordinary dream, where all things were jumbled up and incomprehensible; a
+dream pleasant enough, but different in kind and degree--an ordinary
+dream; and in my distress thereat I woke, and failed to dream again (as
+I wished to dream) that night.
+
+Next morning (after an early swim) I went to the Louvre, and stood
+spellbound before Leonardo da Vinci's "Lisa Gioconda," trying hard to
+find where the wondrous beauty lay that I had heard so extravagantly
+extolled; and not trying very successfully, for I had seen Madame
+Seraskier once more, and felt that "Gioconda" was a fraud.
+
+Presently I was conscious of a group just behind me, and heard a
+pleasant male English voice exclaim--
+
+[Illustration: "Lisa Giaconda"]
+
+"And now, duchess, let me present to you my first and last and only
+love, Mona Lisa." I turned round, and there stood a soldier-like old
+gentleman and two ladies (one of whom was the Duchess of Towers),
+staring at the picture.
+
+As I made way for them I caught her eye, and in it again, as I felt
+sure, a kindly look of recognition--just for half a second. She
+evidently recollected having seen me at Lady Cray's, where I had stood
+all the evening alone in a rather conspicuous corner. I was so
+exceptionally tall (in those days of not such tall people as now) that
+it was easy to notice and remember me, especially as I wore my beard,
+which it was unusual to do then among Englishmen.
+
+She little guessed how _I_ remembered _her_; she little knew all she was
+and had been to me--in life and in a dream!
+
+My emotion was so great that I felt it in my very knees; I could
+scarcely walk; I was as weak as water. My worship for the beautiful
+stranger was becoming almost a madness. She was even more lovely than
+Madame Seraskier. It was cruel to be like that.
+
+It seems that I was fated to fall down and prostrate myself before very
+tall, slender women, with dark hair and lily skins and light angelic
+eyes. The fair damsel who sold tripe and pigs' feet in Clerkenwell was
+also of that type, I remembered; and so was Mrs. Deane. Fortunately for
+me it is not a common one!
+
+All that day I spent on quays and bridges, leaning over parapets, and
+looking at the Seine, and nursing my sweet despair, and calling myself
+the biggest fool in Paris, and recalling over and over again that
+gray-blue kindly glance--my only light, the Light of the World for ME!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My brief holiday over, I went back to London--to Pentonville--and
+resumed my old occupations; but the whole tenor of my existence
+was changed.
+
+The day, the working-day (and I worked harder than ever, to Lintot's
+great satisfaction), passed as in an unimportant dream of mild content
+and cheerful acquiescence in everything, work or play.
+
+There was no more quarrelling with my destiny, nor wish to escape from
+myself for a moment. My whole being, as I went about on business or
+recreation bent, was suffused with the memory of the Duchess of Towers
+as with a warm inner glow that kept me at peace with all mankind and
+myself, and thrilled by the hope, the enchanting hope, of once more
+meeting her image at night in a dream, in or about my old home at Passy,
+and perhaps even feeling once more that ineffable bliss of touching her
+hand. Though why should she be there?
+
+When the blessed hour came round for sleep, the real business of my life
+began. I practised "dreaming true" as one practises a fine art, and
+after many failures I became a professed expert--a master.
+
+I lay straight on my back, with my feet crossed, and my hands clasped
+above my head in a symmetrical position; I would fix my will intently
+and persistently on a certain point in space and time that was within my
+memory--for instance, the avenue gate on a certain Christmas afternoon,
+when I remembered waiting for M. le Major to go for a walk--at the same
+time never losing touch of my own present identity as Peter Ibbetson,
+architect, Wharton Street, Pentonville; all of which is not so easy to
+manage as one might think, although the dream duchess had said, "Ce
+n'est que le premier pas qui coûte;" and finally one night, instead of
+dreaming the ordinary dreams I had dreamed all my life (but twice), I
+had the rapture of _waking up_, the minute I was fairly asleep, by
+the avenue gate, and of seeing Gogo Pasquier sitting on one of the stone
+posts and looking up the snowy street for the major. Presently he jumped
+up to meet his old friend, whose bottle-green-clad figure had just
+appeared in the distance. I saw and heard their warm and friendly
+greeting, and walked unperceived by their side through Auteuil to the
+_mare_, and back by the fortifications, and listened to the thrilling
+adventures of one Fier-à-bras, which, I confess, I had completely
+forgotten.
+
+[Illustration: THE STORY OF THE GIANT FIER-A-BRAS.]
+
+As we passed all three together through the "Porte de la Muette," M. le
+Major's powers of memory (or invention) began to flag a little--for he
+suddenly said, "_Cric!_" But Gogo pitilessly answered, "_Crac!_" and
+the story had to go on, till we reached at dusk the gate of the
+Pasquiers' house, where these two most affectionately parted, after
+making an appointment for the morrow; and I went in with Gogo, and sat
+in the school-room while Thérèse gave him his tea, and heard her tell
+him all that had happened in Passy that afternoon. Then he read and
+summed and translated with his mother till it was time to go up to bed,
+and I sat by his bedside as he was lulled asleep by his mother's
+harp... how I listened with all my ears and heart, till the sweet strain
+ceased for the night! Then out of the hushed house I stole, thinking
+unutterable things--through the snow-clad garden, where Médor was baying
+the moon--through the silent avenue and park--through the deserted
+streets of Passy--and on by desolate quays and bridges to dark quarters
+of Paris; till I fell awake in my tracks and found that another dreary
+and commonplace day had dawned over London--but no longer dreary and
+commonplace for me, with such experiences to look back and forward
+to--such a strange inheritance of wonder and delight!
+
+I had a few more occasional failures, such as, for instance, when the
+thread between my waking and sleeping life was snapped by a moment's
+carelessness, or possibly by some movement of my body in bed, in which
+case the vision would suddenly get blurred, the reality of it destroyed,
+and an ordinary dream rise in its place. My immediate consciousness of
+this was enough to wake me on the spot, and I would begin again, _da
+capo_ till all went as I wished.
+
+Evidently our brain contains something akin both to a photographic
+plate and a phonographic cylinder, and many other things of the same
+kind not yet discovered; not a sight or a sound or a smell is lost; not
+a taste or a feeling or an emotion. Unconscious memory records them all,
+without our even heeding what goes on around us beyond the things that
+attract our immediate interest or attention.
+
+Thus night after night I saw reacted before me scenes not only fairly
+remembered, but scenes utterly forgotten, and yet as unmistakably true
+as the remembered ones, and all bathed in that ineffable light, the
+light of other days--the light that never was on sea or land, and yet
+the light of absolute truth.
+
+How it transcends in value as well as in beauty the garish light of
+common day, by which poor humanity has hitherto been content to live and
+die, disdaining through lack of knowledge the shadow for the substance,
+the spirit for the matter! I verified the truth of these sleeping
+experiences in every detail: old family letters I had preserved, and
+which I studied on awaking, confirmed what I had seen and heard in my
+dream; old stories explained themselves. It was all by-gone truth,
+garnered in some remote corner of the brain, and brought out of the dim
+past as I willed, and made actual once more.
+
+And strange to say, and most inexplicable, I saw it all as an
+independent spectator, an outsider, not as an actor going again through
+scenes in which he has played a part before!
+
+Yet many things perplexed and puzzled me.
+
+For instance, Gogo's back, and the back of his head, when I stood
+behind him, were as visible and apparently as true to life as his face,
+and I had never seen his back or the back of his head; it was much later
+in life that I learned the secret of two mirrors. And then, when Gogo
+went out of the room, sometimes apparently passing through me as he did
+so and coming out at the other side (with a momentary blurring of the
+dream), the rest would go on talking just as reasonably, as naturally,
+as before. Could the trees and walls and furniture have had ears and
+eyes, those long-vanished trees and walls and furniture that existed now
+only in my sleeping brain, and have retained the sound and shape and
+meaning of all that passed when Gogo, my only conceivable
+remembrancer, was away?
+
+Françoise, the cook, would come into the drawing-room to discuss the
+dinner with my mother when Gogo was at school; and I would hear the
+orders given, and later I would assist at the eating of the meal (to
+which Gogo would invariably do ample justice), and it was just as my
+mother had ordered. Mystery of mysteries!
+
+What a pleasant life it was they led together, these ghosts of a by-gone
+time! Such a genial, smooth, easygoing, happy-go-lucky state of
+things--half bourgeois, half Bohemian, and yet with a well-marked
+simplicity, refinement, and distinction of bearing and speech that were
+quite aristocratic.
+
+The servants (only three--Thérèse the house-maid, Françoise the cook,
+and English Sarah, who had been my nurse and was now my mother's maid)
+were on the kindliest and most familiar terms with us, and talked to us
+like friends, and interested themselves in our concerns, and we in
+theirs; I noticed that they always wished us each good-morning and
+good-night--a pretty French fashion of the Passy bourgeoisie in Louis
+Philippe's time (he was a bourgeois king).
+
+Our cuisine was bourgeoise also. Peter Ibbetson's mouth watered (after
+his tenpenny London dinner) to see and smell the steam of "soupe à la
+bonne femme," "soupe aux choux," "pot au feu," "blanquette de veau,"
+"boeuf à la mode," "cotelettes de porc à la sauce piquante,"
+"vinaigrette de boeuf bouilli"--that endless variety of good things on
+which French people grow fat so young--and most excellent claret (at one
+franc a bottle in those happy days): its bouquet seemed to fill the room
+as soon as the cork was drawn!
+
+Sometimes, such a repast ended, "le beau Pasquier," in the fulness of
+his heart, would suddenly let off impossible fireworks of vocalization,
+ascending rockets of chromatic notes which would explode softly very
+high up and come down in full cadences, trills, roulades, like beautiful
+colored stars; and Thérèse would exclaim, "Ah, q'c'est beau!" as if she
+had been present at a real pyrotechnic display; and Thérèse was quite
+right. I have never heard the like from any human throat, and should not
+have believed it possible. Only Joachim's violin can do such beautiful
+things so beautifully.
+
+Or else he would tell us of wolves he had shot in Brittany, or
+wild-boars in Burgundy--for he was a great sportsman--or of his
+adventures as a _garde du corps_ of Charles Dix, or of the wonderful
+inventions that were so soon to bring us fame and fortune; and he would
+loyally drink to Henri Cinq; and he was so droll and buoyant and witty
+that it was as good to hear him speak as to hear him sing.
+
+But there was another and a sad side to all this strange comedy of
+vanished lives.
+
+They built castles in the air, and made plans, and talked of all the
+wealth and happiness that would be theirs when my father's ship came
+home, and of all the good they would do, pathetically unconscious of the
+near future; which, of course, was all past history to their loving
+audience of one.
+
+And then my tears would flow with the unbearable ache of love and pity
+combined; they would fall and dry on the waxed floors of my old home in
+Passy, and I would find them still wet on my pillow in Pentonville
+when I woke.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Soon I discovered by practice that I was able for a second or two to be
+more than a mere spectator--to be an actor once more; to turn myself
+(Ibbetson) into my old self (Gogo), and thus be touched and caressed by
+those I had so loved. My mother kissed me and I felt it; just as long as
+I could hold my breath I could walk hand in hand with Madame Seraskier,
+or feel Mimsey's small weight on my back and her arms round my neck for
+four or five yards as I walked, before blurring the dream; and the blur
+would soon pass away, if it did not wake me, and I was Peter Ibbetson
+once more, walking and sitting among them, hearing them talk and laugh,
+watching them at their meals, in their walks; listening to my father's
+songs, my mother's sweet playing, and always unseen and unheeded by
+them. Moreover, I soon learned to touch things without sensibly blurring
+the dream. I would cull a rose, and stick it in my buttonhole, and
+there it remained--but lo! the very rose I had just culled was still on
+the rose-bush also! I would pick up a stone and throw it at the wall,
+where it disappeared without a sound--and the very same stone still lay
+at my feet, however often I might pick it up and throw it!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+No waking joy in the world can give, can equal in intensity, these
+complex joys I had when asleep; waking joys seem so slight, so vague in
+comparison--so much escapes the senses through lack of concentration and
+undivided attention--the waking perceptions are so blunt.
+
+It was a life within a life--an intenser life--in which the fresh
+perceptions of childhood combined with the magic of dream-land, and in
+which there was but one unsatisfied longing; but its name was Lion.
+
+It was the passionate longing to meet the Duchess of Towers once more in
+that land of dreams.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thus for a time I went on, more solitary than ever, but well compensated
+for all my loneliness by this strange new life that had opened itself to
+me, and never ceasing to marvel and rejoice--when one morning I received
+a note from Lady Cray, who wanted some stables built at Cray, their
+country-seat in Hertfordshire, and begged I would go there for the day
+and night.
+
+I was bound to accept this invitation, as a mere matter of business, of
+course; as a friend, Lady Cray seemed to have dropped me long ago, "like
+a 'ot potato," blissfully unconscious that it was I who had dropped her.
+
+But she received me as a friend--an old friend. All my shyness and
+snobbery fell from me at the mere touch of her hand.
+
+I had arrived at Cray early in the afternoon, and had immediately set
+about my work, which took several hours, so that I got to the house only
+just in time to dress for dinner.
+
+When I came into the drawing-room there were several people there, and
+Lady Cray presented me to a young lady, the vicar's daughter, whom I was
+to take in to dinner.
+
+I was very much impressed on being told by her that the company
+assembled in the drawing-room included no less a person than Sir Edwin
+Landseer. Many years ago I had copied an engraving of one of his
+pictures for Mimsey Seraskier. It was called "The Challenge," or "Coming
+Events cast their Shadows before Them." I feasted my eyes on the
+wondrous little man, who seemed extremely chatty and genial, and quite
+unembarrassed by his fame.
+
+A guest was late, and Lord Cray, who seemed somewhat peevishly impatient
+for his food, exclaimed--
+
+"Mary wouldn't be Mary if she were punctual!"
+
+Just then Mary came in--and Mary was no less a person than the Duchess
+of Towers!
+
+My knees trembled under me; but there was no time to give way to any
+such tender weakness. Lord Cray walked away with her; the procession
+filed into the dining room, and somewhere at the end of it my young
+vicaress and myself.
+
+The duchess sat a long way from me, but I met her glance for a moment,
+and fancied I saw again in it that glimmer of kindly recognition.
+
+My neighbor, who was charming, asked me if I did not think the Duchess
+of Towers the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.
+
+I assented with right good-will, and was told that she was as good as
+she was beautiful, and as clever as she was good (as if I did not know
+it); that she would give away the very clothes off her back; that there
+was no trouble she would not take for others; that she did not get on
+well with her husband, who drank, and was altogether bad and vile; that
+she had a great sorrow--an only child, an idiot, to whom she was
+devoted, and who would some day be the Duke of Towers; that she was
+highly accomplished, a great linguist, a great musician, and about the
+most popular woman in all English society.
+
+Ah! Who loved the Duchess of Towers better than this poor scribe, in
+whose soul she lived and shone like a bright particular star--like the
+sun; and who, without his knowing, was being rapidly drawn into the
+sphere of her attraction, as Lintot called it; one day to be finally
+absorbed, I trust, forever!
+
+"And who was this wonderful Duchess of Towers before she married?" I
+asked.
+
+"She was a Miss Seraskier. Her father was a Hungarian, a physician, and
+a political reformer--a most charming person; that's where she gets her
+manners. Her mother, whom she lost when she was quite a child, was a
+very beautiful Irish girl of good family, a first cousin of Lord
+Cray's--a Miss Desmond, who ran away with the interesting patriot. They
+lived somewhere near Paris. It was there that Madame Seraskier died of
+cholera--... What is the matter--are you ill?"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+I made out that I was faint from the heat, and concealed as well as I
+could the flood of emotion and bewilderment that overwhelmed me.
+
+I dared not look again at the Duchess of Towers.
+
+"Oh! little Mimsey dear, with your poor thin arms round my neck, and
+your cold, pale cheek against mine. I felt them there only last night!
+To have grown into such a splendid vision of female health and strength
+and beauty as this--with that enchanting, ever-ready laugh and smile!
+Why, of course, those eyes, so lashless then, so thickly fringed
+to-day!--how could I have mistaken them? Ah, Mimsey, you never smiled or
+laughed in those days, or I should have known your eyes again! Is it
+possible--is it possible?"
+
+Thus I went on to myself till the ladies left, my fair young companion
+expressing her kind anxiety and polite hope that I would soon be
+myself again.
+
+I sat silent till it was time to join the ladies (I could not even
+follow the witty and brilliant anecdotes of the great painter, who held
+the table); and then I went up to my room. I could not face _her_ again
+so soon after what I had heard.
+
+The good Lord Cray came to make kind inquiries, but I soon satisfied him
+that my indisposition was nothing. He stayed on, however, and talked;
+his dinner seemed to have done him a great deal of good, and he wanted
+to smoke (and somebody to smoke with), which he had not been able to do
+in the dining-room on account of some reverend old bishop who was
+present. So he rolled himself a little cigarette, like a Frenchman, and
+puffed away to his heart's content.
+
+He little guessed how his humble architect wished him away, until he
+began to talk of the Duchess of Towers--"Mary Towers," as he called
+her--and to tell me how "Towers" deserved to be kicked, and whipped at
+the cart's tail. "Why, she's the best and most beautiful woman in
+England, and as sharp as a needle! If it hadn't been for her, he'd have
+been in the bankruptcy court long ago," etc. "There's not a duchess in
+England that's fit to hold the candle to her, either for looks or
+brains, or breedin' either. Her mother (the loveliest woman that ever
+lived, except Mary) was a connection of mine; that's where she gets her
+manners!" etc.
+
+Thus did this noble earl make music for me--sweet and bitter music.
+
+Mary! It is a heavenly name, especially on English lips, and spelled in
+the English mode with the adorable _y_! Great men have had a passion for
+it--Byron, Shelley, Burns. But none, methinks, a greater passion than I,
+nor with such good cause.
+
+And yet there must be a bad Mary now and then, here or there, and even
+an ugly one. Indeed, there was once a Bloody Mary who was both! It seems
+incredible!
+
+Mary, indeed! Why not Hecuba? For what was I to the Duchess of Towers?
+
+When I was alone again I went to bed, and tried to sleep on my back,
+with my arms up, in the hope of a true dream; but sleep would not come,
+and I passed a white night, as the French say. I rose early and walked
+about the park, and tried to interest my self in the stables till it was
+breakfast-time. Nobody was up, and I breakfasted alone with Lady Cray,
+who was as kind as she could be. I do not think she could have found me
+a very witty companion. And then I went back to the stables to think,
+and fell into a doze.
+
+At about twelve I heard the sound of wooden balls, and found a lawn
+where some people were playing "croquet." It was quite a new game, and a
+few years later became the fashion.
+
+[Illustration: SWEET AND BITTER MUSIC.]
+
+I sat down under a large weeping-ash close to the lawn; it was like a
+tent, with chairs and tables underneath.
+
+Presently Lady Cray came there with the Duchess of Towers. I wanted to
+fly, but was rooted to the spot.
+
+[Illustration: The Introduction.]
+
+Lady Cray presented me, and almost immediately a servant came with a
+message for her, and I was left with the One Woman in the World! My
+heart was in my mouth, my throat was dry, my pulse was beating in
+my temples.
+
+She asked me, in the most natural manner, if I played "croquet."
+
+"Yes--no--at least, sometimes--that is, I never of it--oh--I forget!" I
+groaned at my idiocy and hid my face in my hands. She asked if I were
+still unwell, and I said no; and then she began to talk quite easily
+about anything, everything, till I felt more at my ease.
+
+Her voice! I had never heard it well but in a dream, and it was the
+same--a very rich and modulated voice--low--contralto, with many varied
+and delightful inflexions; and she used more action in speaking than the
+generality of Englishwomen, thereby reminding me of Madame Seraskier. I
+noticed that her hands were long and very narrow, and also her feet, and
+remembered that Mimsey's were like that--they were considered poor
+Mimsey's only beauty. I also noticed an almost imperceptible scar on her
+left temple, and remembered with a thrill that I had noticed it in my
+dream as we walked up the avenue together. In waking life I had never
+been near enough to her to notice a small scar, and Mimsey had no scar
+of the kind in the old days--of that I felt sure, for I had seen much of
+Mimsey lately.
+
+I grew more accustomed to the situation, and ventured to say that I had
+once met her at Lady Cray's in London.
+
+"Oh yes; I remember. Giulia Grisi sand the 'Willow Song.'" And then she
+crinkled up her eyes, and laughed, and blushed, and went on: "I noticed
+you standing in a corner, under the famous Gainsborough. You reminded me
+of a dear little French boy I once knew who was very kind to me when I
+was a little girl in France, and whose father you happen to be like. But
+I found that you were Mr. Ibbetson, an English architect, and, Lady Cray
+tells me, a very rising one"
+
+"I _was_ a little French boy once. I had to change my name to please a
+relative, and become English--that is, I was always _really_ English,
+you know."
+
+"Good Heavens, what an extraordinary thing! What _was_ your name, then?"
+
+"Pasquier-Gogo Pasquier!" I groaned, and the tears came into my eyes,
+and I looked away. The duchess made no answer, and when I turned and
+looked at her she was looking at me, very pale, her lips quite white,
+her hands tightly clasped in her lap, and trembling all over.
+
+I said, "You used to be little Mimsey Seraskier, and I used to carry you
+pickaback!"
+
+"Oh don't! oh don't!" she said, and began to cry.
+
+I got up and walked about under the ash-tree till she had dried her
+eyes. The croquet-players were intent upon their game.
+
+I again sat down beside her; she had dried her eyes, and at length she
+said--
+
+"What a dreadful thing it was about your poor father and mother, and
+_my_ dear mother! Do you remember her? She died a week after you left. I
+went to Russia with papa--Dr. Seraskier. What a terrible break-up it
+all was!"
+
+And then we gradually fell to talking quite naturally about old times,
+and dear dead people. She never took her eyes off mine. After a while
+I said--
+
+"I went to Passy, and found everything changed and built over. It
+nearly drove me mad to see. I went to St. Cloud, and saw you driving
+with the Empress of the French. That night I had such an extraordinary
+dream! I dreamed I was floundering about the Rue de la Pompe, and had
+just got to the avenue gate, and you were there."
+
+"Good heavens!" she whispered, and turned white again, and trembled all
+over, "what do you mean?"
+
+"Yes," I said, "you came to my rescue. I was pursued by gnomes and
+horrors."
+
+_She._ "Good heavens! by--by two little jailers, a man and his wife, who
+danced and were trying to hem you in?"
+
+It was now my turn to ejaculate "Good heavens!" We both shook and
+trembled together.
+
+I said: "You gave me your hand, and all came straight at once. My old
+school rose in place of the jail."
+
+_She._ "With a yellow omnibus? And boys going off to their _première
+communion?_"
+
+_I._ "Yes; and there was a crowd--le Père et la Mère
+François, and Madame Liard, the grocer's wife, and--and
+Mimsey Seraskier, with her cropped head. And
+an organ was playing a tune I knew quite well, but
+cannot now recall." ...
+
+_She._ "Wasn't it 'Maman, les p'tits bateaux?'"
+
+_I._ Oh, of _course!_
+
+     _"'Maman, les p'tits bateaux
+     Qui vont sur l'eau,
+     Ont-ils des jambes?'"_
+
+_She_. "That's it!"
+
+     _"'Eh oui, petit bêta!
+     S'ils n'avaient pas
+     Ils n'march'raient pas!'"_
+
+She sank back in her chair, pale and prostrate. After a while--
+
+_She_. "And then I gave you good advice about how to dream true, and we
+got to my old house, and I tried to make you read the letters on the
+portico, and you read them wrong, and I laughed."
+
+_I_. "Yes; I read 'Tête Noire.' Wasn't it idiotic?"
+
+_She_. "And then I touched you again and you read 'Parvis Notre Dame.'"
+
+_I_. "Yes! and you touched me _again_, and I read 'Parva sed
+Apta'--small but fit."
+
+_She_. "Is _that_ what it means? Why, when you were a boy, you told me
+_sed apta_ was all one word, and was the Latin for 'Pavilion.' I
+believed it ever since, and thought 'Parva sed Apta' meant _petit
+pavillon_!"
+
+_I_. "I blush for my bad Latin! After this you gave me good advice
+again, about not touching anything or picking flowers. I never have. And
+then you went away into the park--the light went out of my life,
+sleeping or waking. I have never been able to dream of you since. I
+don't suppose I shall ever meet you again after to-day!"
+
+After this we were silent for a long time, though I hummed and hawed now
+and then, and tried to speak. I was sick with the conflict of my
+feelings. At length she said--
+
+"Dear Mr. Ibbetson, this is all so extraordinary that I must go away
+and think it all over. I cannot tell you what it has been to me to meet
+you once more. And that double dream, common to us both! Oh, I am dazed
+beyond expression, and feel as if I were dreaming now--except that this
+all seems so unreal and impossible--so untrue! We had better part now. I
+don't know if I shall ever meet you again. You will be often in my
+thoughts, but never in my dreams again--that, at least, I can
+command--nor I in yours; it must not be. My poor father taught me how to
+dream before he died, that I might find innocent consolation in dreams
+for my waking troubles, which are many and great, as his were. If I can
+see that any good may come of it, I will write--but no--you must not
+expect a letter. I will now say good-bye and leave you. You go to-day,
+do you not? That is best. I think this had better be a final adieu. I
+cannot tell you of what interest you are to me and always have been. I
+thought you had died long ago. We shall often think of each other--that
+is inevitable--_but never, never dream. That will not do._
+
+"Dear Mr. Ibbetson, I wish you all the good that one human being can
+wish another. And now goodbye, and may God in heaven bless you!"
+
+She rose, trembling and white, and her eyes wet with tears, and wrung
+both my hands, and left me as she had left me in the dream.
+
+The light went out of my life, and I was once more alone--more
+wretchedly and miserably alone than if I had never met her.
+
+I went back to Pentonville, and outwardly took up the thread of my
+monotonous existence, and ate, drank, and worked, and went about as
+usual, but as one in an ordinary dream. For now dreams--true dreams--had
+become the only reality for me.
+
+[Illustration: A FAREWELL.]
+
+So great, so inconceivable and unexampled a wonder had been wrought in a
+dream that all the conditions of life had been altered and reversed.
+
+I and another human being had met--actually and really met--in a double
+dream, a dream common to us both, and clasped each other's hands! And
+each had spoken words to the other which neither ever would or ever
+could forget.
+
+And this other human being and I had been enshrined in each other's
+memory for years--since childhood--and were now linked together by a tie
+so marvellous, an experience so unprecedented, that neither could ever
+well be out of the other's thoughts as long as life and sense and
+memory lasted.
+
+Her very self, as we talked to each other under the ash-tree at Cray,
+was less vividly present to me than that other and still dearer self of
+hers with whom I had walked up the avenue in that balmy dream
+atmosphere, where we had lived and moved and had our being together for
+a few short moments, yet each believing the other at the time to be a
+mere figment of his own (and her) sleeping imagination; such stuff as
+dreams are made of!
+
+And lo! it was all true--as true as the common experience of every-day
+life--more (ten times more), because through our keener and more exalted
+sense perceptions, and less divided attention, we were more conscious of
+each other's real inner being--linked closer together for a space--than
+two mortals had probably ever been since the world began.
+
+That clasp of the hands in the dream--how infinitely more it had
+conveyed of one to the other than even that sad farewell clasp at Cray!
+
+In my poor outer life I waited in vain for a letter; in vain I haunted
+the parks and streets--the street where she lived--in the hope of seeing
+her once more. The house was shut; she was away--in America, as I
+afterwards learned--with her husband and child.
+
+At night, in the familiar scenes I had learned so well to conjure up, I
+explored every nook and corner with the same yearning desire to find a
+trace of her. I was hardly ever away from "Parva sed Apta." There were
+Madame Seraskier and Mimsey and the major, and my mother and Gogo, at
+all times, in and out, and of course as unconscious of my solid presence
+as though I had never existed. And as I looked at Mimsey and her mother
+I wondered at my obtuseness in not recognizing at the very first glance
+who the Duchess of Towers had been, and whose daughter. The height, the
+voice, the eyes, certain tricks of gait and gesture--how could I have
+failed to know her again after such recent dream opportunities?
+
+And Seraskier, towering among them all, as his daughter now towered
+among women. I saw that he lived again in his daughter; _his_ was the
+smile that closed up the eyes, as hers did; had Mimsey ever smiled in
+those days, I should have known her again by this very characteristic
+trait.
+
+Of this daughter of his (the Mimsey of the past years, not the duchess
+of to-day) I never now could have enough, and made her go through again
+and again all the scenes with Gogo, so dear to my remembrance, and to
+hers. I was, in fact, the Prince Charmant, of whose unseen attendance
+she had been conscious in some inconceivable way. What a strange
+foresight! But where was the fée Tarapatapoum? Never there during this
+year of unutterable longing; she had said it; never, never again should
+I be in her dream, or she in mine, however constantly we might dwell in
+each other's thoughts.
+
+So sped a twelvemonth after that last meeting in the flesh at Gray.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now with an unwilling heart and most reluctant pen, I must come to
+the great calamity of my life which I will endeavor to tell in as few
+words as possible.
+
+The reader, if he has been good enough to read without skipping, will
+remember the handsome Mrs. Deane, to whom I fancied I lost my heart, in
+Hopshire, a few years back.
+
+I had not seen her since--had, indeed, almost forgotten her--but had
+heard vaguely that she had left Hopshire, and come to London, and
+married a wealthy man much older than herself.
+
+Well, one day I was in Hyde Park, gazing at the people in the drive,
+when a spick-and-span and very brand-new open carriage went by, and in
+it sad Mrs. Deane (that was), all alone in her glory, and looking very
+sulky indeed. She recognized me and bowed, and I bowed back again, with
+just a moment's little flutter of the heart--an involuntary tribute to
+auld lang syne--and went on my way, wondering that I could ever had
+admired her so.
+
+Presently, to my surprise, I was touched on the elbow. It was Mrs. Deane
+again--I will call her Mrs. Deane still. She had got out and followed
+me on foot. It was her wish that I should drive round the park with her
+and talk of old times. I obeyed, and for the first and last time found
+myself forming part of that proud and gay procession I had so often
+watched with curious eyes.
+
+She seemed anxious to know whether I had ever made it up with Colonel
+Ibbetson, and pleased to hear that I had not, and that I probably never
+should, and that my feeling against him was strong and bitter and
+likely to last.
+
+She appeared to hate him very much.
+
+She inquired kindly after myself and my prospects in life, but did not
+seem deeply interested in my answers--until later, when I talked of my
+French life, and my dear father and mother, when she listened with eager
+sympathy, and I was much touched. She asked if I had portraits of them;
+I had--most excellent miniatures; and when we parted I had promised to
+call upon her next afternoon, and bring these miniatures with me.
+
+She seemed a languid woman, much ennuyée, and evidently without a large
+circle of acquaintance. She told me I was the only person in the whole
+park whom she had bowed to that day. Her husband was in Hamburg, and she
+was going to meet him in Paris in a day or two.
+
+I had not so many friends but what I felt rather glad than otherwise to
+have met her, and willingly called, as I had promised, with the
+portraits.
+
+She lived in a large, new house, magnificently up near the Marble Arch.
+She was quite alone when I called, and asked me immediately if I had
+brought the miniatures; and looked at them quite eagerly, and then at
+me, and exclaimed--
+
+"Good heavens, you are your father's very image!"
+
+Indeed, I had always been considered so.
+
+Both his eyebrows and mine, especially, met in a singular and
+characteristic fashion at the bridge of the nose, and she seemed much
+struck by this. He was represented in the uniform of Charles X's _gardes
+du corps_, in which he had served for two years, and had acquired the
+nickname of "le beau Pasquier." Mrs. Deane seemed never to tire of
+gazing at it, and remarked that my father "must have been the very ideal
+of a young girl's dream" (an indirect compliment which made me blush
+after what she had just said of the likeness between us. I almost began
+to wonder whether she was going to try and make a fool of me again, as
+she had so successfully done a few years ago).
+
+Then she became interested again in my early life and recollections, and
+wanted to know whether my parents were fond of each other. They were a
+most devoted and lover-like pair, and had loved each other at first
+sight and until death, and I told her so; and so on until I became quite
+excited, and imagined she must know of some good fortune to which I was
+entitled, and had been kept out of by the machinations of a
+wicked uncle.
+
+For I had long discovered in my dreams that he had been my father's
+bitterest enemy and the main cause of his financial ruin, by selfish,
+heartless, and dishonest deeds too complicated to explain here--a
+regular Shylock.
+
+I had found this out by listening (in my dreams) to long conversations
+between my father and mother in the old drawing-room at Passy, while
+Gogo was absorbed in his book; and every word that had passed through
+Gogo's inattentive ears into his otherwise preoccupied little brain had
+been recorded there as in a phonograph, and was now repeated over and
+over again for Peter Ibbetson, as he sat unnoticed among them.
+
+I asked her, jokingly, if she had discovered that I was the rightful
+heir to Ibbetson Hall by any chance.
+
+She replied that nothing would give her greater pleasure, but there was
+no such good fortune in store for either her or me; that she had
+discovered long ago that Colonel Ibbetson was the greatest blackguard
+unhung, and nothing new she might discover could make him worse.
+
+I then remembered how he would often speak of her, even to me, and hint
+and insinuate things which were no doubt untrue, and which I
+disbelieved. Not that the question of their truth or untruth made him
+any the less despicable and vile for telling.
+
+She asked me if he had ever spoken of her to me, and after much
+persuasion and cunning cross-examination I told her as much of the truth
+as I dared, and she became a tigress. She assured me that he had managed
+so to injure and compromise her in Hopshire that she and her mother had
+to leave, and she swore to me most solemnly (and I thoroughly believe
+she spoke the truth) that there had never been any relation between
+them that she could not have owned to before the whole world.
+
+She had wished to marry him, it is true, for his wealth and position;
+for both she and her mother were very poor, and often hard put to it to
+make both ends meet and keep up a decent appearance before the world;
+and he had singled her out and paid her marked attention from the first,
+and given her every reason to believe that his attentions were serious
+and honorable.
+
+At this juncture her mother came in, Mrs. Glyn, and we renewed our old
+acquaintance. She had quite forgiven me my school-boy admiration for her
+daughter; all her power of hating, like her daughter's, had concentrated
+itself on Ibbetson; and as I listened to the long story of their wrongs
+and his infamy, I grew to hate him worse than ever, and was ready to be
+their champion on the spot, and to take up their quarrel there and then.
+
+But this would not do, it appeared, for their name must nevermore be in
+any way mixed up with his.
+
+Then suddenly Mrs. Glyn asked me if I knew when he went to India.
+
+I could satisfy her, for I knew that it was just after my parents'
+marriage, nearly a year before my birth; upon which she gave the exact
+date of his departure with his regiment, and the name of the transport,
+and everything; and also, to my surprise, the date of my parents'
+marriage at Marylebone Church, and of my baptism there fifteen months
+later--just fourteen weeks after my birth in Passy. I was growing quite
+bewildered with all this knowledge of my affairs, and wondered more
+and more.
+
+We sat silent for a while, the two women looking at each other and at me
+and at the miniatures. It was getting grewsome. What could it all mean?
+
+Presently Mrs. Glyn, at a nod from her daughter, addressed me thus:
+
+"Mr. Ibbetson, your uncle, as you call him, though he is not your uncle,
+is a very terrible villain, and has done you and your parents a very
+foul wrong. Before I tell you what it is (and I think you ought to know)
+you must give me your word of honor that you will do or say nothing that
+will get our name publicly mixed up in any way with Colonel Ibbetson's.
+The injury to my daughter, now she is happily married to an excellent
+man, would be irreparable."
+
+With a beating heart I solemnly gave the required assurance.
+
+"Then, Mr. Ibbetson, it is right that you should know that Colonel
+Ibbetson, when he was paying his infamous addresses to my daughter, gave
+her unmistakably to understand that you were his natural son, by his
+cousin, Miss Catherine Biddulph, afterwards Madame Pasquier de
+la Marière!"
+
+"Oh, oh, oh!" I cried, "surely you must be mistaken--he knew it was
+impossible--he had been refused by my mother three times--he went to
+India nearly a year before I was born--he--"
+
+Then Mrs. Deane said, producing an old letter from her pocket:
+
+"Do you know his handwriting and his crest? Do you happen to recollect
+once bringing me a note from at Ibbetson Hall? Here it is," and she
+handed it to me. It was unmistakably his, and I remembered it at once,
+and this is what it said:
+
+"For Heaven's sake, dear friend, don't breathe a word to any living soul
+of what you were clever enough to guess last night! There is a likeness,
+of course.
+
+"Poor Antinoüs! He is quite ignorant of the true relationship, which has
+caused me many a pang of shame and remorse....
+
+"'Que voulez-vous? Elle était ravissaure!' ... We were cousins, much
+thrown together; 'both were so young, and one so beautiful!' ... I was
+but a penniless cornet in those days--hardly more than a boy. Happily an
+unsuspecting Frenchman of good family was there who had loved her long,
+and she married him. 'Il était temps!' ...
+
+"Can you forgive me this 'entraînement de jeunesse?' I have repented in
+sackcloth and ashes, and made what reparation I could by adopting and
+giving my name to one who is a perpetual reminder to me of a moment's
+infatuation. He little knows, poor boy, and never will, I hope. 'Il n'a
+plus que moi au monde!'
+
+"Burn this as soon as you have read it, and never let the subject be
+mentioned between us again.
+
+"R. ('Qui sait aimer')."
+
+Here was a thunderbolt out of the blue!
+
+I sat stunned and saw scarlet, and felt as if I should see scarlet
+forever.
+
+[Illustration: THE FATAL LETTER.]
+
+After a long silence, during which I could feel my pulse beat to
+bursting-point in my temples, Mrs. Glyn said:
+
+"Now, Mr. Ibbetson, I hope you will do nothing rash--nothing that can
+bring my daughter's name into any quarrel between yourself and your
+uncle. For the sake of your mother's good name, you will be prudent, I
+know. If he could speak like this of his cousin, with whom he had been
+in love when he was young, what lies would he not tell of my poor
+daughter? He _has_--terrible lies! Oh, what we have suffered! When he
+wrote that letter I believe he really meant to marry her. He had the
+greatest trust in her, or he would never have committed himself so
+foolishly."
+
+"Does he know of this letter's existing?" I asked.
+
+"No. When he and my daughter quarrelled she sent him back his
+letters--all but this one, which she told him she had burned immediately
+after reading it, as he had told her to do."
+
+"May I keep it?"
+
+"Yes. I know you may be trusted, and my daughter's name has been removed
+from the outside, as you see. No one but ourselves has ever seen it, nor
+have we mentioned to a soul what it contains, as we never believed it
+for a moment. Two or three years ago we had the curiosity to find out
+when and where your parents had married, and when you were born, and
+when _he_ went to India, it was no surprise to us at all. We then tried
+to find you, but soon gave it up, and thought it better to leave matters
+alone. Then we heard he was in mischief again--just the same sort of
+mischief; and then my daughter saw you in the park, and we concluded you
+ought to know."
+
+Such was the gist of that memorable conversation, which I have condensed
+as much as I could.
+
+When I left these two ladies I walked twice rapidly round the park. I
+saw scarlet often during that walk. Perhaps I looked scarlet. I remember
+people staring at me.
+
+Then I went straight to Lintot's, with the impulse to tell him my
+trouble and ask his advice.
+
+He was away from home, and I waited in his smoking-room for a while,
+reading the letter over and over again.
+
+Then I decided not to tell him, and left the house, taking with me as I
+did so (but without any definite purpose) a heavy loaded stick, a most
+formidable weapon, even in the hands of a boy, and which I myself had
+given to Lintot on his last birthday. [Greek: Anagkae]!
+
+Then I went to my usual eating-house near the circus and dined. To the
+surprise of the waiting-maid, I drank a quart of bitter ale and two
+glasses of sherry. It was my custom to drink water. She plied me with
+questions as to whether I was ill or in trouble. I answered her no, and
+at last begged she would leave me alone.
+
+Ibbetson lived in St. James's Street. I went there. He was out. It was
+nine o'clock, and his servant seemed uncertain when he would return. I
+came back at ten. He was not yet home, and the servant, after thinking a
+while, and looking up and down the street, and finding my appearance
+decent and by no means dangerous, asked me to go upstairs and wait, as I
+told him it was a matter of great importance.
+
+So I went and sat in my uncle's drawing-room and waited.
+
+The servant came with me and lit the candles, and remarked on the
+weather, and handed me the _Saturday Review_ and _Punch_. I must have
+looked quite natural--as I tried to look--and he left me.
+
+I saw a Malay creese on the mantel-piece and hid it behind a
+picture-frame. I locked a door leading to another drawing-room where
+there was a grand piano, and above it a trophy of swords, daggers,
+battle-axes, etc., and put the key in my pocket.
+
+The key of the room where I waited was inside the door.
+
+All this time I had a vague idea of possible violence on his part, but
+no idea of killing him. I felt far too strong for that. Indeed, I had a
+feeling of quiet, irresistible strength--the result of suppressed
+excitement.
+
+I sat down and meditated all I would say. I had settled it over and over
+again, and read and reread the fatal letter.
+
+The servant came up with glasses and soda-water. I trembled lest he
+should observe that the door to the other room was locked, but he did
+not. He opened the window and looked up and down the street. Presently
+he said, "Here's the colonel at last, sir," and went down to open
+the door.
+
+I heard him come in and speak to his servant. Then he came straight up,
+humming _"la donna e mobile,"_ and walked in with just the jaunty, airy
+manner I remembered. He was in evening dress, and very little changed.
+He seemed much surprised to see me, and turned very white.
+
+"Well, my Apollo of the T square, _pourquoi cet honneur?_ Have you come,
+like a dutiful nephew, to humble yourself and beg for forgiveness?"
+
+I forgot all I meant to say (indeed, nothing happened as I had meant),
+but rose and said, "I have come to have a talk with you," as quietly as
+I could, though with a thick voice.
+
+He seemed uneasy, and went towards the door.
+
+I got there before him, and closed it, and locked it, and put the key
+in my pocket.
+
+He darted to the other door and found it locked.
+
+Then he went to the mantel-piece and looked for the creese, and not
+finding it, he turned round with his back to the fireplace and his arms
+akimbo, and tried to look very contemptuous and determined. His chin was
+quite white under his dyed mustache--like wax--and his eyes blinked
+nervously.
+
+I walked up to him and said: "You told Mrs. Deane that I was your
+natural son."
+
+"It's a lie! Who told you so?"
+
+"She did--this afternoon."
+
+"It's a lie--a spiteful invention of a cast-off mistress!"
+
+"She never was your mistress!"
+
+"You fool! I suppose she told you that too. Leave the room, you pitiful
+green jackass, or I'll have you turned out," and he rang the bell.
+
+"Do you know your own handwriting?" I said, and handed him the letter.
+
+He read a line or two and gasped out that it was a forgery, and rang the
+bell again, and looked again behind the clock for his creese. Then he
+lit the letter at a candle and threw it in the fireplace, where it
+blazed out.
+
+I made no attempt to prevent him.
+
+The servant tried to open the door, and Ibbetson went to the window and
+called out for the police. I rushed to the picture where I had hidden
+the creese, and threw it on the table. Then I swung him away from the
+window by his coat-tails, and told him to defend himself, pointing to
+the creese.
+
+He seized it, and stood on the defensive; the servant had apparently run
+down-stairs for assistance.
+
+"Now, then," I said, "down on your knees, you infamous cur, and confess;
+it's your only chance."
+
+"Confess what, you fool?"
+
+"That you're a coward and a liar; that you wrote that letter; that Mrs.
+Deane was no more your mistress than my mother was!"
+
+There was a sound of people running up-stairs. He listened a moment and
+hissed out:
+
+"They _both_ were, you idiot! How can I tell for certain whether you are
+my son or not? It all comes to the same. Of course I wrote the letter.
+Come on, you cowardly assassin, you bastard parricide!" ... and he
+advanced on me with his creese low down in his right hand, the point
+upward, and made a thrust, shrieking out, "Break open the door! quick!"
+They did; but too late!
+
+[Illustration: "BASTARD! PARRICIDE!"]
+
+I saw crimson!
+
+He missed me, and I brought down my stick on his left arm, which he held
+over his head, and then on his head, and he fell, crying:
+
+"O my God! O Christ!"
+
+I struck him again on his head as he was falling, and once again when he
+was on the ground. It seemed to crash right in.
+
+That is why and how I killed Uncle Ibbetson.
+
+
+
+
+Part Five
+
+[Illustration]
+
+     "_Grouille, grève, grève, grouille,
+     File, file, ma quenouille!
+     File sa corde au bourreau
+     Qui siffle dans le préau..._"
+
+
+So sang the old hag in _Notre Dame de Paris!_
+
+So sang to me night and day, for many nights and days, the thin small
+voice that always went piping inside me, now to one tune, now to
+another, but always the same words--that terrible refrain that used to
+haunt me so when I was a school-boy at Bluefriars!
+
+Oh, to be a school-boy again in a long gray coat and ridiculous pink
+stockings--innocent and free--with Esmeralda for my only love, and Athos
+and Porthos and D'Artagnan for my bosom friends, and no worse
+tribulation than to be told on a Saturday afternoon that the third
+volume was in hand--_volume trois en lecture_'.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Sometimes, I remember, I could hardly sleep on a Sunday night, for pity
+of the poor wretch who was to be hanged close by on Monday morning, and
+it has come to that with _me_!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Oh, Mary, Mary, Duchess of Towers, sweet friend of my childhood, and
+love of my life, what must you think of me now?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+How blessed are the faithful! How good it must be to trust in God and
+heaven, and the forgiveness of sin, and be as a little child in all but
+innocence! A whole career of crime wiped out in a moment by just one
+cheap little mental act of faith at the eleventh hour, in the extreme
+terror of well-merited dissolution; and all the evil one has worked
+through life (that goes on breeding evil for ages to come) taken off
+one's shoulders like a filthy garment, and just cast aside, anywhere,
+anyhow, for the infecting of others--who do not count.
+
+What matter if it be a fool's paradise? Paradise is paradise, for
+whoever owns it!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They say a Sicilian drum-major, during the French occupation of Palermo,
+was sentenced to be shot. He was a well-known coward, and it was feared
+he would disgrace his country at the last moment in the presence of the
+French soldiers, who had a way of being shot with a good grace and a
+light heart: they had grown accustomed to it.
+
+For the honor of Sicily his confessor told him, in the strictest
+confidence, that his sentence was a mock one, and that he would be fired
+at with blank cartridges.
+
+It was a pious fraud. All but two of the twelve cartridges had bullets,
+and he fell, riddled through and through. No Frenchman ever died with a
+lighter heart, a better grace. He was superb, and the national honor
+was saved.
+
+Thrice happy Sicilian drum-major, if the story be true! That trust in
+blank cartridges was his paradise.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Oh, it is uphill work to be a stoic when the moment comes and the tug!
+But when the tug lasts for more than a moment--days and nights, days and
+nights! Oh, happy Sicilian drum-major!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Pray? Yes, I will pray night and morning, and all day long, to whatever
+there is left of inherited strength and courage in that luckless,
+misbegotten waif, Peter Ibbetson; that it may bear him up a little while
+yet; that he may not disgrace himself in the dock or on the gallows.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Repent? Yes, of many things. But of the thing for which I am here?
+Never!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is a ghastly thing to be judge and jury and executioner all in one,
+and for a private and personal wrong--to condemn and strike and kill.
+
+Pity comes after--when it is too late, fortunately--the wretched
+weakness of pity! Pooh! no Calcraft will ever pity _me_, and I do not
+want him to.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He had his long, snaky knife against my stick; he, too, was a big strong
+man, well skilled in self-defence! Down he went, and I struck him again
+and again. "O my God! O Christ!" he shrieked....
+
+"It will ring in my heart and my ears till I die--till I die!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was no time to lose--no time to think for the best. It is all for
+the best as it is. What might he not have said if he had lived!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thank Heaven, pity is not remorse or shame; and what crime could well
+be worse than his? To rob one's dearly beloved dead of their fair shame!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He might have been mad, perhaps, and have grown in time to believe the
+lies he told himself. Such things have been. But such a madman should no
+more be suffered to live than a mad dog. The only way to kill the lie
+was to kill the liar--that is, if one _can_ ever kill a lie!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Poor worm! after all, he could not help it, I suppose! he was _built_
+like that! and _I_ was built to kill him for it, and be hanged.'
+[Greek: Anagkae]!
+
+What an exit for "Gogo--gentil petit Gogo!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Just opposite that wall, on the other side, was once a small tripe and
+trotter shop, kept by a most lovely daughter of the people, so fair and
+good in my eyes that I would have asked her to be my wife. What would
+she think of me now? That I should have dared to aspire! What a
+King Cophetua!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What does everybody think? I can never breathe the real cause to a soul.
+Only two women know the truth, and they will take good care not to tell.
+Thank Heaven for that!
+
+What matters what anybody thinks? "It will be all the same as a hundred
+years hence." That is the most sensible proverb ever invented.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But meanwhile!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The judge puts on the black cap, and it is all for you! Every eye is
+fixed on you, so big and young and strong and full of life! Ugh!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They pinion you, and you have to walk and be a man, and the chaplain
+exhorts and prays and tries to comfort. Then a sea of faces; people
+opposite, who have been eating and drinking and making merry, waiting for
+_you!_ A cap is pulled over your eyes--oh, horror! horror! horror!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Heureux tambour-major de Sicile!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Il faut laver son ligne sale en famille, et c'est ce que j'ai fait.
+Mais ça va ma coûter cher!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Would I do it all over again? Oh, let me hope, yes!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Ah, he died too quick; I dealt him those four blows in less than as
+many seconds. It was five minutes, perhaps--or, at the most, ten--from
+the moment he came into the room to that when I finished him and was
+caught red-handed. And I--what a long agony!
+
+Oh, that I might once more dream a "true dream," and see my dear people
+once more! But it seems that I have lost the power of dreaming true
+since that fatal night. I try and try, but it will not come. My dreams
+are dreadful; and, oh, the _waking_!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After all, my life hitherto, but for a few happy years of childhood, has
+not been worth living; it is most unlikely that it ever would have been,
+had I lived to a hundred! Oh, Mary! Mary!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And penal servitude! Better any death than that. It is good that my
+secret must die with me--that there will be no extenuating
+circumstances, no recommendation to mercy, no commutation of the swift
+penalty of death.
+
+"File, file... File sa corde au bourreau!"
+
+By such monotonous thoughts, and others as dreary and hopeless,
+recurring again and again in the same dull round, I beguiled the
+terrible time that intervened between Ibbetson's death and my trial at
+the Old Bailey.
+
+It all seems very trivial and unimportant now--not worth
+recording--even hard to remember.
+
+But at the time my misery was so great, my terror of the gallows so
+poignant, that each day I thought I must die of sheer grief before
+another twenty-four hours could possibly pass over me.
+
+The intolerable strain would grow more and more severe till a climax of
+tension was reached, and a hysterical burst of tears would relieve me
+for a while, and I would feel reconciled to my fate, and able to face
+death like a man.... Then the anguish would gradually steal over me
+again, and the uncontrollable weakness of the flesh....
+
+And each of these two opposite moods, while it lasted, made the other
+seem impossible, and as if it never could come back again; yet back it
+came with the regularity of a tide--the most harrowing seesaw that
+ever was.
+
+I had always been unstable like that; but whereas I had hitherto
+oscillated between high elation and despondency, it was now from a dumb,
+resigned despair to the wildest agony and terror.
+
+I sought in vain for the only comfort it was in me to seek; but when,
+overdone with suffering, I fell asleep at last, I could no longer dream
+true; I could dream only as other wretches dream.
+
+I always dreamed those two little dancing, deformed jailers, man and
+wife, had got me at last; and that I shrieked aloud for my beloved
+duchess to succor me, as they ran me in, each butting at me sideways,
+and showing their toothless gums in a black smile, and poisoning me
+with their hot sour breath! The gate was there, and the avenue, all
+distorted and quite unlike; and, opposite, a jail; but no powerful
+Duchess of Towers to wave the horror away.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It will be remembered by some, perhaps, how short was my trial.
+
+The plea of "not guilty" was entered for me. The defence set up was
+insanity, based on the absence of any adequate motive. This defence was
+soon disposed of by the prosecution; witnesses to my sanity were not
+wanting, and motives enough were found in my past relations with Colonel
+Ibbetson to "make me--a violent, morose, and vindictive-natured
+man--imbrue my hands in the gore of my relative and benefactor--a man
+old enough to be my father--who, indeed, might have been my father, for
+the love he had bestowed upon me, with his honored name, when I was left
+a penniless, foreign orphan on his hands."
+
+Here I laughed loud and long, and made a most painful impression, as is
+duly recorded in the reports of the trial.
+
+The jury found me guilty quite early in the afternoon of the second day,
+without leaving the box; and I, "preserving to the last the callous and
+unmoved demeanor I had borne all through the trial," was duly sentenced
+to death without any hope of mercy, but with an expression of regret on
+the part of the judge--a famous hanging judge--that a man of my
+education and promise should be brought by his own evil nature and
+uncontrollable passions to so deplorable an end.
+
+Now whether the worst of certainties is better than suspense--whether my
+nerves of pain had been so exercised during the period preceding my
+trial that I had really become callous, as they say a man's back does
+after a certain number of strokes from the "cat"--certain it was that I
+knew the worst, and acquiesced in it with a surprised sense of actual
+relief, and found it in me to feel it not unbearable.
+
+Such, at least, was my mood that night. I made the most of it. It was
+almost happiness by comparison with what I had gone through. I remember
+eating with a heartiness that surprised me. I could have gone straight
+from my dinner to the gallows, and died with a light heart and a good
+grace--like a Sicilian drum-major.
+
+I resolved to write the whole true story to the Duchess of Towers, with
+an avowal of my long and hopeless adoration for her, and the expression
+of a hope that she would try to think of me only as her old playfellow,
+and as she had known me before this terrible disaster. And thinking of
+the letter I would write till very late, I fell asleep in my cell, with
+two warders to watch over me; and then--Another phase of my inner
+life began.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Without effort, without let or hindrance of any kind, I was at the
+avenue gate.
+
+The pink and white may, the lilacs and laburnums were in full bloom, the
+sun made golden paths everywhere. The warm air was full of fragrance,
+and alive with all the buzz and chirp of early summer.
+
+I was half crying with joy to reach the land of my true dreams again, to
+feel at home once more--_chez moi! chez moi!_
+
+La Mère François sat peeling potatoes at the door of her _loge_; she was
+singing a little song about _cinq sous, sinq sous, pour monter notre
+ménage._ I had forgotten it, but it all came back now.
+
+[Illustration: "CINQ SOUS, CINQ SOUS, POUR MONTER NOTRE MÉNAGE."]
+
+The facetious postman, Yverdon, went in at the gate of my old garden;
+the bell rang as he pushed it, and I followed him.
+
+Under the apple-tree, which was putting forth shoots of blossom in
+profusion, sat my mother and Monsieur le Major. My mother took the
+letter from the postman's hand as he said, "Pour Vous? Oh yes, Madame
+Pasquier, God sev ze Kveen!" and paid the postage. It was from Colonel
+Ibbetson, then in Ireland, and not yet a colonel.
+
+Médor lay snoring on the grass, and Gogo and Mimsey were looking at the
+pictures in the _musée des familles._
+
+In a garden chair lolled Dr. Seraskier, apparently asleep, with his long
+porcelain pipe across his knees.
+
+Madame Seraskier, in a yellow nankeen gown with gigot sleeves, was
+cutting curl-papers out of the _Constitutionnel_.
+
+I gazed on them all with unutterable tenderness. I was gazing on them
+perhaps for the last time.
+
+I called out to them by name.
+
+"Oh, speak to me, beloved shades! Oh, my father! oh, mother, I want you
+so desperately! Come out of the past for a few seconds, and give me some
+words of comfort! I'm in such woful plight! If you could only
+_know_ ..."
+
+But they could neither hear nor see me.
+
+Then suddenly another figure stepped forth from behind the
+apple-tree--no old-fashioned, unsubstantial shadow of by-gone days that
+one can only see and hear, and that cannot hear and see one back again;
+but one in all the splendid fulness of life, a pillar of help and
+strength--Mary, Duchess of Towers!
+
+I fell on my knees as she came to me with both hands extended.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Ibbetson, I have been seeking and waiting for you here night
+after night! I have been frantic! If you hadn't come at last, I must
+have thrown everything to the winds, and gone to see you in Newgate,
+waking and before the world, to have a talk with you--an _abboccamento_.
+I suppose you couldn't sleep, or were unable to dream."
+
+I could not answer at first. I could only cover her hands with kisses,
+as I felt her warm life-current mixing with mine--a rapture!
+
+And then I said--
+
+"I swear to you by all I hold most sacred--by _my_ mother's memory and
+_yours_--by yourself--that I never meant to take Ibbetson's life, or
+even strike him; the miserable blow was dealt...."
+
+"As if you need tell me that! As if I didn't know you of old, my poor
+friend, kindest and gentlest of men! Why, I am holding your hands, and
+see into the very depths of your heart!"
+
+(I put down all she said as she said it. Of course I am not, and never
+have been, what her old affectionate regard made me seem in her eyes,
+any more than I am the bloodthirsty monster I passed for. Woman-like,
+she was the slave of her predilections.)
+
+"And now, Mr. Ibbetson," she went on, "let me first of all tell you, for
+a certainty, that the sentence will be commuted. I saw the Home
+Secretary three or four hours ago. The real cause of your deplorable
+quarrel with your uncle is an open secret. His character is well known.
+A Mrs. Gregory (whom you knew in Hopshire as Mrs. Deane) has been with
+the Home Secretary this afternoon. Your chivalrous reticence at the
+trial...."
+
+"Oh," I interrupted, "I don't care to live any longer! Now that I have
+met you once more, and that you have forgiven me and think well of me in
+spite of everything, I am ready to die. There has never been anybody but
+you in the world for _me_--never a ghost of a woman, never even a friend
+since my mother died and yours. Between that time and the night I first
+saw you at Lady Cray's concert, I can scarcely be said to have lived at
+all. I fed on scraps of remembrance. You see I have no talent for making
+new friends, but oh, such a genius for fidelity to old ones! I was
+waiting for Mimsey to come back again, I suppose, the one survivor to me
+of that sweet time, and when she came at last I was too stupid to
+recognize her. She suddenly blazed and dazzled into my poor life like a
+meteor, and filled it with a maddening love and pain. I don't know which
+of the two has been the sweetest; both have been my life. You cannot
+realize what it has been. Trust me, I have lived my fill. I am ready and
+willing to die. It is the only perfect consummation I can think of.
+Nothing can ever equal this moment--nothing on earth or in heaven. And
+if I were free to-morrow, life would not be worth having without _you_.
+I would not take it as a gift."
+
+She sat down by me on the grass with her hands clasped across her knees,
+close to the unconscious shadows of our kith and kin, within hearing of
+their happy talk and laughter.
+
+Suddenly we both heard Mimsey say to Gogo--
+
+"O, ils sont joliment bien ensemble, le Prince Charmant et la fée
+Tarapatapoum!"
+
+We looked at each other and actually laughed aloud. The duchess said--
+
+"Was there ever, since the world began, such a _muse en scène_, and for
+such a meeting, Mr. Ibbetson? Think of it! Conceive it! _I_ arranged it
+all. I chose a day when they were all together. As they would say in
+America, _I_ am the boss of this particular dream."
+
+And she laughed again, through her tears, that enchanting ripple of a
+laugh that closed her eyes and made her so irresistible.
+
+"Was there ever," said I--"ever since the world began, such ecstasy as I
+feel now? After this what can there be for me but death--well earned and
+well paid for? Welcome and lovely death!"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"You have not yet thought, Mr. Ibbetson--you have not realized what life
+may have in store for you if--if all you have said about your affection
+for me is true. Oh, it is too terrible for me to think of, I know, that
+you, scarcely more than a boy, should have to spend the rest of your
+life in miserable confinement and unprofitable monotonous toil. But
+there is _another_ side to that picture.
+
+"Now listen to your old friend's story--poor little Mimsey's confession.
+I will make it as short as I can.
+
+"Do you remember when you first saw me, a sickly, plain, sad little
+girl, at the avenue gate, twenty years ago?
+
+"Le Père François was killing a fowl--cutting its throat with a
+clasp-knife--and the poor thing struggled frantically in his grasp as
+its blood flowed into the gutter. A group of boys were looking on in
+great glee, and all the while Père François was gossiping with M. le
+Curé, who didn't seem to mind in the least. I was fainting with pity and
+horror. Suddenly you came out of the school opposite with Alfred and
+Charlie Plunket, and saw it all, and in a fit of noble rage you called
+Père François a 'sacred pig of assassin'--which, as you know, is very
+rude in French--and struck him as near his face as you could reach.
+
+"Have you forgotten that? Ah, _I_ haven't! It was not an effectual deed,
+perhaps, and certainly came too late to save the fowl. Besides, Père
+François struck you back again, and left some of the fowl's blood on
+your cheek. It was a baptism! You became on the spot my hero--my angel
+of light. Look at Gogo over there. Is he beautiful enough? That was
+_you_, Mr. Ibbetson.
+
+"M. le Curé said something about 'ces _Anglais_' who go mad if a man
+whips his horse, and yet pay people to box each other to death. Don't
+you really remember? Oh, the recollection to _me!_
+
+"And that little language we invented and used to talk so fluently!
+Don't you _rappel_ it to yourself? 'Ne le _récollectes_ tu pas?' as we
+would have said in those days, for it used to be _thee_ and _thou_
+with us then.
+
+"Well, at all events, you must remember how for five happy years we were
+so often together; how you drew for me, read to me, played with me; took
+my part in everything, right or wrong; carried me pickaback when I was
+tired. Your drawings--I have them all. And oh! you were so funny
+sometimes! How you used to make mamma laugh, and M. le Major! Just look
+at Gogo again. Have you forgotten what he is doing now? I haven't.... He
+has just changed the _musée des familles_ for the _Penny Magazine_, and
+is explaining Hogarth's pictures of the 'Idle and Industrious
+Apprentices' to Mimsey, and they are both agreed that the idle one is
+much the less objectionable of the two!
+
+"Mimsey looks passive enough, with her thumb in her mouth, doesn't she?
+Her little heart is so full of gratitude and love for Gogo that she
+can't speak. She can only suck her thumb. Poor, sick, ungainly child!
+She would like to be Gogo's slave--she would die for Gogo. And her
+mother adores Gogo too; she is almost jealous of dear Madame Pasquier
+for having so sweet a son. In just one minute from now, when she has
+cut that last curl-paper, poor long-dead mamma will call Gogo to her and
+give him a good 'Irish hug,' and make him happy for a week. Wait a
+minute and see. _There!_ What did I tell you?
+
+"Well, all that came to an end. Madame Pasquier went away and never came
+back, and so did Gogo. Monsieur and Madame Pasquier were dead, and dear
+mamma died in a week from the cholera. Poor heartbroken Mimsey was taken
+away to St. Petersburg, Warsaw, Leipsic, Venice, all over Europe, by her
+father, as heart-broken as herself.
+
+"It was her wish and her father's that she should become a pianist by
+profession, and she studied hard for many years in almost every capital,
+and under almost every master in Europe, and she gave promise
+of success.
+
+"And so, wandering from one place to another, she became a young
+woman--a greatly petted and spoiled and made-much-of young woman, Mr.
+Ibbetson, although she says it who shouldn't; and had many suitors of
+all kinds and countries.
+
+"But the heroic and angelic Gogo, with his lovely straight nose, and his
+hair _aux enfants d'Edouard_, and his dear little white silk chimney-pot
+hat and Eton jacket, was always enshrined in her memory, in her inmost
+heart, as the incarnation of all that was beautiful and brave and good.
+But alas! what had become of this Gogo in the mean time? Ah, he was
+never even heard of--he was dead!
+
+"Well, this long-legged, tender-hearted, grown-up young Mimsey of
+nineteen was attracted by a very witty and accomplished English attaché
+at Vienna--a Mr. Harcourt, who seemed deeply in love with her, and
+wished her to be his wife.
+
+"He was not rich, but Dr. Seraskier liked and trusted him so much that
+he dispossessed himself of almost everything he had to enable this young
+couple to marry--and they did. And truth compels me to admit that for a
+year they were very happy and contented with fate and each other.
+
+"Then a great misfortune befell them both. In a most unexpected manner,
+through four or five consecutive deaths in Mr. Harcourt's family, he
+became, first, Lord Harcourt, and then the Duke of Towers. And since
+then, Mr. Ibbetson, I have not had an hour's peace or happiness.
+
+"In the first place a son was born to me--a cripple, poor dear! and
+deformed from his birth; and as he grew older it soon became evident
+that he was also born without a mind.
+
+"Then my unfortunate husband changed completely; he drank and gambled
+and worse, till we came to live together as strangers, and only spoke to
+each other in public and before the world...."
+
+"Ah," I said, "you were still a great lady--an English duchess!"
+
+I could not endure the thought of that happy twelvemonth with that
+bestial duke! I, sober, chaste, and clean--of all but blood, alas!--and
+a condemned convict!
+
+Oh, Mr. Ibbetson, you must make no mistake about _me_! I was never
+intended by nature for a duchess--especially an English one. Not but
+what, if dukes and duchesses are necessary, the English are the
+best--and, of course, by dukes and duchesses I mean all that
+upper-ten-thousand in England which calls itself 'society'--as if there
+were no other worth speaking of. Some of them are almost angelic, but
+they are not for outsiders like me. Perpetual hunting and shooting and
+fishing and horseracing--eating, drinking, and killing, and making
+love--eternal court gossip and tittle-tattle--the Prince--the
+Queen--whom and what the Queen likes, whom and what she doesn't!--tame
+English party politics--the Church--a Church that doesn't know its own
+mind, in spite of its deans, bishops, archbishops, and their wives and
+daughters--and all their silly, solemn sense of social rank and dignity!
+Endless small-talk, dinners, and drums, and no society from year's end
+to year's end but each other! Ah, one must be caught young, and put in
+harness early, to lead such an existence as that and be content! And I
+had met and known _such_ men and women with my father! They _were_
+something to know!
+
+There is another society in London and elsewhere--a freemasonry of
+intellect and culture and hard work--_la haute bohême du talent_--men
+and women whose names are or ought to be household words all over the
+world; many of them are good friends of mine, both here and abroad; and
+that society, which was good enough for my father and mother, is quite
+good enough for me.
+
+I am a republican, Mr. Ibbetson--a cosmopolite--a born Bohemian!
+
+_"'Mon grand père était rossignol; Ma grand mère était hirondelle!"_
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Look at my dear people there--look at your dear people! What waifs and
+strays, until their ship comes home, which we know it never will! Our
+fathers forever racking their five wits in the pursuit of an idea! Our
+mothers forever racking theirs to save money and make both ends
+meet!... Why, Mr. Ibbetson, you are nearer to the _rossignol_ than I am.
+Do you remember your father's voice? Shall I ever forget it! He sang to
+me only last night, and in the midst of my harrowing anxiety about you I
+was beguiled into listening outside the window. He sang Rossini's
+_'Cujus Animam.'_ He _was_ the nightingale; that was his vocation, if he
+could but have known it. And you are my brother Bohemian; that is
+_yours!_ ... Ah, _my_ vocation! It was to be the wife of some busy
+brain-worker--man of science--conspirator--writer--artist--architect,
+if you like; to fence him round and shield him from all the little
+worries and troubles and petty vexations of life. I am a woman of
+business _par excellence_--a manager, and all that. He would have had a
+warm, well-ordered little nest to come home to after hunting his idea!
+
+"Well, I thought myself the most unhappy woman alive, and wrapped myself
+up in my affection for my much-afflicted little son; and as I held him
+to my breast, and vainly tried to warm and mesmerize him into feeling
+and intelligence, Gogo came back into my heart, and I was forever
+thinking, 'Oh, if I had a son like Gogo what a happy woman I should be!'
+and pitied Madame Pasquier for dying and leaving him so soon, for I had
+just begun to dream true, and had seen Gogo and his sweet mother
+once again.
+
+"And then one night--one never-to-be-forgotten night--I went to Lady
+Gray's concert, and saw you standing in a corner by yourself; and I
+thought, with a leap of my heart, 'Why, that must be Gogo, grown dark,
+and with a beard and mustache like a Frenchman!' But alas, I found that
+you were only a Mr. Ibbetson, Lady Cray's architect, whom she had asked
+to her house because he was 'quite the handsomest young man she had
+ever seen!'
+
+"You needn't laugh. You looked very nice, I assure you!
+
+"Well, Mr. Ibbetson, although you were not Gogo, you became suddenly so
+interesting to me that I never forgot you--you were never quite out of
+my mind. I wanted to counsel and advise you, and take you by the hand,
+and be an elder sister to you, for I felt myself already older than you
+in the world and its ways. I wanted to be twenty years older still, and
+to have you for my son. I don't know _what_ I wanted! You seemed so
+lonely, and fresh, and unspotted from the world, among all those smart
+worldlings, and yet so big and strong and square and invincible--oh, so
+strong! And then you looked at me with such sincere and sweet and
+chivalrous admiration and sympathy--there, I cannot speak of it--and
+then you were _so_ like what Gogo might have become! Oh, you made as
+warm and devoted a friend of me at first sight as any one might desire!
+
+"And at the same time you made me feel so self-conscious and shy that I
+dared not ask to be introduced to you--I, who scarcely know what
+shyness is.
+
+"Dear Giulia Grisi sang '_Sedut' al Pie d' un' Salice,' and that tune
+has always been associated in my mind with your tongue ever since, and
+always will be. Your dear mother used to play it on the harp. Do
+you remember?
+
+"Then came that extraordinary dream, which you remember as well as I do:
+_wasn't_ it a wonder? You see, my dear father had learned a strange
+secret of the brain--how in sleep to recall past things and people and
+places as they had once been seen or known by him--even unremembered
+things. He called it 'dreaming true,' and by long practice, he told me,
+he had brought the art of doing this to perfection. It was the one
+consolation of his troubled life to go over and over again in sleep all
+his happy youth and childhood, and the few short years he had spent with
+his beloved young wife. And before he died, when he saw I had become so
+unhappy that life seemed to have no longer any possible hope of pleasure
+for me, he taught me his very simple secret.
+
+"Thus have I revisited in sleep every place I have ever lived in, and
+especially this, the beloved spot where I first as a little girl
+knew _you_!"
+
+That night when we met again in our common dream I was looking at the
+boys from Saindou's school going to their _première communion_, and
+thinking very much of you, as I had seen you, when awake, a few hours
+before, looking out of the window at the 'Tête Noire;' when you suddenly
+appeared in great seeming trouble and walking like a tipsy man; and my
+vision was disturbed by the shadow of a prison--alas! alas!--and two
+little jailers jingling their keys and trying to hem you in.
+
+My emotion at seeing you again so soon was so great that I nearly woke.
+But I rescued you from your imaginary terrors and held you by the hand.
+You remember all the rest.
+
+I could not understand why you should be in my dream, as I had almost
+always dreamed true--that is, about things that _had_ been in my
+life--not about things that _might_ be; nor could I account for the
+solidity of your hand, nor understand why you didn't fade away when I
+took it, and blur the dream. It was a most perplexing mystery that
+troubled many hours of both my waking and sleeping life. Then came that
+meeting with you at Cray, and part of the mystery was accounted for, for
+you were my old friend Gogo, after all. But it is still a mystery, an
+awful mystery, that two people should meet as we are meeting now in one
+and the same dream--should dovetail so accurately into each other's
+brains. What a link between us two, Mr. Ibbetson, already linked by
+such memories!
+
+After meeting you at Cray I felt that I must never meet you again,
+either waking or dreaming. The discovery that you were Gogo, after all,
+combined with the preoccupation which as a mere stranger you had already
+caused me for so long, created such a disturbance in my spirit
+that--that--there, you must try and imagine it for yourself.
+
+Even before that revelation at Cray I had often known you were here in
+my dream, and I had carefully avoided you ... though little dreaming
+you were here in your own dream too! Often from that little
+dormer-window up there I have seen you wandering about the park and
+avenue in seeming search of _me_, and wondered why and how you came. You
+drove me into attics and servants' bedrooms to conceal myself from you.
+It was quite a game of hide-and-seek--_cache-cache_, as we used to
+call it.
+
+But after our meeting at Cray I felt there must be no more
+_cache-cache_; I avoided coming here at all; you drove me away
+altogether.
+
+Now try to imagine what I felt when the news of your terrible quarrel
+with Mr. Ibbetson burst upon the world. I was beside myself! I came here
+night after night; I looked for you everywhere--in the park, in the Bois
+de Boulogne, at the Mare d'Auteuil, at St. Cloud--in every place I could
+think of! And now here you are at last--at last!
+
+Hush! Don't speak yet! I have soon done!
+
+Six months ago I lost my poor little son, and, much as I loved him, I
+cannot wish him back again. In a fortnight I shall be legally separated
+from my wretched husband--I shall be quite alone in the world! And then,
+Mr. Ibbetson--oh, _then_, dearest friend that child or woman ever
+had--every hour that I can steal from my waking existence shall
+henceforward be devoted to you as long as both of us live, and sleep the
+same hours out of the twenty-four. My one object and endeavor shall be
+to make up for the wreck of your sweet and valuable young life. 'Stone
+walls shall not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage!' [And here she
+laughed and cried together, so that her eyes, closing up, squeezed out
+her tears, and I thought, "Oh, that I might drink them!"]
+
+And now I will leave you. I am a weak and loving woman, and must not
+stay by your side till I can do so without too much self-reproach.
+
+And indeed I feel I shall soon fall awake from sheer exhaustion of joy.
+Oh, selfish and jealous wretch that I am, to talk of joy!
+
+"I cannot help rejoicing that no other woman can be to you what I hope
+to be. No other woman can ever come _near_ you! I am your tyrant and
+your slave--your calamity has made you mine forever; but all my
+life--all--all--shall be spent in trying to make you forget yours, and I
+think I shall succeed."
+
+"Oh, don't make such dreadful haste!" I exclaimed. "Am _I_ dreaming
+true? What is to prove all this to me when I wake? Either I am the most
+abject and wretched of men, or life will never have another unhappy
+moment. How am I to _know_?'
+
+"Listen. Do you remember 'Parva sed Apta, le petit pavilion,' as you
+used to call it? That is still my home when I am here. It shall be
+yours, if you like, when the time comes. You will find much to interest
+you there. Well, to-morrow early, in your cell, you will receive from me
+an envelope with a slip of paper in it, containing some violets, and the
+words 'Parva sed Apta--à bientôt' written in violet ink. Will that
+convince you?"
+
+"Oh yes, yes!"
+
+"Well, then, give me your hands, dearest and best--both hands! I shall
+soon be here again, by this apple-tree; I shall count the hours.
+Good-bye!" and she was gone, and I woke.
+
+I woke to the gaslit darkness of my cell. It was just before dawn. One
+of the warders asked me civilly if I wanted anything, and gave me a
+drink of water.
+
+I thanked him quietly, and recalled what had just happened to me, with a
+wonder, an ecstasy, for which I can find no words.
+
+No, it had _not_ been a _dream_--of that I felt quite sure--not in any
+one single respect; there had been nothing of the dream about it except
+its transcendent, ineffable enchantment.
+
+Every inflexion of that beloved voice, with its scarcely perceptible
+foreign accent that I had never noticed before; every animated gesture,
+with its subtle reminiscence of both her father and her mother; her
+black dress trimmed with gray; her black and gray hat; the scent of
+sandal-wood about her--all were more distinctly and vividly impressed
+upon me than if she had just been actually, and in the flesh, at my
+bedside. Her tones still rang in my ears. My eyes were full of her: now
+her profile, so pure and chiselled; now her full face, with her gray
+eyes (sometimes tender and grave and wet with tears, sometimes half
+closed in laughter) fixed on mine; her lithe sweet body curved forward,
+as she sat and clasped her knees; her arched and slender smooth straight
+feet so delicately shod, that seemed now and then to beat time to
+her story....
+
+And then that strange sense of the transfusion of life at the touching
+of the hands! Oh, it was _no dream_! Though what it was I
+cannot tell....
+
+I turned on my side, happy beyond expression, and fell asleep again--a
+dreamless sleep that lasted till I was woke and told to dress.
+
+[Illustration: "MY EYES WERE FULL OF HER."]
+
+Some breakfast was brought to me, and _with it an envelope, open, which
+contained some violets, and a slip of paper, scented with sandal-wood,
+on which were written, in violet ink, the words--
+
+"Parva sed Apla--à bientôt!
+Tarapatapoum."_
+
+I will pass over the time that elapsed between my sentence and its
+commutation; the ministrations and exhortations of the good chaplain;
+the kind and touching farewells of Mr. and Mrs. Lintot, who had also
+believed that I was Ibbetson's son (I undeceived them); the visit of my
+old friend Mrs. Deane ... and her strange passion of gratitude and
+admiration.
+
+I have no doubt it would all be interesting enough, if properly
+remembered and ably told. But it was all too much like a
+dream--anybody's dream--not one of _mine_--all too slight and flimsy to
+have left an abiding remembrance, or to matter much.
+
+In due time I was removed to the jail at----, and bade farewell to the
+world, and adapted myself to the conditions of my new outer life with a
+good grace and with a very light heart.
+
+The prison routine, leaving the brain so free and unoccupied; the
+healthy labor, the pure air, the plain, wholesome food were delightful
+to me--a much-needed daily mental rest after the tumultuous emotions of
+each night.
+
+For I was soon back again in Passy, where I spent every hour of my
+sleep, you may be sure, never very far from the old apple-tree, which
+went through all its changes, from bare bough to tender shoots and
+blossoms, from blossom to ripe fruit, from fruit to yellow falling leaf,
+and then to bare boughs again, and all in a few peaceful nights, which
+were my days. I flatter myself by this time that I know the habits of a
+French apple-tree, and its caterpillars!
+
+And all the dear people I loved, and of whom I could never tire, were
+about--all but one. _The_ One!
+
+At last she arrived. The garden door was pushed, the bell rang, and she
+came across the lawn, radiant and tall and swift, and opened wide her
+arms. And there, with our little world around us--all that we had ever
+loved and cared for, but quite unseen and unheard by them--for the first
+time in my life since my mother and Madame Seraskier had died I held a
+woman in my arms, and she pressed her lips to mine.
+
+[Illustration: "AT LAST SHE ARRIVED."]
+
+Round and round the lawn we walked and talked, as we had often done
+fifteen, sixteen, twenty years ago. There were many things to say. "The
+Charming Prince" and the "Fairy Tarapatapoum" were "prettily well
+together"--at last!
+
+The time sped quickly--far too quickly. I said--
+
+"You told me I should see your house--'Parva sed Apta'--that I should
+find much to interest me there." ...
+
+She blushed a little and smiled, and said--
+
+"You mustn't expect _too_ much," and we soon found ourselves walking
+thither up the avenue. Thus we had often walked as children, and once--a
+memorable once--besides.
+
+There stood the little white house with its golden legend, as I had seen
+it a thousand times when a boy--a hundred since.
+
+How sweet and small it looked in the mellow sunshine! We mounted the
+stone _perron_, and opened the door and entered. My heart beat
+violently.
+
+Everything was as it had always been, as far as I could see. Dr.
+Seraskier sat in a chair by the window reading Schiller, and took no
+notice of us. His hair moved in the gentle breeze. Overhead we heard the
+rooms being swept and the beds made.
+
+I followed her into a little lumber-room, where I did not remember to
+have been before; it was full of odds and ends.
+
+"Why have you brought me here?" I asked.
+
+She laughed and said--
+
+"Open the door in the wall opposite."
+
+There was no door, and I said so.
+
+Then she took my hand, and lo! there _was_ a door! And she pushed, and
+we entered another suite of apartments that never could have been there
+before; there had never been room for them--nor ever could have been--in
+all Passy!
+
+[Illustration: "'AND NEUHA LED HER TORQUIL BY THE HAND.'"]
+
+"Come," she said, laughing and blushing at once; for she seemed nervous
+and excited and shy--do you remember--
+
+      'And Neuha led her Torquil by the hand,
+       And waved along the vault her flaming brand!'
+
+--do you remember your little drawing out of _The Island_, in the green
+morocco Byron? Here it is, in the top drawer of this beautiful cabinet.
+Here are all the drawings you ever did for me--plain and colored--with
+dates, explanations, etc., all written by myself--_l'album de la fee
+Tarapatapoum_. They are only duplicates. I have the real ones at my
+house in Hampshire.
+
+The cabinet also is a duplicate;--isn't it a beauty?--it's from the
+Czar's Winter Palace. Everything here is a duplicate, more or less. See,
+this is a little dining-room;--did you ever see anything so perfect?--it
+is the famous _salle à manger_ of Princesse de Chevagné. I never use it,
+except now and then to eat a slice of English household bread with
+French butter and 'cassonade.' Little Mimsey, out there, does so
+sometimes, when Gogo brings her one, and it makes big Mimsey's mouth
+water to see her, so she has to go and do likewise. Would you like
+a slice?
+
+You see the cloth is spread, _deux couverts_. There is a bottle of
+famous champagne from Mr. De Rothschild's; there's plenty more where
+that came from. The flowers are from Chatsworth, and this is a lobster
+salad for _you_. Papa was great at lobster salads and taught me. I mixed
+it myself a fortnight ago, and, as you see, it is as fresh and sweet as
+if I had only just made it, and the flowers haven't faded a bit.
+
+Here are cigarettes and pipes and cigars. I hope they are good. I don't
+smoke myself.
+
+Isn't all the furniture rare and beautiful? I have robbed every palace
+in Europe of its very best, and yet the owners are not a penny the
+worse. You should see up-stairs.
+
+Look at those pictures--the very pick of Raphael and Titian and
+Velasquez. Look at that piano--I have heard Liszt play upon it over and
+over again, in Leipsic!
+
+Here is my library. Every book I ever read is there, and every binding
+I ever admired. I don't often read them, but I dust them carefully. I've
+arranged that dust shall fall on them in the usual way to make it real,
+and remind one of the outer life one is so glad to leave. All has to be
+taken very seriously here, and one must put one's self to a little
+trouble. See, here is my father's microscope, and under it a small
+spider caught on the premises by myself. It is still alive. It seems
+cruel, doesn't it? but it only exists in our brains.
+
+Look at the dress I've got on--feel it; how every detail is worked out.
+And you have unconsciously done the same: that's the suit you wore that
+morning at Cray under the ash-tree--the nicest suit I ever saw. Here is
+a spot of ink on your sleeve as real as can be (bravo!). And this button
+is coming off--quite right; I will sew it on with a dream needle, and
+dream thread, and a dream thimble!
+
+This little door leads to every picture-gallery in Europe. It took me a
+long time to build and arrange them all by myself--quite a week of
+nights. It is very pleasant to walk there with a good catalogue, and
+make it rain cats and dogs outside.
+
+Through this curtain is an opera box--the most comfortable one I've
+ever been in; it does for theatres as well, and oratorios and concerts
+and scientific lectures. You shall see from it every performance I've
+ever been at, in half a dozen languages; you shall hold my hand and
+understand them all. Every singer that I ever heard, you shall hear.
+Dear Giulia Grisi shall sing the 'Willow Song' again and again, and you
+shall hear the applause. Ah, what applause!
+
+Come into this little room--my favorite; out of _this_ window and down
+these steps we can walk or drive to any place you or I have ever been
+to, and other places besides. Nothing is far, and we have only to go
+hand in hand. I don't know yet where my stables and coach-houses are;
+you must help me to find out. But so far I have never lacked a carriage
+at the bottom of those steps when I wanted to drive, nor a steam-launch,
+nor a gondola, nor a lovely place to go to.
+
+Out of _this_ window, from this divan, we can sit and gaze on whatever
+we like. What shall it be? Just now, you perceive, there is a wild and
+turbulent sea, with not a ship in sight. Do you hear the waves tumbling
+and splashing, and see the albatross? I had been reading Keats's 'Ode to
+the Nightingale,' and was so fascinated by the idea of a lattice opening
+on the foam
+
+     '_Of perilous seas by faery lands forlorn_'
+
+that I thought it would be nice to have a lattice like that myself. I
+tried to evolve that sea from my inner consciousness, you know, or
+rather from seas that I have sailed over. Do you like it? It was done a
+fortnight ago, and the waves have been tumbling about ever since. How
+they roar! and hark at the wind! I couldn't manage the 'faery lands.' It
+wants one lattice for the sea, and one for the land, I'm afraid. You
+must help me. Mean while, what would you like there tonight--the
+Yosemite Valley? the Nevski Prospect in the winter, with the sledges?
+the Rialto? the Bay of Naples after sunset, with Vesuvius in eruption?...
+
+--"Oh Mary--Mimsey--what do I care for Vesuvius, and sunsets, and the
+Bay of Naples ... _just now_? ... Vesuvius is in my heart!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thus began for us both a period of twenty-five years, during which we
+passed eight or nine hours out of the twenty-four in each other's
+company--except on a few rare occasions, when illness or some other
+cause prevented one of us from sleeping at the proper time.
+
+Mary! Mary!
+
+I idolized her while she lived; I idolize her memory.
+
+For her sake all women are sacred to me, even the lowest and most
+depraved and God-forsaken. They always found a helping friend in _her_.
+
+How can I pay a fitting tribute to one so near to me--nearer than any
+woman can ever have been to any man?
+
+I know her mind as I know my own! No two human souls can ever have
+interpenetrated each other as ours have done, or we should have heard of
+it. Every thought she ever had from her childhood to her death has been
+revealed--every thought of mine! Living as we did, it was inevitable.
+The touch of a finger was enough to establish the strange circuit, and
+wake a common consciousness of past and present, either hers or mine.
+
+And oh, how thankful am I that some lucky chance has preserved me,
+murderer and convict as I am, from anything she would have found it
+impossible to condone!
+
+I try not to think that shyness and poverty, ungainliness and social
+imbecility combined, have had as much to do as self-restraint and
+self-respect in keeping me out of so many pitfalls that have been fatal
+to so many men better and more gifted than myself.
+
+I try to think that her extraordinary affection, the chance result of a
+persistent impression received in childhood, has followed me through
+life without my knowing it, and in some occult, mysterious way has kept
+me from thoughts and deeds that would have rendered me unworthy, even in
+her too indulgent eyes.
+
+Who knows but that her sweet mother's farewell kiss and blessing, and
+the tender tears she shed over me when I bade her good-bye at the avenue
+gate so many years ago, may have had an antiseptic charm? Mary! I have
+followed her from her sickly, suffering childhood to her girlhood--from
+her half-ripe, gracefully lanky girlhood to the day of her retirement
+from the world of which she was so great an ornament. From girl to woman
+it seems like a triumphal procession through all the courts of
+Europe--scenes the like of which I have never even dreamed--flattery and
+strife to have turned the head of any princess! And she was the simple
+daughter of a working scientist and physician--the granddaughter of
+a fiddler.
+
+Yet even Austrian court etiquette was waived in favor of the child of
+plain Dr. Seraskier.
+
+What men have I seen at her feet--how splendid, handsome, gallant,
+brilliant, chivalrous, lordly, and gay! And to all, from her, the same
+happy geniality--the same kindly, laughing, frolicsome, innocent gayety,
+with never a thought of self.
+
+M. le Major was right--"elle avait toutes les intelligences de la tête
+et du coeur." And old and young, the best and the worst, seemed to love
+and respect her alike--and women as well as men--for her perfect
+sincerity, her sweet reasonableness.
+
+And all this time I was plodding at my dull drawing-board in
+Pentonville, carrying out another's designs for a stable or a pauper's
+cottage, and not even achieving that poor task particularly well!
+
+It would have driven me mad with humiliation and jealousy to see this
+past life of hers, but we saw it all hand in hand together--the magical
+circuit was established! And I knew, as I saw, how it all affected her,
+and marvelled at her simplicity in thinking all this pomp and splendor
+of so little consequence.
+
+And I trembled to find that what space in her heart was not filled by
+the remembrance of her ever-beloved mother and the image of her father
+(one of the noblest and best of men) enshrined the ridiculous figure of
+a small boy in a white silk hat and an Eton jacket. And that small
+boy was I!
+
+Then came a dreadful twelvemonth that I was fain to leave a blank--the
+twelvemonth during which her girlish fancy for her husband lasted--and
+then her life was mine again forever!
+
+And _my_ life!
+
+The life of a convict is not, as a rule, a happy one; his bed is not
+generally thought a bed of roses.
+
+Mine was!
+
+If I had been the most miserable leper that ever crawled to his wattled
+hut in Molokai, I should also have been the happiest of men, could sleep
+but have found me there, and could I but sleeping have been the friend
+of sleeping Mary Seraskier. She would have loved me all the more!
+
+She has filled my long life of bondage with such felicity as no monarch
+has ever dreamed, and has found her own felicity in doing so. That poor,
+plodding existence I led before my great misadventure, and have tried to
+describe--she has witnessed almost every hour of it with passionate
+interest and sympathy, as we went hand in hand together through each
+other's past. She would at any time have been only too glad to share it,
+leaving her own.
+
+I dreaded the effect of such a sordid revelation upon one who had lived
+so brilliantly and at such an altitude. I need have had no fear! Just as
+she thought me an "angelic hero" at eight years old, she remained
+persuaded all through her life that I was an Apollo--a misunderstood
+genius--a martyr!
+
+I am sick with shame when I think of it. But I am not the first unworthy
+mortal on whom blind, undiscriminating love has chosen to lavish its
+most priceless treasures. Tarapatapoum is not the only fairy who has
+idealized a hulking clown with an ass's head into a Prince Charming;
+the spectacle, alas! is not infrequent. But at least I have been humbly
+thankful for the undeserved blessing, and known its value. And,
+moreover, I think I may lay claim to one talent: that of also knowing by
+intuition when and where and how to love--in a moment--in a
+flash--and forever!
+
+Twenty-five years!
+
+It seems like a thousand, so much have we seen and felt and done in that
+busy enchanted quarter of a century. And yet how quickly the time
+has sped!
+
+And now I must endeavor to give some account of our wonderful inner
+life--_à deux_--a delicate and difficult task.
+
+There is both an impertinence and a lack of taste in any man's laying
+bare to the public eye--to any eye--the bliss that has come to him
+through the love of a devoted woman, with whose life his own has
+been bound up.
+
+The most sympathetic reader is apt to be repelled by such a
+revelation--to be sceptical of the beauties and virtues and mental gifts
+of one he has never seen; at all events, to feel that they are no
+concern of his, and ought to be the subject of a sacred reticence on the
+part of her too fortunate lover or husband.
+
+The lack of such reticence has marred the interest of many an
+autobiography--of many a novel, even; and in private life, who does not
+know by painful experience how embarrassing to the listener such tender
+confidences can sometimes be? I will try my best not to transgress in
+this particular. If I fail (I may have failed already), I can only plead
+that the circumstances are quite exceptional and not to be matched; and
+that allowances must be made for the deep gratitude I owe and feel over
+and above even my passionate admiration and love.
+
+For the next three years of my life has nothing to show but the
+alternation of such honeymooning as never was before with a dull but
+contented prison life, not one hour of which is worth recording, or even
+remembering, except as a foil to its alternative.
+
+It had but one hour for me, the bed hour, and fortunately that was an
+early one.
+
+Healthily tired in body, blissfully expectant in mind, I would lie on my
+back, with my hands duly crossed under my head, and sleep would soon
+steal over me like balm; and before I had forgotten who and what and
+where I really was, I would reach the goal on which my will was intent,
+and waking up, find my body in another place, in another garb, on a
+couch by an enchanted window, still with my arms crossed behind my
+head--in the sacramental attitude.
+
+Then would I stretch my limbs and slip myself free of my outer life, as
+a new-born butterfly from the durance of its self-spun cocoon, with an
+unutterable sense of youth and strength and freshness and felicity; and
+opening my eyes I would see on the adjacent couch the form of Mary, also
+supine, but motionless and inanimate as a statue. Nothing could wake her
+to life till the time came: her hours were somewhat later, and she was
+still in the toils of the outer life I had just left behind me.
+
+And these toils, in her case, were more complicated than in mine.
+Although she had given up the world, she had many friends and an immense
+correspondence. And then, being a woman endowed with boundless health
+and energy, splendid buoyancy of animal spirits, and a great capacity
+for business, she had made for herself many cares and occupations.
+
+She was the virtual mistress of a home for fallen women, a reformatory
+for juvenile thieves, and a children's convalescent hospital--to all of
+which she gave her immediate personal superintendence, and almost every
+penny she had. She had let her house in Hampshire, and lived with a
+couple of female servants in a small furnished house on Campden Hill.
+She did without a carriage, and went about in cabs and omnibuses,
+dressed like a daily governess, though nobody could appear more regally
+magnificent than she did when we were together.
+
+She still kept her name and title, as a potent weapon of influence on
+behalf of her charities, and wielded it mercilessly in her constant raid
+on the purse of the benevolent Philistine, who is fond of great people.
+
+All of which gave rise to much comment that did not affect her
+equanimity in the least.
+
+She also attended lectures, committees, boards, and councils; opened
+bazaars and soup kitchens and coffee taverns, etc. The list of her
+self-imposed tasks was endless. Thus her outer life was filled to
+overflowing, and, unlike mine, every hour of it was worth record--as I
+well know, who have witnessed it all. But this is not the place in which
+to write the outer life of the Duchess of Towers; another hand has done
+that, as everybody knows.
+
+Every page henceforward must be sacred to Mary Seraskier, the "fée
+Tarapatapoum" of "Magna sed Apta" (for so we had called the new home
+and palace of art she had added on to "Parva sed Apta," the home of her
+childhood).
+
+To return thither, where we left her lying unconscious. Soon the color
+would come back to her cheeks, the breath to her nostrils, the pulse to
+her heart, and she would wake to her Eden, as she called it--our common
+inner life--that we might spend it in each other's company for the next
+eight hours.
+
+Pending this happy moment, I would make coffee (such coffee!), and smoke
+a cigarette or two; and to fully appreciate the bliss of _that_ one must
+be an habitual smoker who lives his real life in an English jail.
+
+When she awoke from her sixteen hours' busy trance in the outer world,
+such a choice of pleasures lay before us as no other mortal has ever
+known. She had been all her life a great traveller, and had dwelt in
+many lands and cities, and seen more of life and the world and nature
+than most people. I had but to take her hand, and one of us had but to
+wish, and, lo! wherever either of us had been, whatever either of us had
+seen or heard or felt, or even eaten or drunk, there it was all over
+again to choose from, with the other to share in it--such a hypnotism of
+ourselves and each other as was never dreamed of before.
+
+Everything was as life-like, as real to us both, as it had been to
+either at the actual time of its occurrence, with an added freshness and
+charm that never belonged to mortal existence. It was no dream; it was a
+second life, a better land.
+
+We had, however, to stay within certain bounds, and beware of
+transgressing certain laws that we discovered for ourselves, but could
+not quite account for. For instance, it was fatal to attempt exploits
+that were outside of our real experience; to fly, or to jump from a
+height, or do any of these non-natural things that make the charm and
+wonder of ordinary dreams. If we did so our true dream was blurred, and
+became as an ordinary dream--vague, futile, unreal, and untrue--the
+baseless fabric of a vision. Nor must we alter ourselves in any way;
+even to the shape of a finger-nail, we must remain ourselves; although
+we kept ourselves at our very best, and could choose what age we should
+be. We chose from twenty-six to twenty-eight, and stuck to it.
+
+Yet there were many things, quite as impossible in real life, that we
+could do with impunity--most delightful things!
+
+For instance, after the waking cup of coffee, it was certainly
+delightful to spend a couple of hours in the Yosemite Valley, leisurely
+strolling about and gazing at the giant pines--a never-palling source of
+delight to both of us--breathing the fragrant fresh air, looking at our
+fellow-tourists and listening to their talk, with the agreeable
+consciousness that, solid and substantial as we were to each other, we
+were quite inaudible, invisible, and intangible to them. Often we would
+dispense with the tourists, and have the Yosemite Valley all to
+ourselves. (Always there, and in whatever place she had visited with her
+husband, we would dispense with the figure of her former self and him, a
+sight I could not have borne.)
+
+When we had strolled and gazed our fill, it was delightful again, just
+by a slight effort of her will and a few moments' closing of our eyes,
+to find ourselves driving along the Via Cornice to an exquisite garden
+concert in Dresden, or being rowed in a gondola to a Saturday Pop at St.
+James's Hall. And thence, jumping into a hansom, we would be whisked
+through Piccadilly and the park to the Arc de Triomphe home to "Magna
+sed Apta," Rue de la Pompe, Passy (a charming drive, and not a bit too
+long), just in time for dinner.
+
+A very delicious little dinner, judiciously ordered out of _her_
+remembrance, not _mine_ (and served in the most exquisite little
+dining-room in all Paris--the Princesse de Chevagné's): "huîtres
+d'Ostende," let us say, and "soupe à la bonne femme," with a "perdrix
+aux choux" to follow, and pancakes, and "fromage de Brie;" and to drink,
+a bottle of "Romané Conti;" without even the bother of waiters to change
+the dishes; a wish, a moment's shutting of the eyes--_augenblick_! and
+it was done--and then we could wait on each other.
+
+After my prison fare, and with nothing but tenpenny London dinners to
+recollect in the immediate past, I trust I shall not be thought a gross
+materialist for appreciating these small banquets, and in such company.
+(The only dinner I could recall which was not a tenpenny one, except the
+old dinners of my childhood, was that famous dinner at Cray, where I had
+discovered that the Duchess of Towers was Mimsey Seraskier, and I did
+not eat much of _that_.)
+
+Then a cigarette and a cup of coffee, and a glass of curaçoa; and after,
+to reach our private box we had but to cross the room and lift
+a curtain.
+
+And there before us was the theatre or opera-house brilliantly lighted,
+and the instruments tuning up, and the splendid company pouring in:
+crowned heads, famous beauties, world-renowned warriors and statesmen,
+Garibaldi, Gortschakoff, Cavour, Bismarck, and Moltke, now so famous,
+and who not? Mary would point them out to me. And in the next box Dr.
+Seraskier and his tall daughter, who seemed friends with all that
+brilliant crowd.
+
+Now it was St. Petersburg, now Berlin, now Vienna, Paris, Naples, Milan,
+London--every great city in turn. But our box was always the same, and
+always the best in the house, and I the one person privileged to smoke
+my cigar in the face of all that royalty, fashion, and splendor.
+
+Then, after the overture, up went the curtain. If it was a play, and the
+play was in German or Russian or Italian, I had but to touch Mary's
+little finger to understand it all--a true but incomprehensible thing.
+For well as I might understand, I could not have spoken a word of
+either, and the moment that slight contact was discontinued, they might
+as well have been acting in Greek or Hebrew, for _me_.
+
+But it was for music we cared the most, and I think I may say that of
+music during those three years (and ever after) we have had our glut.
+For all through her busy waking life Mary found time to hear whatever
+good music was going on in London, that she might bring it back to me at
+night; and we would rehear it together, again and again, and _da capo_.
+
+It is a rare privilege for two private individuals, and one of them a
+convict, to assist at a performance honored by the patronage and
+presence of crowned heads, and yet be able to encore any particular
+thing that pleases them. How often have we done that!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Oh, Joachim! oh, Clara Schumann! oh, Piattil--all of whom I know so
+well, but have never heard with the fleshly ear! Oh, others, whom it
+would be invidious to mention without mentioning all--a glorious list!
+How we have made you, all unconscious, repeat the same movements over
+and over again, without ever from you a sign of impatience or fatigue!
+How often have we summoned Liszt to play to us on his own favorite
+piano, which adorned our own favorite sitting-room! How little he knew
+(or will ever know now, alas!) what exquisite delight he gave us!
+
+Oh, Pattit, Angelina! Oh, Santley and Sims Reeves! Oh, De Soria,
+nightingale of the drawing-room, I wonder you have a note left!
+
+And you, Ristori, and you, Salvini, et vous, divine Sarah, qui débutiez
+alors! On me dit que votre adorable voix a perdu un peu de sa première
+fraîcheur. Cela ne m'étonne pas! Bien sûr, nous y sommes pour
+quelque chose!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And then the picture-galleries, the museums, the botanical and
+zoological gardens of all countries--"Magna sed Apta" had space for them
+all, even to the Elgin Marbles room of the British Museum, which I
+added myself.
+
+What enchanted hours have we spent among the pictures and statues of the
+world, weeding them here and there, perhaps, or hanging them
+differently, or placing them in what we thought a better light! The
+"Venus of Milo" showed to far greater advantage in "Magna sed Apta" than
+at the Louvre.
+
+And when busied thus delightfully at home, and to enhance the delight,
+we made it shocking bad weather outside; it rained cats and dogs, or
+else the north wind piped, and snow fell on the desolate gardens of
+"Magna sed Apta," and whitened the landscape as far as eye could see.
+
+Nearest to our hearts, however, were many pictures of our own time, for
+we were moderns of the moderns, after all, in spite of our efforts of
+self-culture.
+
+There was scarcely a living or recently living master in Europe whose
+best works were not in our possession, so lighted and hung that even the
+masters themselves would have been content; for we had plenty of space
+at our command, and each picture had a wall to itself, so toned as to do
+full justice to its beauty, and a comfortable sofa for two
+just opposite.
+
+But in the little room we most lived in, the room with the magic window,
+we had crowded a few special favorites of the English school, for we had
+so much foreign blood in us that we were more British than John Bull
+himself--_plus royalistes que le Roi_.
+
+There was Millais's "Autumn Leaves," his "Youth of Sir Walter Raleigh,"
+his "Chill October"; Watts's "Endymion," and "Orpheus and Eurydice";
+Burne-Jones's "Chant d'Amour," and his "Laus Veneris"; Alma-Tadema's
+"Audience of Agrippa," and the "Women of Amphissa"; J. Whistler's
+portrait of his mother; the "Venus and Aesculapius," by E. J. Poynter;
+F. Leighton's "Daphnephoria"; George Mason's "Harvest Moon"; and
+Frederic Walker's "Harbor of Refuge," and, of course, Merridew's
+"Sun-God."
+
+While on a screen, designed by H. S. Marks, and exquisitely decorated
+round the margin with golden plovers and their eggs (which I adore),
+were smaller gems in oil and water-color that Mary had fallen in love
+with at one time or another. The immortal "Moonlight Sonata," by
+Whistler; E, J. Poynter's exquisite "Our Lady of the Fields" (dated
+Paris, 1857); a pair of adorable "Bimbi" by V. Prinsep, who seems very
+fond of children; T. R. Lamont's touching "L'Après Dîner de l'Abbé
+Constantin," with the sweet girl playing the old spinet; and that
+admirable work of T. Armstrong, in his earlier and more realistic
+manner, "Le Zouave et lâ Nounou," not to mention splendid rough sketches
+by John Leech, Charles Keene, Tenniel, Sambourne, Furniss, Caldecott,
+etc.; not to mention, also, endless little sketches in silver point of a
+most impossibly colossal, blackavised, shaggy-coated St. Bernard--signed
+with the familiar French name of some gay troubadour of the pencil, some
+stray half-breed like myself, and who seems to have loved his dog as
+much as I loved mine.
+
+Then suddenly, in the midst of all this unparalleled artistic splendor,
+we felt that a something was wanting. There was a certain hollowness
+about it; and we discovered that in our case the principal motives for
+collecting all these beautiful things were absent.
+
+  1. We were not the sole possessors.
+  2. We had nobody to show them to.
+  3. Therefore we could take no pride in them.
+
+[Illustration: THE NURSERY SCHOOL-ROOM.]
+
+And found that when we wanted bad weather for a change, and the joys of
+home, we could be quite as happy in my old school-room, where the
+squirrels and the monkey and the hedgehog were, with each of us on a
+cane-bottomed arm-chair by the wood-fire, each roasting chestnuts for
+the other, and one book between us, for one of us to read out loud; or,
+better still, the morning and evening papers she had read a few hours
+earlier; and marvellous to relate, she had not even _read_ them when
+awake! she had merely glanced through them carefully, taking in the
+aspect of each column one after another, from top to bottom--and yet she
+was able to read out every word from the dream-paper she held in her
+hands--thus truly chewing the very cud of journalism!
+
+This always seemed to us, in a small but practical way, the most
+complete and signal triumph of mind over matter we had yet achieved.
+
+Not, indeed, that we could read much, we had so much to talk about.
+
+Unfortunately, the weak part of "Magna sed Apta" was its library.
+Naturally it could only consist of books that one or the other of us had
+read when awake. She had led such an active life that but little leisure
+had been left her for books, and I had read only as an every-day young
+man reads who is fond of reading.
+
+However, such books as we _had_ read were made the most of, and so
+magnificently bound that even their authors would have blushed with
+pride and pleasure had they been there to see. And though we had little
+time for reading them over again, we could enjoy the true bibliophilous
+delight of gazing at their backs, and taking them down and fingering
+them and putting them carefully back again.
+
+In most of these treats, excursions, festivities, and pleasures of the
+fireside, Mary was naturally leader and hostess; it could scarcely have
+been otherwise.
+
+There was once a famous Mary, of whom it was said that to know her was a
+liberal education. I think I may say that to have known Mary Seraskier
+has been all that to me!
+
+But now and then I would make some small attempt at returning her
+hospitality.
+
+We have slummed together in Clerkenwell, Smithfield, Cow Cross,
+Petticoat Lane, Ratcliffe Highway, and the East India and West
+India docks.
+
+She has been with me to penny gaffs and music-halls; to Greenwich Fair,
+and Cremorne and Rosherville gardens--and liked them all. She knew
+Pentonville as well as I do; and my old lodgings there, where we have
+both leaned over my former shoulder as I read or drew. It was she who
+rescued from oblivion my little prophetic song about "The Chime," which
+I had quite forgotten. She has been to Mr. Lintot's parties, and found
+them most amusing--especially Mr. Lintot.
+
+And going further back into the past, she has roamed with me all over
+Paris, and climbed with me the towers of Notre Dame, and looked in vain
+for the mystic word [Greek: Anagkae]!
+
+But I had also better things to show, untravelled as I was.
+
+She had never seen Hampstead Heath, which I knew by heart; and Hampstead
+Heath at any time, but especially on a sunny morning in late October, is
+not to be disdained by any one.
+
+Half the leaves have fallen, so that one can see the fading glory of
+those that remain; yellow and brown and pale and hectic red, shining
+like golden guineas and bright copper coins against the rich, dark,
+business-like green of the trees that mean to flourish all the winter
+through, like the tall slanting pines near the Spaniards, and the old
+cedar-trees, and hedges of yew and holly, for which the Hampstead
+gardens are famous.
+
+Before us lies a sea of fern, gone a russet-brown from decay, in which
+are isles of dark green gorse, and little trees with little scarlet and
+orange and lemon-colored leaflets fluttering down, and running after
+each other on the bright grass, under the brisk west wind which makes
+the willows rustle, and turn up the whites of their leaves in pious
+resignation to the coming change.
+
+Harrow-on-the-Hill, with its pointed spire, rises blue in the distance;
+and distant ridges, like receding waves, rise into blueness, one after
+the other, out of the low-lying mist; the last ridge bluely melting into
+space. In the midst of it all gleams the Welsh Harp Lake, like a piece
+of sky that has become unstuck and tumbled into the landscape with its
+shiny side up.
+
+On the other side, all London, with nothing but the gilded cross of St.
+Paul's on a level with the eye; it lies at our feet, as Paris used to do
+from the heights of Passy, a sight to make true dreamers gaze and think
+and dream the more; and there we sit thinking and dreaming and gazing
+our fill, hand in hand, our spirits rushing together.
+
+Once as we sat we heard the clatter of hoofs behind us, and there was a
+troop of my old regiment out exercising. Invisible to all but ourselves,
+and each other, we watched the wanton troopers riding by on their meek
+black chargers.
+
+First came the cornet--a sunny-haired Apollo, a gilded youth, graceful
+and magnificent to the eye--careless, fearless, but stupid, harsh, and
+proud--an English Phébus de Châteaupers--the son of a great contractor;
+I remembered him well, and that he loved me not. Then the rank and file
+in stable jackets, most of them (but for a stalwart corporal here and
+there) raw, lanky youths, giving promise of much future strength, and
+each leading a second horse; and among them, longest and lankiest of
+them all, but ruddy as a ploughboy, and stolidly whistling _"On revient
+toujours à ses premiers amours,"_ rode my former self--a sight (or
+sound) that seemed to touch some tender chord in Mary's nature, where
+there were so many, since it filled her eyes with tears.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+To describe in full a honey-moon filled with such adventures, and that
+lasted for three years, is unnecessary. It would be but another
+superficial record of travel, by another unskilled pen. And what a pen
+is wanted for such a theme! It was not mere life, it was the very cream
+and essence of life, that we shared with each other--all the toil and
+trouble, the friction and fatigue, left out. The necessary earthly
+journey through time and space from one joy to another was omitted,
+unless such a journey were a joy in itself.
+
+For instance, a pleasant hour can be spent on the deck of a splendid
+steamer, as it cleaves its way through a sapphire tropical sea, bound
+for some lovely West Indian islet; with a good cigar and the dearest
+companion in the world, watching the dolphins and the flying-fish, and
+mildly interesting one's self in one's fellow-passengers, the captain,
+the crew. And then, the hour spent and the cigar smoked out, it is well
+to shut one's eyes and have one's self quietly lowered down the side of
+the vessel into a beautiful sledge, and then, half smothered in costly
+furs, to be whirled along the frozen Neva to a ball at the Winter
+Palace, there to valse with one's Mary among all the beauty and chivalry
+of St. Petersburg, and never a soul to find fault with one's valsing,
+which at first was far from perfect, or one's attire, which was not that
+of the fashionable world of the day, nor was Mary's either. We were
+aesthetic people, and very Greek, who made for ourselves fashions of our
+own, which I will not describe.
+
+[Illustration:]
+
+Where have we not waltzed together, from Buckingham Palace downward? I
+confess I grew to take a delight in valsing, or waltzing, or whatever it
+is properly called; and although it is not much to boast of, I may say
+that after a year or two no better dancer than I was to be found in
+all Vienna.
+
+And here, by the way, I may mention what pleasure it gave me (hand in
+hand with Mary, of course, as usual) to renew and improve my
+acquaintance with our British aristocracy, begun so agreeably many years
+ago at Lady Cray's concert.
+
+Our British aristocracy does not waltz well by any means, and lacks
+lightness generally; but it may gratify and encourage some of its
+members to hear that Peter Ibbetson (ex-private soldier, architect and
+surveyor, convict and criminal lunatic), who has had unrivalled
+opportunities for mixing with the cream of European society, considers
+our British aristocracy quite the best-looking, best-dressed, and
+best-behaved aristocracy of them all, and the most sensible and the
+least exclusive--perhaps the most sensible _because_ the least
+exclusive.
+
+It often snubs, but does not altogether repulse, those gifted and
+privileged outsiders who (just for the honor and glory of the thing) are
+ever so ready to flatter and instruct and amuse it, and run its
+errands, and fetch and carry, and tumble for its pleasure, and even to
+marry such of its "ugly ducklings" (or shall we say such of its
+"unprepossessing cygnets?") as cannot hope to mate with birds of their
+own feather.
+
+For it has the true English eye for physical beauty.
+
+Indeed, it is much given to throw the handkerchief--successfully, of
+course--and, most fortunately for itself, beyond the pale of its own
+narrow precincts--nay, beyond the broad Atlantic, even, to the land
+where beauty and dollars are to be found in such happy combination.
+
+Nor does it disdain the comeliness of the daughters of Israel, nor their
+shekels, nor their brains, nor their ancient and most valuable blood. It
+knows the secret virtue of that mechanical transfusion of fluids
+familiar to science under the name of "endosmoses" and "exosmoses" (I
+hope I have spelled them rightly), and practises the same. Whereby it
+shows itself wise in its generation, and will endure the longer, which
+cannot be very long.
+
+Peter Ibbetson (etc., etc.), for one, wishes it no manner of harm.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But to return. With all these temptations of travel and amusement and
+society and the great world, such was our insatiable fondness for "the
+pretty place of our childhood" and all its associations, that our
+greatest pleasure of all was to live our old life over again and again,
+and make Gogo and Mimsey and our parents and cousins and M. le Major go
+through their old paces once more; and to recall _new_ old paces for
+them, which we were sometimes able to do, out of stray forgotten bits of
+the past; to hunt for which was the most exciting sport in the world.
+
+Our tenderness for these beloved shades increased with familiarity. We
+could see all the charm and goodness and kindness of these dear fathers
+and mothers of ours with the eyes of matured experience, for we were
+pretty much of an age with them now; no other children could ever say as
+much since the world began, and how few young parents could bear such a
+scrutiny as ours.
+
+Ah! what would we not have given to extort just a spark of recognition,
+but that was impossible; or to have been able to whisper just a word of
+warning, which would have averted the impending strokes of inexorable
+fate! They might have been alive now, perhaps--old indeed, but honored
+and loved as no parents ever were before. How different everything would
+have been! Alas! alas!
+
+And of all things in the world, we never tired of that walk through the
+avenue and park and Bois de Boulogne to the Mare d'Auteuil; strolling
+there leisurely on an early spring afternoon, just in time to spend a
+midsummer hour or two on its bank, and watch the old water-rat and the
+dytiscus and the tadpoles and newts, and see the frogs jump; and then
+walking home at dusk in the school-room of my old home; and then back to
+war, well-lighted "Magna sed Apta" by moonlight through the avenue on
+New Year's Eve, ankle-deep in snow; all in a few short hours.
+
+Dream winds and dream weathers--what an enchantment! And all real!
+
+Soft caressing rains that do not wet us if we do not wish them to; sharp
+frosts that brace but never chill; blazing suns that neither scorch
+nor dazzle.
+
+Blustering winds of early spring, that seem to sweep right through these
+solid frames of ours, and thrill us to the very marrow with the old
+heroic excitement and ecstasy we knew so well in happy childhood, but
+can no longer feel now when awake!
+
+Bland summer breezes, heavy with the scent of long lost French woods and
+fields and gardens in full flower; swift, soft, moist equinoctial gales,
+blowing from the far-off orchards of Meudon, or the old market gardens
+of Suresnes in their autumnal decay, and laden, we do not know why, with
+strange, mysterious, troubling reminiscence too subtle and elusive to be
+expressed in any tongue--too sweet for any words! And then the dark
+December wind that comes down from the north, and brings the short,
+early twilights and the snow, and drives us home, pleasantly shivering,
+to the chimney-corner and the hissing logs--_chez nous!_
+
+It is the last night of an old year--_la veille du jour de l'an_.
+
+Ankle-deep in snow, we walk to warm, well-lighted "Magna sed Apta," up
+the moonlit avenue. It is dream snow, and yet we feel it crunch beneath
+our feet; but if we turn to look, the tracks of our footsteps have
+disappeared--and we cast no shadows, though the moon is full!
+
+M. le Major goes by, and Yverdon the postman, and Père François, with
+his big sabots, and others, and their footprints remain--and their
+shadows are strong and sharp!
+
+They wish each other the compliments of the season as they meet and
+pass; they wish us nothing! We give them _la bonne année_ at the tops of
+our voices; they do not heed us in the least, though our voices are as
+resonant as theirs. We are wishing them a "Happy New Year," that dawned
+for good or evil nearly twenty years ago.
+
+Out comes Gogo from the Seraskiers', with Mimsey. He makes a snowball
+and throws it. It flies straight through me, and splashes itself on Père
+François's broad back. "Ah, ce polisson de Monsieur Gogo ... attendez un
+peu!" and Père François returns the compliment--straight through me
+again, as it seems; and I do not even feel it! Mary and I are as solid
+to each other as flesh and blood can make us. We cannot even touch these
+dream people without their melting away into thin air; we can only hear
+and see them, but that in perfection!
+
+There goes that little André Corbin, the poulterer's son, running along
+the slippery top of Madame Pelé's garden wall, which is nearly ten
+feet high.
+
+"Good heavens," cries Mary, "stop him! Don't you remember? When he gets
+to the corner he'll fall down and break both his legs!"
+
+I rush and bellow out to him--
+
+"Descends donc, malheureux; tu vas te casser les deux jambes! Saute!
+saute!" ... I cry, holding out my arms. He does not pay the slightest
+attention: he reaches the corner, followed low down by Gogo and Mimsey,
+who are beside themselves with generous envy and admiration. Stimulated
+by their applause, he becomes more foolhardy than ever, and even tries
+to be droll, and standing on one leg, sings a little song that begins--
+
+_"Maman m'a donné quat' sous Pour m'en aller à la foire, Non pas pour
+manger ni boire, Alais pour m'régaler d'joujoux!"_
+
+Then suddenly down he slips, poor boy, and breaks both his legs below
+the knee on an iron rail, whereby he becomes a cripple for life.
+
+All this sad little tragedy of a New-year's Eve plays itself anew. The
+sympathetic crowd collects; Mimsey and Gogo weep; the heart-broken
+parents arrive, and the good little doctor Larcher; and Mary and I look
+on like criminals, so impossible it seems not to feel that we might have
+prevented it all!
+
+We two alone are alive and substantial in all this strange world of
+shadows, who seem, as far as we can hear and see, no less substantial
+and alive than ourselves. They exist for us; we do not exist for them.
+We exist for each other only, waking or sleeping; for even the people
+among whom our waking life is spent know hardly more of us, and what our
+real existence is, than poor little André Corbin, who has just broken
+his legs for us over again!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+And so, back to "Magna sed Apta," both saddened by this deplorable
+misadventure, to muse and talk and marvel over these wonders; penetrated
+to the very heart's core by a dim sense of some vast, mysterious power,
+latent in the sub-consciousness of man--unheard of, undreamed of as yet,
+but linking him with the Infinite and the Eternal.
+
+And how many things we always had to talk about besides!
+
+Heaven knows, I am not a brilliant conversationalist, but she was the
+most easily amusable person in the world--interested in everything that
+interested me, and I disdamaged myself (to use one of her
+Anglo-Gallicisms) of the sulky silence of years.
+
+Of her as a companion it is not for me to speak. It would be
+impertinent, and even ludicrous, for a person in my position to dilate
+on the social gifts of the famous Duchess of Towers.
+
+Incredible as it may appear, however, most of our conversation was about
+very common and earthly topics--her homes and refuges, the difficulties
+of their management, her eternal want of money, her many schemes and
+plans and experiments and failures and disenchantments--in all of which
+I naturally took a very warm interest. And then my jail, and all that
+occurred there--in all of which I became interested myself because it
+interested her so passionately; she knew every corner of it that I knew,
+every detail of the life there--the name, appearance, and history of
+almost every inmate, and criticised its internal economy with a
+practical knowledge of affairs; a business-like sagacity at which I
+never ceased to marvel.
+
+One of my drollest recollections is of a visit she
+paid there _in the flesh_, by some famous philanthropists of both sexes.
+I was interviewed by them all as the model prisoner, who, for his
+unorthodoxy, was a credit to the institution. She listened demurely to
+my intelligent answers when I was questioned as to my bodily health,
+etc., and asked whether I had any complaints to make. Complaints! Never
+was jail-bird so thoroughly satisfied with his nest--so healthy, so
+happy, so well-behaved. She took notes all the time.
+
+[Illustration: MARY, DUCHESS OF TOWERS. From a photograph by
+Strlkzchuski, Warsaw.]
+
+Eight hours before we had been strolling hand in hand through the Uffizi
+Gallery in Florence; eight hours later we should be in each
+other's arms.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Strange to relate, this happiness of ours--so deep, so acute, so
+transcendent, so unmatched in all the history of human affection--was
+not always free of unreasonable longings and regrets. Man is never so
+blessed but what he would have his blessedness still greater.
+
+The reality of our close companionship, of our true possession of each
+other (during our allotted time), was absolute, complete, and thorough.
+No Darby that ever lived can ever have had sweeter, warmer, more tender
+memories of any Joan than I have now of Mary Seraskier! Although each
+was, in a way, but a seeming illusion of the other's brain, the illusion
+was no illusion for us. It was an illusion that showed the truth, as
+does the illusion of sight. Like twin kernels in one shell
+("Philipschen," as Mary called it), we touched at more points and were
+closer than the rest of mankind (with each of them a separate shell of
+his own). We tried and tested this in every way we could devise, and
+never found ourselves at fault, and never ceased to marvel at so great a
+wonder. For instance, I received letters from her in jail (and answered
+them) in an intricate cipher we had invented and perfected together
+entirely during sleep, and referring to things that had happened to us
+both when together.[A]
+
+[Footnote A: _Note_.--Several of these letters are in my possession.
+MADGE PLUNKET.]
+
+Our privileges were such as probably no human beings could have ever
+enjoyed before. Time and space were annihilated for us at the mere wish
+of either--we lived in a palace of delight; all conceivable luxuries
+were ours--and, better than all, and perennially, such freshness and
+elation as belong only to the morning of life--and such a love for each
+other (the result of circumstances not to be paralleled) as time could
+never slake or quench till death should come and part us. All this, and
+more, was our portion for eight hours out of twenty-four.
+
+So what must we do sometimes, but fret that the sixteen hours which
+remained did not belong to us well; that we must live two-thirds of our
+lives apart; that we could not share the toils and troubles of our
+work-a-day, waking existence, as we shared the blissful guerdon of our
+seeming sleep--the glories of our common dream.
+
+And then we would lament the lost years we had spent in mutual ignorance
+and separation--a deplorable waste of life; when life, sleeping or
+waking, was so short.
+
+How different things might have been with us had we but known!
+
+We need never have lost sight and touch of each other; we might have
+grown up, and learned and worked and struggled together from the
+first--boy and girl, brother and sister, lovers, man and wife--and yet
+have found our blessed dream-land and dwelt in it just the same.
+
+Children might have been born to us! Sweet children, _beaux comme le
+jour_, as in Madame Perrault's fairy tales; even beautiful and good as
+their mother.
+
+And as we talked of these imaginary little beings and tried to picture
+them, we felt in ourselves such a stupendous capacity for loving the
+same that we would fall to weeping on each other's shoulders. Full well
+I knew, even as if they had formed a part of my own personal experience,
+all the passion and tenderness, all the wasted anguish of her brief,
+ill-starred motherhood: the very ache of my jealousy that she should
+have borne a child to another man was forgotten in that keen and
+thorough comprehension! Ah, yes ... that hungry love, that woful pity,
+which not to know is hardly quite to have lived! Childless as I am
+(though old enough to be a grandfather) I have it all by heart!
+
+Never could we hope for son or daughter of our own. For us the blessed
+flower of love in rich, profuse, unfading bloom; but its blessed fruit
+of life, never, never, never!
+
+Our only children were Mimsey and Gogo, between whom and ourselves was
+an impassable gulf, and who were unconscious of our very existence,
+except for Mimsey's strange consciousness that a Fairy Tarapatapoum and
+a Prince Charming were watching over them.
+
+All this would always end, as it could not but end, in our realizing the
+more fully our utter dependence on each other for all that made life not
+only worth living, ingrates that we were, but a heaven on earth for us
+both; and, indeed, we could not but recognize that merely thus to love
+and be loved was in itself a thing so immense (without all the other
+blessings we had) that we were fain to tremble at our audacity in daring
+to wish for more.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thus sped three years, and would have sped all the rest, perhaps, but
+for an incident that made an epoch in our joint lives, and turned all
+our thoughts and energies in a new direction.
+
+
+
+
+Part Six
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Some petty annoyance to which I had been subjected by one of the prison
+authorities had kept me awake for a little while after I had gone to
+bed, so that when at last I awoke in "Magna sed Apta," and lay on my
+couch there (with that ever-fresh feeling of coming to life in heaven
+after my daily round of work in an earthly jail), I was conscious that
+Mary was there already, making coffee, the fragrance of which filled
+the room, and softly humming a tune as she did so--a quaint, original,
+but most beautiful tune, that thrilled me with indescribable emotion,
+for I had never heard it with the bodily ear before, and yet it was as
+familiar to me as "God save the Queen."
+
+As I listened with rapt ears and closed eyes, wonderful scenes passed
+before my mental vision: the beautiful white-haired lady of my childish
+dreams, leading a small _female_ child by the hand, and that child was
+myself; the pigeons and their tower, the stream and the water-mill; the
+white-haired young man with red heels to his shoes; a very fine lady,
+very tall, stout, and middle-aged, magnificently dressed in brocaded
+silk; a park with lawns and alleys and trees cut into trim formal
+shapes; a turreted castle--all kinds of charming scenes and people of
+another age and country.
+
+"What on earth is that wonderful tune, Mary?" I exclaimed, when she had
+finished it.
+
+"It's my favorite tune," she answered; "I seldom hum it for fear of
+wearing away its charm. I suppose that is why you have never heard it
+before. Isn't it lovely? I've been trying to lull you awake with it.
+
+"My grandfather, the violinist, used to play it with variations of his
+own, and made it famous in his time; but it was never published, and
+it's now forgotten.
+
+"It is called 'Le Chant du Triste Commensal,' and was composed by his
+grandmother, a beautiful French woman, who played the fiddle too; but
+not as a profession. He remembered her playing it when he was a child
+and she was quite an old lady, just as I remember _his_ playing it when
+I was a girl in Vienna, and he was a white-haired old man. She used to
+play holding her fiddle downward, on her knee, it seems; and always
+played in perfect tune, quite in the middle of the note, and with
+excellent taste and expression; it was her playing that decided his
+career. But she was like 'Single-speech Hamilton,' for this was the only
+thing she ever composed. She composed it under great grief and
+excitement, just after her husband had died from the bite of a wolf, and
+just before the birth of her twin-daughters--her only children--one of
+whom was my great-grandmother."
+
+"And what was this wonderful old lady's name?"
+
+"Gatienne Aubéry; she married a Breton squire called Budes, who was a
+_gentilhomme verrier_ near St. Prest, in Anjou--that is, he made
+glass--decanters, water-bottles, tumblers, and all that, I suppose--in
+spite of his nobility. It was not considered derogatory to do so;
+indeed, it was the only trade permitted to the _noblesse_, and one had
+to be at least a squire to engage in it.
+
+"She was a very notable woman, _la belle Verrière_, as she was called;
+and she managed the glass factory for many years after her husband's
+death, and made lots of money for her two daughters."
+
+"How strange!" I exclaimed; "Gatienne Aubéry! Dame du Brail--Budes--the
+names are quite familiar to me. Mathurin Budes, Seigneur de Monhoudéard
+et de Verny le Moustier."
+
+"Yes, that's it. How wonderful that you should know! One daughter,
+Jeanne, married my greatgrandfather, an officer in the Hungarian army;
+and Seraskier, the fiddler, was their only child. The other (so like her
+sister that only her mother could distinguish them) was called Anne, and
+married a Comte de Bois something."
+
+"Boismorinel. Why, all those names are in my family too. My father used
+to make me paint their arms and quarterings when I was a child, on
+Sunday mornings, to keep me quiet. Perhaps we are related by blood,
+you and I."
+
+"Oh, that would be too delightful!" said Mary. "I wonder how we could
+find out? Have you no family papers?"
+
+_I_. "There were lots of them, in a horse-hair trunk, but I don't know
+where they are now. What good would family papers have been to me?
+Ibbetson took charge of them when I changed my name. I suppose his
+lawyers have got them."
+
+_She_. "Happy thought; we will do without lawyers. Let us go round to
+your old house, and make Gogo paint the quarterings over again for us,
+and look over his shoulder."
+
+Happy thought, indeed! We drank our coffee and went straight to my old
+house, with the wish (immediate father to the deed) that Gogo should be
+there, once more engaged in his long forgotten accomplishment of
+painting coats of arms.
+
+It was a beautiful Sunday morning, and we found Gogo hard at work at a
+small table by an open window. The floor was covered with old deeds and
+parchments and family papers; and le beau Pasquier, at another table,
+was deep in his own pedigree, making notes on the margin--an occupation
+in which he delighted--and unconsciously humming as he did so. The sunny
+room was filled with the penetrating soft sound of his voice, as a
+conservatory is filled with the scent of its flowers.
+
+By the strangest inconsistency my dear father, a genuine republican at
+heart (for all his fancied loyalty to the white lily of the Bourbons), a
+would-be scientist, who in reality was far more impressed by a clever
+and industrious French mechanic than by a prince (and would, I think,
+have preferred the former's friendship and society), yet took both a
+pleasure and a pride in his quaint old parchments and obscure
+quarterings. So would I, perhaps, if things had gone differently with
+me--for what true democrat, however intolerant of such weakness in
+others, ever thinks lightly of his own personal claims to aristocratic
+descent, shadowy as these may be!
+
+He was fond of such proverbs and aphorisms as "noblesse oblige," "bon
+sang ne sait mentir," "bon chien chasse de race," etc., and had even
+invented a little aphorism of his own, to comfort him when he was extra
+hard up, "bon gentilhomme n'a jamais honte de la misère." All of which
+sayings, to do him justice, he reserved for home consumption
+exclusively, and he would have been the first to laugh on hearing them
+in the mouth of any one else.
+
+Of his one great gift, the treasure in his throat, he thought absolutely
+nothing at all.
+
+"Ce que c'est que de nous!"
+
+Gogo was coloring the quarterings of the Pasquier family--_la maison
+de Pasquier_, as it was called--in a printed book (_Armorial Général du
+Maine et de l'Anjou_), according to the instructions that were given
+underneath. He used one of Madame Liard's three-sou boxes, and the tints
+left much to be desired.
+
+We looked over his shoulder and read the picturesque old jargon, which
+sounds even prettier and more comforting and more idiotic in French than
+in English. It ran thus--
+
+"Pasquier (branche des Seigneurs de la Marière et du Hirel), party de 4
+pièces et coupé de 2.
+
+"Au premier, de Hérault, qui est de écartelé de gueules et d'argent.
+
+"Au deux, de Budes, qui est d'or au pin de sinople.
+
+"Au trois, d'Aubéry--qui est d'azur à trois croissants d'argent.
+
+"Au quatre, de Busson qui est d'argent au lyon de sable armé couronné et
+lampassé d'or," And so on, through the other quarterings: Bigot, Epinay,
+Malestroit, Mathefelon. And finally, "Sur le tout, de Pasquier qui est
+d'or à trois lyons d'azur, au franc quartier écartelé des royames de
+Castille et de Léon."
+
+Presently my mother came home from the English chapel in the Rue
+Marboeuf, where she had been with Sarah, the English maid. Lunch was
+announced, and we were left alone with the family papers. With infinite
+precautions, for fear of blurring the dream, we were able to find what
+we wanted to find--namely, that we were the great-great-grandchildren
+and only possible living descendants of Gatienne, the fair glassmaker
+and composer of "Le Chant du Triste Commensal."
+
+Thus runs the descent--
+
+Jean Aubéry, Seigneur du Brail, married Anne Busson. His daughter,
+Gatienne Aubéry, Dame du Brail, married Mathurin Budes, Seigneur de
+Verny le Moustier et de Monhoudéard.
+
+ --------------------------^--------------------------
+/                                                     \
+
+
+Anne Budes, Dame de            Jeanne Budes, Dame du
+  Verny le Moustier, married     Brail et de Monhoudéard,
+  Guy Hérault, Comte             married Ulric
+  de Boismorinel.                Seraskier.
+
+Jeanne François Hérault de     Otto Seraskier, violinist,
+  Boismorinel married            married Teresa Pulci.
+  François Pasquier de la
+  Marière.
+
+
+Jean Pasquier de la Marière    Johann Seraskier, M.D.,
+  married Catherine              married Laura Desmond.
+  Ibbetson-Biddulph.
+
+Pierre Pasquier de la Marière  Mary Seraskier, Duchess of
+  (_alias_ Peter Ibbetson,  Towers.
+  convict).
+
+We walked back to "Magna sed Apta" in great joy, and there we celebrated
+our newly-discovered kinship by a simple repast, out of _my_ répertoire
+this time. It consisted of oysters from Rules's in Maiden Lane, when
+they were sixpence a dozen, and bottled stout (_l'eau m'en vient à la
+bouche_); and we spent the rest of the hours allotted to us that night
+in evolving such visions as we could from the old tune "Le Chant du
+Triste Commensal," with varying success; she humming it, accompanying
+herself on the piano in her masterly, musician-like way, with one hand,
+and seeing all that I saw by holding my hand with the other.
+
+By slow degrees the scenes and people evoked grew less dim, and whenever
+the splendid and important lady, whom we soon identified for certain as
+Gatienne, our common great-great-grandmother, appeared--"la belle
+verrière de Verny le Moustier"--she was more distinct than the others;
+no doubt, because we both had part and parcel in her individuality, and
+also because her individuality was so strongly marked.
+
+And before I was called away at the inexorable hour, we had the supreme
+satisfaction of seeing her play the fiddle to a shadowy company of
+patched and powdered and bewigged ladies and gentlemen, who seemed to
+take much sympathetic delight in her performance, and actually, even, of
+just hearing the thin, unearthly tones of that most original and
+exquisite melody, "Le Chant du Triste Commensal," to a quite inaudible
+accompaniment on the spinet by her daughter, evidently Anne Hérault,
+Comtesse de Boismorinel (_née_ Budes), while the small child Jeanne de
+Boismorinel (afterwards Dame Pasquier de la Marière) listened with
+dreamy rapture.
+
+And, just as Mary had said, she played her fiddle with its body
+downward, and resting on her knees, as though it had been an undersized
+'cello. I then vaguely remembered having dreamed of such a figure when a
+small child.
+
+Within twenty-four hours of this strange adventure the practical and
+business-like Mary had started, in the flesh and with her maid, for that
+part of France where these, my ancestors, had lived, and within a
+fortnight she had made herself mistress of all my French family history,
+and had visited such of the different houses of my kin as were still in
+existence.
+
+The turreted castle of my childish dreams, which, with the adjacent
+glass-factory, was still called Verny le Moustier, was one of these. She
+found it in the possession of a certain Count Hector du Chamorin, whose
+grandfather had purchased it at the beginning of the century.
+
+He had built an entirely new plant, and made it one of the first
+glass-factories in Western France. But the old turreted _corps de logis_
+still remained, and his foreman lived there with his wife and family.
+The _pigeonnier_ had been pulled down to make room for a shed with a
+steam-engine, and the whole aspect of the place was revolutionized; but
+the stream and water-mill (the latter a mere picturesque ruin) were
+still there; the stream was, however, little more than a ditch, some ten
+feet deep and twenty broad, with a fringe of gnarled and twisted willows
+and alders, many of them dead.
+
+It was called "Le Brail," and had given its name to my
+great-great-grandmother's property, whence it had issued thirty miles
+away (and many hundred years ago); but the old Château du Brail, the
+manor of the Aubérys, had become a farm-house.
+
+The Château de la Marière, in its walled park, and with its beautiful,
+tall, hexagonal tower, dated 1550, and visible for miles around, was now
+a prosperous cider brewery; it is still, and lies on the high-road from
+Angers to Le Mans.
+
+The old forest of Boismorinel, that had once belonged to the family of
+Hérault, was still in existence; charcoal-burners were to be found in
+its depths, and a stray roebuck or two; but no more wolves and
+wild-boars, as in the olden time. And where the old castle had been now
+stood the new railway station of Boismorinel et Saint Maixent.
+
+[Illustration: LA BELLE VERRIERE]
+
+Most of such Budes, Bussons, Héraults, Aubérys, and Pasquiers as were
+still to be found in the country, probably distant kinsmen of Mary's
+and mine, were lawyers, doctors, or priests, or had gone into trade and
+become respectably uninteresting; such as they were, they would scarcely
+have cared to claim kinship with such as I.
+
+But a hundred years ago and more these were names of importance in Maine
+and Anjou; their bearers were descended for the most part from younger
+branches of houses which in the Middle Ages had intermarried with all
+there was of the best in France; and although they were looked down upon
+by the _noblesse_ of the court and Versailles, as were all the
+provincial nobility, they held their own well in their own country;
+feasting, hunting, and shooting with each other; dancing and fiddling
+and making love and intermarrying; and blowing glass, and growing richer
+and richer, till the Revolution came and blew them and their glass into
+space, and with them many greater than themselves, but few better. And
+all record of them and of their doings, pleasant and genial people as
+they were, is lost, and can only be recalled by a dream.
+
+Verny le Moustier was not the least interesting of these old manors.
+
+It had been built three hundred years ago, on the site of a still older
+monastery (whence its name); the ruined walls of the old abbey were (and
+are) still extant in the house-garden, covered with apricot and pear and
+peach trees, which had been sown or planted by our common ancestress
+when she was a bride.
+
+Count Hector, who took a great pleasure in explaining all the past
+history of the place to Mary, had built himself a fine new house in
+what remained of the old park, and a quarter of a mile away from the
+old manor-house. Every room of the latter was shown to her; old wood
+panels still remained, prettily painted in a by-gone fashion; old
+documents, and parchment deeds, and leases concerning fish-ponds,
+farms, and the like, were brought out for her inspection, signed by
+my grandfather Pasquier, my great-grandfather Boismorinel, and our
+great-great-grandmother and her husband, Mathurin Budes, the lord of
+Verny le Moustier; and the tradition of Gatienne, _la belle Verrière_
+(also nicknamed _la reine de Hongrie_, it seems) still lingered in the
+county; and many old people still remembered, more or less correctly,
+"Le Chant du Triste Commensal," which a hundred years ago had been in
+everybody's mouth.
+
+She was said to have been the tallest and handsomest woman in Anjou, of
+an imperious will and very masculine character, but immensely popular
+among rich and poor alike; of indomitable energy, and with a finger in
+every pie; but always more for the good of others than her own--a
+typical, managing, business-like French woman, and an exquisite
+musician to boot.
+
+Such was our common ancestress, from whom, no doubt, we drew our love of
+music and our strange, almost hysterical susceptibility to the power of
+sound; from whom had issued those two born nightingales of our
+race--Seraskier, the violinist, and my father, the singer. And, strange
+to say, her eyebrows met at the bridge of her nose just like mine, and
+from under them beamed the luminous, black-fringed, gray-blue eyes of
+Mary, that suffered eclipse whenever their owners laughed or smiled!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+During this interesting journey of Mary's in the flesh, we met every
+night at "Magna sed Apta" in the spirit, as usual; and I was made to
+participate in every incident of it.
+
+We sat by the magic window, and had for our entertainment, now the
+Verrerie de Verny le Moustier in its present state, all full of modern
+life, color, and sound, steam and gas, as she had seen it a few hours
+before; now the old château as it was a hundred years ago; dim and
+indistinct, as though seen by nearsighted eyes at the close of a gray,
+misty afternoon in late autumn through a blurred window-pane, with busy
+but silent shadows moving about--silent, because at first we could not
+hear their speech; it was too thin for our mortal ears, even in this
+dream within our dream! Only Gatienne, the authoritative and commanding
+Gatienne, was faintly audible.
+
+Then we would go down and mix with them. Thus, at one moment, we would
+be in the midst of a charming old-fashioned French family group of
+shadows: Gatienne, with her lovely twin-daughters Jeanne and Anne, and
+her gardeners round her, all trailing young peach and apricot trees
+against what still remained of the ancient buttresses and walls of the
+Abbaye de Verny le Moustier--all this more than a hundred years ago--the
+pale sun of a long-past noon casting the fainter shadows of these faint
+shadows on the shadowy garden-path.
+
+Then, presto! Changing the scene as one changes a slide in a
+magic-lantern, we would skip a century, and behold!
+
+Another French family group, equally charming, on the self-same spot,
+but in the garb of to-day, and no longer shadowy or mute by any means.
+Little trees have grown big; big trees have disappeared to make place
+for industrious workshops and machinery; but the old abbey walls have
+been respected, and gay, genial father, and handsome mother, and lovely
+daughters, all pressing on "la belle Duchesse Anglaise" peaches and
+apricots of her great-great-grandmother's growing.
+
+For this amiable family of the Chamorin became devoted to Mary in a very
+short time--that is, the very moment they first saw her; and she never
+forgot their kindness, courtesy, and hospitality; they made her feel in
+five minutes as though she had known them for many years.
+
+I may as well state here that a few months later she received from
+Mademoiselle du Chamorin (with a charming letter) the identical violin
+that had once belonged to _la belle Verrière_, and which Count Hector
+had found in the possession of an old farmer--the great-grandson of
+Gatienne's coachman--and had purchased, that he might present it as a
+New-year's gift to her descendant, the Duchess of Towers.
+
+It is now mine, alas! I cannot play it; but it amuses and comforts me to
+hold in my hand, when broad and wide awake, an instrument that Mary and
+I have so often heard and seen in our dream, and which has so often rung
+in by-gone days with the strange melody that has had so great an
+influence on our lives. Its aspect, shape, and color, every mark and
+stain of it, were familiar to us before we had ever seen it with the
+bodily eye or handled it with the hand of flesh. It thus came straight
+to us out of the dim and distant past, heralded by the ghost of itself!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To return. Gradually, by practice and the concentration of our united
+will, the old-time figures grew to gain substance and color, and their
+voices became perceptible; till at length there arrived a day when we
+could move among them, and hear them and see them as distinctly as we
+could our own immediate progenitors close by--as Gogo and Mimsey, as
+Monsieur le Major, and the rest.
+
+The child who went about hand in hand with the white-haired lady (whose
+hair was only powdered) and fed the pigeons was my grandmother, Jeanne
+de Boismorinel (who married François Pasquier de la Marière). It was her
+father who wore red heels to his shoes, and made her believe she could
+manufacture little cocked-hats in colored glass; she had lived again in
+me whenever, as a child, I had dreamed that exquisite dream.
+
+I could now evoke her at will; and, with her, many buried memories were
+called out of nothingness into life.
+
+Among other wonderful things, I heard the red-heeled gentleman, M. de
+Boismorinel (my great-grandfather), sing beautiful old songs by Lulli
+and others to the spinet, which he played charmingly a rare
+accomplishment in those days. And lo! these tunes were tunes that had
+risen oft and unbidden in my consciousness, and I had fondly imagined
+that I had composed them myself--little impromptus of my own. And lo,
+again! His voice, thin, high, nasal, but very sympathetic and musical,
+was that never still small voice that has been singing unremittingly for
+more than half a century in the unswept, ungarnished corner of my brain
+where all the cobwebs are.
+
+[Illustration: "THAT NEVER STILL SMALL VOICE."]
+
+And these cobwebs?
+
+Well, I soon became aware, by deeply diving into my inner consciousness
+when awake and at my daily prison toil (which left the mind singularly
+clear and free), that I was full, quite full, of slight elusive
+reminiscences which were neither of my waking life nor of my dream-life
+with Mary: reminiscences of sub-dreams during sleep, and belonging to
+the period of my childhood and early youth; sub-dreams which no doubt
+had been forgotten when I woke, at which time I could only remember the
+surface dreams that had just preceded my waking.
+
+Ponds, rivers, bridges, roads, and streams, avenues of trees, arbors,
+windmills and water-mills, corridors and rooms, church functions,
+village fairs, festivities, men and women and animals, all of another
+time and of a country where I had never set my foot, were familiar to my
+remembrance. I had but to dive deep enough into myself, and there they
+were; and when night came, and sleep, and "Magna sed Apta," I could
+re-evoke them all, and make them real and complete for Mary and myself.
+
+That these subtle reminiscences were true antenatal memories was soon
+proved by my excursions with Mary into the past; and her experience of
+such reminiscences, and their corroboration, were just as my own. We
+have heard and seen her grandfather play the "Chant du Triste Commensal"
+to crowded concert-rooms, applauded to the echo by men and women long
+dead and buried and forgotten!
+
+Now, I believe such reminiscences to form part of the sub-consciousness
+of others, as well as Mary's and mine, and that by perseverance in
+self-research many will succeed in reaching them--perhaps even more
+easily and completely than we have done.
+
+It is something like listening for the overtones of a musical note; we
+do not hear them at first, though they are there, clamoring for
+recognition; and when at last we hear them, we wonder at our former
+obtuseness, so distinct are they.
+
+Let a man with an average ear, however uncultivated, strike the C low
+down on a good piano-forte, keeping his foot on the loud pedal. At first
+he will hear nothing but the rich fundamental note C.
+
+But let him become _expectant_ of certain other notes; for instance, of
+the C in the octave immediately above, then the G immediately above
+that, then the E higher still; he will hear them all in time as clearly
+as the note originally struck; and, finally, a shrill little ghostly and
+quite importunate B flat in the treble will pulsate so loudly in his ear
+that he will never cease to hear it whenever that low C is sounded.
+
+By just such a process, only with infinitely more pains (and in the end
+with what pleasure and surprise), will he grow aware in time of a dim,
+latent, antenatal experience that underlies his own personal experience
+of this life.
+
+We also found that we were able not only to assist as mere spectators at
+such past scenes as I have described (and they were endless), but also
+to identify ourselves occasionally with the actors, and cease for the
+moment to be Mary Seraskier and Peter Ibbetson. Notably was this the
+case with Gatienne. We could each be Gatienne for a space (though never
+both of us together), and when we resumed our own personality again we
+carried back with it a portion of hers, never to be lost again--a
+strange phenomenon, if the reader will but think of it, and
+constituting the germ of a comparative personal immortality on earth.
+
+At my work in prison, even, I could distinctly remember having been
+Gatienne; so that for the time being, Gatienne, a provincial French
+woman who lived a hundred years ago, was contentedly undergoing penal
+servitude in an English jail during the latter half of the
+nineteenth century.
+
+A questionable privilege, perhaps.
+
+But to make up for it, when she was not alive in me she could be brought
+to life in Mary (only in one at a time, it seemed), and travel by rail
+and steamer, and know the uses of gas and electricity, and read the
+telegrams of "our special correspondents" in the _Times_, and taste her
+nineteenth century under more favorable conditions.
+
+Thus we took _la belle Verrière_ by turns, and she saw and heard things
+she little dreamed of a hundred years ago. Besides, she was made to
+share in the glories of "Magna sed Apta."
+
+And the better we knew her the more we loved her; she was a very nice
+person to descend from, and Mary and I were well agreed that we could
+not have chosen a better great-great-grandmother, and wondered what each
+of our seven others was like, for we had fifteen of these between us,
+and as many great-great-grandfathers.
+
+Thirty great-great-grandfathers and great-great-grandmothers had made us
+what we were; it was no good fighting against them and the millions at
+their backs.
+
+Which of them all, strong, but gentle and shy, and hating the very
+sight of blood, yet saw scarlet when he was roused, and thirsted for the
+blood of his foe?
+
+Which of them all, passionate and tender, but proud, high-minded, and
+chaste, and with the world at her feet, was yet ready to "throw her cap
+over the windmills," and give up all for love, deeming the world
+well lost?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That we could have thus identified ourselves, only more easily and
+thoroughly, with our own more immediate progenitors, we felt certain
+enough. But after mature thought we resolved to desist from any further
+attempt at such transfusion of identity, for sacred reasons of
+discretion which the reader will appreciate.
+
+But that this will be done some day (now the way has been made clear),
+and also that the inconveniences and possible abuses of such a faculty
+will be obviated or minimized by the ever-active ingenuity of mankind,
+is to my mind a foregone conclusion.
+
+It is too valuable a faculty to be left in abeyance, and I leave the
+probable and possible consequences of its culture to the reader's
+imagination--merely pointing out to him (as an inducement to cultivate
+that faculty in himself) that if anything can keep us well within the
+thorny path that leads to happiness and virtue, it is the certainty that
+those who come after us will remember having been ourselves, if only in
+a dream--even as the newly-hatched chicken has remembered in its egg the
+use of eyes and ears and the rest, out of the fulness of its long
+antenatal experience; and more fortunate than the helpless human infant
+in this respect, can enter on the business and pleasures of its brief,
+irresponsible existence at once!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Wherefore, oh reader, if you be but sound in mind and body, it most
+seriously behooves you (not only for the sake of those who come after
+you, but your own) to go forth and multiply exceedingly, to marry early
+and much and often, and to select the very best of your kind in the
+opposite sex for this most precious, excellent, and blessed purpose;
+that all your future reincarnations (and hers), however brief, may be
+many; and bring you not only joy and peace and pleasurable wonderment
+and recreation, but the priceless guerdon of well-earned self-approval!
+
+For whoever remembers having once been you, wakes you for the nonce out
+of--nirvana, shall we say? His strength, his beauty, and his wit are
+yours; and the felicity he derives from them in this earthly life is for
+you to share, whenever this subtle remembrance of you stirs in his
+consciousness; and you can never quite sink back again into--nirvana,
+till all your future wakers shall cease to be!
+
+It is like a little old-fashioned French game we used to play at Passy,
+and which is not bad for a dark, rainy afternoon: people sit all round
+in a circle, and each hands on to his neighbor a spill or a
+lucifer-match just blown out, but in which a little live spark still
+lingers; saying, as he does so--
+
+_"Petit bonhomme vit encore!"_
+
+And he, in whose hand the spark becomes extinct, has to pay forfeit and
+retire--"Hélas! petit bonhomme n'est plus! ... Pauv' petit bonhomme!"
+
+Ever thus may a little live spark of your own individual consciousness,
+when the full, quick flame of your actual life here below is
+extinguished, be handed down mildly incandescent to your remotest
+posterity. May it never quite go out--it need not! May you ever be able
+to say of yourself, from generation to generation, "Petit bonhomme vit
+encore!" and still keep one finger at least in the pleasant earthly pie!
+
+And, reader, remember so to order your life on earth that the memory of
+you (like that of Gatienne, la belle Verrière de Verny le Moustier) may
+smell sweet and blossom in the dust--a memory pleasant to recall--to
+this end that its recallings and its recallers may be as numerous as
+filial love and ancestral pride can make them....
+
+And oh! looking _backward_ (as _we_ did), be tender to the failings of
+your forbears, who little guessed when alive that the secrets of their
+long buried hearts should one day be revealed to _you_! Their faults are
+really your own, like the faults of your innocent, ignorant childhood,
+so to say, when you did not know better, as you do now; or will
+soon, thanks to
+
+_"Le Chant du Triste Commensal!"_
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Wherefore, also, beware and be warned in time, ye tenth transmitters of
+a foolish face, ye reckless begetters of diseased or puny bodies, with
+hearts and brains to match! Far down the corridors of time shall
+club-footed retribution follow in your footsteps, and overtake you at
+every turn! Most remorselessly, most vindictively, will you be aroused,
+in sleepless hours of unbearable misery (future-waking nightmares), from
+your false, uneasy dream of death; to participate in an inheritance of
+woe still worse than yours--worse with all the accumulated interest of
+long years and centuries of iniquitous self-indulgence, and poisoned by
+the sting of a self-reproach that shall never cease till the last of
+your tainted progeny dies out, and finds his true nirvana, and yours, in
+the dim, forgetful depths of interstellar space!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And here let me most conscientiously affirm that, partly from my keen
+sense of the solemnity of such an appeal, and the grave responsibility I
+take upon myself in making it; but more especially in order to impress
+you, oh reader, with the full significance of this apocalyptic and
+somewhat minatory utterance (that it may haunt your finer sense during
+your midnight hours of introspective self-communion), I have done my
+best, my very best, to couch it in the obscurest and most unintelligible
+phraseology I could invent. If I have failed to do this, if I have
+unintentionally made any part of my meaning clear, if I have once
+deviated by mistake into what might almost appear like sense--mere
+common-sense--it is the fault of my half-French and wholly imperfect
+education. I am but a poor scribe!
+
+Thus roughly have I tried to give an account of this, the most
+important of our joint discoveries in the strange new world revealed to
+us by chance. More than twenty years of our united lives have been
+devoted to the following out of this slender clew--with what surprising
+results will, I trust, be seen in subsequent volumes.
+
+We have not had time to attempt the unravelling of our English ancestry
+as well--the Crays, and the Desmonds, the Ibbetsons, and Biddulphs,
+etc.--which connects us with the past history of England. The farther we
+got back into France, the more fascinating it became, and the
+easier--and the more difficult to leave.
+
+What an unexampled experience has been ours! To think that we have
+seen--actually seen--_de nos propres yeux vu_--Napoleon Bonaparte
+himself, the arch-arbiter of the world, on the very pinnacle of his
+pride and power; in his little cocked hat and gray double-breasted
+overcoat, astride his white charger, with all his staff around him, just
+as he has been so often painted! Surely the most impressive,
+unforgettable, ineffaceable little figure in all modern history, and
+clothed in the most cunningly imagined make-up that ever theatrical
+costumier devised to catch the public eye and haunt the public memory
+for ages and ages yet to come!
+
+It is a singularly new, piquant, and exciting sensation to stare in
+person, and as in the present, at bygone actualities, and be able to
+foretell the past and remember the future all in one!
+
+To think that we have even beheld him before he was first consul--slim
+and pale, his lank hair dangling down his neck and cheeks, if possible
+more impressive still as innocent as a child of all that lay before him!
+Europe at his feet--the throne--Waterloo-St. Helena--the Iron English
+Duke--the pinnacle turned into a pillory so soon!
+
+_"O corse à cheveux plats, que la France était belle Au soleil de
+Messidor!"_
+
+And Mirabeau and Robespierre, and Danton and Marat and Charlotte Corday!
+we have seen them too; and Marie Antoinette and the fish-wives, and "the
+beautiful head of Lamballe" (on its pike!) ... and watched the tumbrils
+go by to the Place du Carrousel, and gazed at the guillotine by
+moonlight--silent and terror-stricken, our very hearts in our mouths....
+
+And in the midst of it all, ridiculous stray memories of Madame Tussaud
+would come stealing into our ghastly dream of blood and retribution,
+mixing up past and present and future in a manner not to be described,
+and making us smile through our tears!
+
+Then we were present (several times!) at the taking of the Bastille, and
+indeed witnessed most of the stormy scenes of that stormy time, with our
+Carlyle in our hands; and often have we thought, and with many a hearty
+laugh, what fun it must be to write immortal histories, with never an
+eye-witness to contradict you!
+
+And going further back we have haunted Versailles in the days of its
+splendor, and drunk our fill of all the glories of the court of
+Louis XIV!
+
+What imposing ceremonials, what stupendous royal functions have we not
+attended--where all the beauty, wit, and chivalry of France, prostrate
+with reverence and awe (as in the very presence of a god), did loyal
+homage to the greatest monarch this world has ever seen--while we sat
+by, on the very steps of his throne, as he solemnly gave out his royal
+command! and laughed aloud under his very nose--the shallow, silly,
+pompous little snob--and longed to pull it! and tried to disinfect his
+greasy, civet-scented, full-bottomed wig with wholesome whiffs from a
+nineteenth-century regalia!
+
+Nothing of that foolish but fascinating period escaped us. Town, hamlet,
+river, forest, and field; royal palace, princely castle, and starving
+peasants' hut; pulpit, stage, and salon; port, camp, and marketplace;
+tribunal and university; factory, shop, studio, smithy; tavern and
+gambling-hell and den of thieves; convent and jail, torture-chamber and
+gibbet-close, and what not all!
+
+And at every successive step our once desponding, over-anxious,
+over-burdened latter-day souls have swelled with joy and pride and hope
+at the triumphs of our own day all along the line! Yea, even though we
+have heard the illustrious Bossuet preach, and applauded Molière in one
+of his own plays, and gazed at and listened to (and almost forgiven)
+Racine and Corneille, and Boileau and Fénélon, and the good
+Lafontaine--those five ruthless persecutors of our own innocent French
+childhood!
+
+And still ascending the stream of time, we have hobnobbed with Montaigne
+and Rabelais, and been personally bored by Malherbe, and sat at
+Ronsard's feet, and ridden by Froissart's side, and slummed with
+François Villon--in what enchanted slums! ...
+
+François Villon! Think of that, ye fond British bards and bardlets
+of to-day--ye would-be translators and imitators of that
+never-to-be-translated, never-to-be-imitated lament, the immortal
+_Ballade des Dames du Temps jadis_!
+
+And while I speak of it, I may as well mention that we have seen them
+too, or some of them--those fair ladies _he_ had never seen, and who had
+already melted away before his coming, like the snows of yester year,
+_les neiges d'antan!_ Bertha, with the big feet; Joan of Arc, the good
+Lorrainer (what would she think of her native province now!); the very
+learned Héloïse, for love of whom one Peter Esbaillart, or Abélard (a
+more luckless Peter than even I!), suffered such cruel indignities at
+monkish hands; and that haughty, naughty queen, in her Tower of Nesle,
+
+_"Qui commanda que Buridan Fut jecté en ung Sac en Seine...."_
+
+Yes, we have seen them with the eye, and heard them speak and sing, and
+scold and jest, and laugh and weep, and even pray! And I have sketched
+them, as you shall see some day, good reader! And let me tell you that
+their beauty was by no means maddening: the standard of female
+loveliness has gone up, even in France! Even _la très sage Héloïs_ was
+scarcely worth such a sacrifice as--but there! Possess your soul in
+patience; all that, and it is all but endless, will appear in due time,
+with such descriptions and illustrations as I flatter myself the world
+has never bargained for, and will value as it has never valued any
+historical records yet!
+
+Day after day, for more than twenty years, Mary has kept a voluminous
+diary (in a cipher known to us both); it is now my property, and in it
+every detail of our long journey into the past has been set down.
+
+Contemporaneously, day by day (during the leisure accorded to me by the
+kindness of Governor----) I have drawn over again from memory the
+sketches of people and places I was able to make straight from nature
+during those wonderful nights at "Magna sed Apta." I can guarantee the
+correctness of them, and the fidelity of their likenesses; no doubt
+their execution leaves much to be desired.
+
+Both her task and mine (to the future publication of which this
+autobiography is but an introduction) have been performed with the
+minutest care and conscientiousness; no time or trouble have been
+spared. For instance, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew alone, which we
+were able to study from seventeen different points of view, cost us no
+less than two months' unremitting labor.
+
+As we reached further and further back through the stream of time, the
+task became easier in a way; but we have had to generalize more, and
+often, for want of time and space, to use types in lieu of individuals.
+For with every successive generation the number of our progenitors
+increased in geometrical progression (as in the problem of the nails in
+the horseshoe) until a limit of numbers was reached--namely, the sum of
+the inhabitants of the terrestrial globe. In the seventh century there
+was not a person living in France (not to mention Europe) who was not in
+the line of our direct ancestry, excepting, of course, those who had
+died without issue and were mere collaterals.
+
+[Illustration: "THE MAMMOTH."]
+
+We have even just been able to see, as in a glass darkly, the faint
+shadows of the Mammoth and the cave bear, and of the man who hunted and
+killed and ate them, that he might live and prevail.
+
+The Mammoth!
+
+We have walked round him and under him as he browsed, and even _through_
+him where he lay and rested, as one walks through the dun mist in a
+little hollow on a still, damp morning; and turning round to look (at
+the proper distance) there was the unmistakable shape again, just thick
+enough to blot out the lines of the dim primeval landscape beyond, and
+make a hole in the blank sky. A dread silhouette, thrilling our hearts
+with awe--blurred and indistinct like a composite photograph--merely the
+_type_, as it had been seen generally by all who had ever seen it at
+all, every one of whom _(exceptis excipiendis)_ was necessarily an
+ancestor of ours, and of every man now living.
+
+There it stood or reclined, the monster, like the phantom of an
+overgrown hairy elephant; we could almost see, or fancy we saw, the
+expression of his dull, cold, antediluvian eye--almost perceive a
+suggestion of russet-brown in his fell.
+
+Mary firmly believed that we should have got in time to our hairy
+ancestor with pointed ears and a tail, and have been able to ascertain
+whether he was arboreal in his habits or not. With what passionate
+interest she would have followed and studied and described him! And I!
+With what eager joy, and yet with what filial reverence, I would have
+sketched his likeness--with what conscientious fidelity as far as my poor
+powers would allow! (For all we know to the contrary he may have been
+the most attractive and engaging little beast that ever was, and far
+less humiliating to descend from than many a titled yahoo of the
+present day.)
+
+Fate, alas, has willed that it should be otherwise, and on others, duly
+trained, must devolve the delightful task of following up the clew we
+have been so fortunate as to discover.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now the time has come for me to tell as quickly as I may the story
+of my bereavement--a bereavement so immense that no man, living or dead,
+can ever have experienced the like; and to explain how it is that I have
+not only survived it and kept my wits (which some people seem to doubt),
+but am here calmly and cheerfully writing my reminiscences, just as if I
+were a famous Academician, actor, novelist, statesman, or general
+diner-out--blandly garrulous and well-satisfied with myself and
+the world.
+
+During the latter years of our joint existence Mary and I engrossed by
+our fascinating journey through the centuries, had seen little or
+nothing of each other's outer lives, or rather I had seen nothing of
+hers (for she still came back sometimes with me to my jail); I only saw
+her as she chose to appear in our dream.
+
+Perhaps at the bottom of this there may have been a feminine dislike on
+her part to be seen growing older, for at "Magna sed Apta" we were
+always twenty-eight or thereabouts--at our very best. We had truly
+discovered the fountain of perennial youth, and had drunk thereof! And
+in our dream we always felt even younger than we looked; we had the
+buoyancy of children and their freshness.
+
+Often had we talked of death and separation and the mystery beyond, but
+only as people do for whom such contingencies are remote; yet in reality
+time flew as rapidly for us as for others, although we were less
+sensible of its flight.
+
+There came a day when Mary's exuberant vitality, so constantly
+overtaxed, broke down, and she was ill for a while; although that did
+not prevent our meeting as usual, and there was no perceptible
+difference in her when we met. But I am certain that in reality she was
+never quite the same again as she had been, and the dread possibility of
+parting any day would come up oftener in our talk; in our minds, only
+too often, and our minds were as one.
+
+She knew that if I died first, everything I had brought into "Magna sed
+Apta" (and little it was) would be there no more; even to my body, ever
+lying supine on the couch by the enchanted window, it she had woke by
+chance to our common life before I had, or remained after I had been
+summoned away to my jail.
+
+And I knew that, if she died, not only her body on the adjacent couch,
+but all "Magna sed Apta" itself would melt away, and be as if it had
+never been, with its endless galleries and gardens and magic windows,
+and all the wonders it contained.
+
+Sometimes I felt a hideous nervous dread, on sinking into sleep, lest I
+should find it was so, and the ever-heavenly delight of waking there,
+and finding all as usual, was but the keener. I would kneel by her
+inanimate body, and gaze at her with a passion of love that seemed made
+up of all the different kinds of love a human being can feel; even the
+love of a dog for his mistress was in it, and that of a wild beast for
+its young.
+
+With eager, tremulous anxiety and aching suspense I would watch for the
+first light breath from her lips, the first faint tinge of carmine in
+her cheek, that always heralded her coming back to life. And when she
+opened her eyes and smiled, and stretched her long young limbs in the
+joy of waking, what transports of gratitude and relief!
+
+[Illustration: "WAITING"]
+
+Ah me! the recollection!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At last a terrible unforgettable night arrived when my presentiment was
+fulfilled.
+
+I awoke in the little lumber-room of "Parva sed Apta," where the door
+had always been that led to and from our palace of delight; but there
+was no door any longer--nothing but a blank wall....
+
+I woke back at once in my cell, in such a state as it is impossible to
+describe. I felt there must be some mistake, and after much time and
+effort was able to sink into sleep again, but with the same result: the
+blank wall, the certainty that "Magna sed Apta" was closed forever, that
+Mary was dead; and then the terrible jump back into my prison
+life again.
+
+This happened several times during the night, and when the morning
+dawned I was a raving madman. I took the warder who first came
+(attracted by my cries of "Mary!") for Colonel Ibbetson, and tried to
+kill him, and should have done so, but that he was a very big man,
+almost as powerful as myself and only half my age.
+
+Other warders came to the rescue, and I took them all for Ibbetsons, and
+fought like the maniac I was.
+
+When I came to myself, after long horrors and brain-fever and what not,
+I was removed from the jail infirmary to another place, where I am now.
+
+I had suddenly recovered my reason, and woke to mental agony such as I,
+who had stood in the dock and been condemned to a shameful death, had
+never even dreamed of.
+
+I soon had the knowledge of my loss confirmed, and heard (it had been
+common talk for more than nine days) that the famous Mary, Duchess of
+Towers, had met her death at the ------ station of the Metropolitan
+Railway.
+
+A woman, carrying a child, had been jostled by a tipsy man just as a
+train was entering the station, and dropped her child onto the metals.
+She tried to jump after it but was held back, and Mary, who had just
+come up, jumped in her stead, and by a miracle of strength and agility
+was just able to clutch the child and get onto the six-foot way as the
+engine came by.
+
+She was able to carry the child to the end of the train, and was helped
+onto the platform. It was her train, and she got into a carriage, but
+she was dead before it reached the next station. Her heart, (which, it
+seems, had been diseased for some time) had stopped, and all was over.
+
+So died Mary Seraskier, at fifty-three.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I lay for many weeks convalescent in body, but in a state of dumb, dry
+tearless, despair, to which there never came a moment's relief, except
+in the dreamless sleep I got from chloral, which was given to me in
+large quantities--and then, the _waking_!
+
+I never spoke nor answered a question, and hardly ever stirred. I had
+one fixed idea--that of self-destruction; and after two unsuccessful
+attempts, I was so closely bound and watched night and day that any
+further attempt was impossible. They would not trust me with a toothpick
+or a button or a piece of common packthread.
+
+I tried to starve myself to death and refused all solid food: but an
+intolerable thirst (perhaps artificially brought on) made it impossible
+for me to refuse any liquid that was offered, and I was tempted with
+milk, beef-tea, port, and sherry, and these kept me alive....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I had lost all wish to dream.
+
+At length, one afternoon, a strange, inexplicable, overwhelming
+nostalgic desire came over me to see once more the Mare d'Auteuil--only
+once; to walk thither for the last time through the Chaussée de la
+Muette, and by the fortifications.
+
+It grew upon me till it became a torture to wait for bedtime, so frantic
+was my impatience.
+
+When the long-wished-for hour arrived at last, I laid myself down once
+more (as nearly as I could for my bonds) in the old position I had not
+tried for so long; my will intent upon the Porte de la Muette, an old
+stone gate-way that separated the Grande Rue de Passy from the entrance
+to the Bois de Boulogne--a kind of Temple Bar.
+
+It was pulled down forty-five years ago.
+
+I soon found myself there, just where the Grande Rue meets the Rue de la
+Pompe, and went through the arch and looked towards the Bois.
+
+It was a dull, leaden day in autumn; few people were about, but a gay
+_repas de noces_ was being held at a little restaurant on my right-hand
+side. It was to celebrate the wedding of Achille Grigoux, the
+green-grocer, with Félicité Lenormand, who had been the Seraskiers'
+house-maid. I suddenly remembered all this, and that Mimsey and Gogo
+were of the party--the latter, indeed, being _premier garçon d'honneur_,
+on whom would soon devolve the duty of stealing the bride's garter, and
+cutting it up into little bits to adorn the button-holes of the male
+guests before the ball began.
+
+In an archway on my left some forlorn, worn-out old rips, broken-kneed
+and broken-winded, were patiently waiting, ready saddled and bridled, to
+be hired--Chloris, Murat, Rigolette, and others: I knew and had ridden
+them all nearly half a century ago. Poor old shadows of the long-dead
+past, so life-like and real and pathetic--it "split me the heart" to
+see them!
+
+A handsome young blue-coated, silver-buttoned courier of the name of
+Lami came trotting along from St. Cloud on a roan horse, with a great
+jingling of his horse's bells and clacking of his short-handled whip. He
+stopped at the restaurant and called for a glass of white wine, and
+rising in his stirrups, shouted gayly for Monsieur et Madame Grigoux.
+They appeared at the first-floor window, looking very happy, and he
+drank their health, and they his. I could see Gogo and Mimsey in the
+crowd behind them, and mildly wondered again, as I had so often wondered
+before, how I came to see it all from the outside--from another point of
+view than Gogo's.
+
+Then the courier bowed gallantly, and said, _"Bonne chance!"_ and went
+trotting down the Grande Rue on his way to the Tuileries, and the
+wedding guests began to sing: they sang a song beginning--
+
+_"Il était un petit navire, Qui n'avait jamais navigué_...."
+
+I had quite forgotten it, and listened till the end, and thought it very
+pretty; and was interested in a dull, mechanical way at discovering
+that it must be the original of Thackeray's famous ballad of "Little
+Billee," which I did not hear till many years after. When they came to
+the last verse--
+
+"_Si cette histoire vous embête, Nous allons la recommencer_,"
+
+I went on my way. This was my last walk in dreamland, perhaps, and
+dream-hours are uncertain, and I would make the most of them, and
+look about me.
+
+I walked towards Ranelagh, a kind of casino, where they used to give
+balls and theatrical performances on Sunday and Thursday nights (and
+where afterwards Rossini spent the latter years of his life; then it was
+pulled down, I am told, to make room for many smart little villas).
+
+In the meadow opposite M. Erard's park, Saindou's school-boys were
+playing rounders--_la balle au camp_--from which I concluded it was a
+Thursday afternoon, a half-holiday; if they had had clean shirts on
+(which they had not) it would have been Sunday, and the holiday a
+whole one.
+
+I knew them all, and the two _pions_, or ushers, M. Lartigue and _le
+petit Cazal_; but no longer cared for them or found them amusing or
+interesting in the least.
+
+Opposite the Ranelagh a few old hackney-coach men were pacifically
+killing time by a game of _bouchon_--knocking sous off a cork with other
+sous--great fat sous and double sous long gone out of fashion. It is a
+very good game, and I watched it for a while and envied the
+long-dead players.
+
+Close by was a small wooden shed, or _baraque_, prettily painted and
+glazed, and ornamented at the top with little tricolor flags; it
+belonged to a couple of old ladies, Mère Manette and Grandmère
+Manette-the two oldest women ever seen. They were very keen about
+business, and would not give credit for a centime--not even to English
+boys. They were said to be immensely rich and quite alone in the world.
+How very dead they must be now! I thought. And I gazed at them and
+wondered at their liveliness and the pleasure they took in living. They
+sold many things: nougat, _pain d'èpices_, mirlitons, hoops, drums,
+noisy battledoors and shuttlecocks; and little ten-sou hand-mirrors,
+neatly bound in zinc, that could open and shut.
+
+I looked at myself in one of these that was hanging outside; I was old
+and worn and gray-my face badly shaven--my hair almost white. I had
+never been old in a dream before.
+
+I walked through the gate in the fortifications on to the outer Talus
+(which was quite bare in those days), in the direction of the Mare
+d'Auteuil. The place seemed very deserted and dull for a Thursday. It
+was a sad and sober walk; my melancholy was not to be borne--my heart
+was utterly broken, and my body so tired I could scarcely drag myself
+along. Never before had I known in a dream what it was to be tired.
+
+I gazed at the famous fortifications in all their brand-new pinkness,
+the scaffoldings barely removed--some of them still lying in the dry
+ditch between--and smiled to think how these little brick and granite
+walls would avail to keep the Germans out of Paris thirty years later
+(twenty years ago). I tried to throw a stone across the narrow part, and
+found I could no longer throw stones; so I sat down and rested. How thin
+my legs were! and how miserably clad--in old prison trousers, greasy,
+stained, and frayed, and ignobly kneed--and what boots!
+
+[Illustration: "I sat down and rested."]
+
+Never had I been shabby in a dream before.
+
+Why could not I, once for all, walk round to the other side and take a
+header _à la hussarde_ off those lofty bulwarks, and kill myself for
+good and all? Alas! I should only blur the dream, and perhaps even wake
+in my miserable strait-waistcoat. And I wanted to see the _mare_ once
+more, very badly.
+
+This set me thinking. I would fill my pockets with stones, and throw
+myself into the Mare d'Auteuil after I had taken a last good look at it,
+and around. Perhaps the shock of emotion, in my present state of
+weakness, might really kill me in my sleep. Who knows? it was worth
+trying, anyhow.
+
+I got up and dragged myself to the _mare_. It was deserted but for one
+solitary female figure, soberly clad in black and gray, that sat
+motionless on the bench by the old willow.
+
+I walked slowly round in her direction, picking up stones and putting
+them into my pockets, and saw that she was gray-haired and middle-aged,
+with very dark eyebrows, and extremely tall, and that her magnificent
+eyes were following me.
+
+Then, as I drew nearer, she smiled and showed gleaming white teeth, and
+her eyes crinkled and nearly closed up as she did so.
+
+"Oh, my God!" I shrieked; "it is Mary Seraskier!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I ran to her--I threw myself at her feet, and buried my face in her lap,
+and there I sobbed like a hysterical child, while she tried to soothe me
+as one soothes a child.
+
+After a while I looked up into her face. It was old and worn and gray,
+and her hair nearly white, like mine. I had never seen her like that
+before; she had always been eight-and-twenty. But age became her
+well--she looked so benignly beautiful and calm and grand that I was
+awed--and quick, chill waves went down my backbone.
+
+Her dress and bonnet were old and shabby, her gloves had been
+mended--old kid gloves with fur about the wrists. She drew them off, and
+took my hands and made me sit beside her, and looked at me for a while
+with all her might in silence.
+
+At length she said: "Gogo mio, I know all you have been through by the
+touch of your hands. Does the touch of mine tell you nothing?"
+
+It told me nothing but her huge love for me, which was all I cared for,
+and I said so.
+
+She sighed, and said: "I was afraid it would be like this. The old
+circuit is broken, and can't be restored--not yet!"
+
+We tried again hard; but it was useless.
+
+She looked round and about and up at the tree-tops, everywhere; and then
+at me again, with great wistfulness, and shivered, and finally began to
+speak, with hesitation at first, and in a manner foreign to her. But
+soon she became apparently herself, and found her old swift smile and
+laugh, her happy slight shrugs and gestures, and quaint polyglot
+colloquialisms (which I omit, as I cannot always spell them); her
+homely, simple ways of speech, her fluent, magnetic energy, the winning
+and sympathetic modulations of her voice, its quick humorous changes
+from grave to gay--all that made everything she said so suggestive of
+all she wanted to say besides.
+
+"Gogo, I knew you would come. I _wished_ it! How dreadfully you have
+suffered! How thin you are! It shocks me to see you! But that will not
+be any more; we are going to change all that.
+
+"Gogo, you have no idea how difficult it has been for me to come back,
+even for a few short hours, for I can't hold on very long. It is like
+hanging on to the window-sill by one's wrists. This time it is Hero
+swimming to Leander, or Juliet climbing up to Romeo.
+
+"Nobody has ever come back before.
+
+"I am but a poor husk of my former self, put together at great pains for
+you to know me by. I could not make myself again what I have always been
+to you. I had to be content with this, and so must you. These are the
+clothes I died in. But you knew me directly, dear Gogo.
+
+"I have come a long way--such a long way--to have an _abboccamento_ with
+you. I had so many things to say. And now we are both here, hand in hand
+as we used to be, I can't even understand what they were; and if I
+could, I couldn't make _you_ understand. But you will know some day, and
+there is no hurry whatever.
+
+"Every thought you have had since I died, I know already; _your_ share
+of the circuit is unbroken at least. I know now why you picked up those
+stones and put them in your pockets. You must never think of _that_
+again--you never will. Besides, it would be of no use, poor Gogo!"
+
+Then she looked up at the sky and all round her again, and smiled in her
+old happy manner, and rubbed her eyes with the backs of her hands, and
+seemed to settle herself for a good long talk--an _abboccamento!_
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Of all she said I can only give a few fragments--whatever I can recall
+and understand when awake. Wherever I have forgotten I will put a line
+of little dots. Only when I sleep and dream can I recall and understand
+the rest. It seems all very simple then. I often say to myself, "I will
+fix it well in my mind, and put it into well-chosen words--_her_
+words--and learn them by heart; and then wake cautiously and remember
+them, and write them all down in a book, so that they shall do for
+others all they have done for me, and turn doubt into happy certainty,
+and despair into patience and hope and high elation."
+
+[Illustration: "IT IS MARY SERASKIER!"]
+
+But the bell rings and I wake, and my memory plays me false. Nothing
+remains but the knowledge _that all will be well for us all, and of such
+a kind that those who do not sigh for the moon will be well content_.
+
+Alas, this knowledge: I cannot impart it to others. Like many who have
+lived before me, I cannot prove--I can only affirm....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"How odd and old-fashioned it feels," she began, "to have eyes and ears
+again, and all that--little open windows on to what is near us. They are
+very clumsy contrivances! I had already forgotten them."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Look, there goes our old friend, the water-rat, under the bank--the old
+fat father--_le bon gros père_--as we used to call him. He is only a
+little flat picture moving upsidedown in the opposite direction across
+the backs of our eyes, and the farther he goes the smaller he seems. A
+couple of hundred yards off we shouldn't see him at all. As it is, we
+can only see the outside of him, and that only on one side at a time;
+and yet he is full of important and wonderful things that have taken
+millions of years to make--like us! And to see him at all we have to
+look straight at him--and then we can't see what's behind us or
+around--and if it was dark we couldn't see anything whatever.
+
+Poor eyes! Little bags full of water, with a little magnifying-glass
+inside, and a nasturtium leaf behind--to catch the light and feel it!
+
+A celebrated German oculist once told papa that if his instrument-maker
+were to send him such an ill-made machine as a human eye, he would send
+it back and refuse to pay the bill. I can understand that now; and yet
+on earth where should we be without eyes? And afterwards where should we
+be if some of us hadn't once had them on earth?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I can hear your dear voice, Gogo, with both ears. Why two ears? Why
+only two? What you want, or think, or feel, you try to tell me in sounds
+that you have been taught--English, French. If I didn't know English and
+French, it would be no good whatever. Language is a poor thing. You fill
+your lungs with wind and shake a little slit in your throat, and make
+mouths, and that shakes the air; and the air shakes a pair of little
+drums in my head--a very complicated arrangement, with lots of bones
+behind--and my brain seizes your meaning in the rough. What a roundabout
+way, and what a waste of time!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And so with all the rest. We can't even smell straight! A dog would
+laugh at us--not that even a dog knows much!
+
+And feeling! We can feel too hot or too cold, and it sometimes makes us
+ill, or even kills us. But we can't feel the coming storm, or which is
+north and south, or where the new moon is, or the sun at midnight, or
+the stars at noon, or even what o'clock it is by our own measurement. We
+cannot even find our way home blindfolded--not even a pigeon can do
+that, nor a swallow, nor an owl! Only a mole, or a blind man, perhaps,
+feebly groping with a stick, if he has already been that way before.
+
+And taste! It is well said there is no accounting for it.
+
+And then, to keep all this going, we have to eat, and drink, and sleep,
+and all the rest. What a burden!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And you and I are the only mortals that I know of who ever found a way
+to each other's inner being by the touch of the hands. And then we had
+to go to sleep first. Our bodies were miles apart; not that _that_ would
+have made any difference, for we could never have done it waking--never;
+not if we hugged each other to extinction!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Gogo, I cannot find any words to tell you _how_, for there are none in
+any language that _I_ ever knew to tell it; but where I am it is all ear
+and eye and the rest in _one_, and there is, oh, how much more besides!
+Things a homing-pigeon has known, and an ant, and a mole, and a
+water-beetle, and an earthworm, and a leaf, and a root, and a
+magnet--even a lump of chalk, and more. One can see and smell and touch
+and taste a sound, as well as hear it, and _vice versâ_. It is very
+simple, though it may not seem so to you now.
+
+And the sounds! Ah, what sounds! The thick atmosphere of earth is no
+conductor for such as _they_, and earthly ear-drums no receiver. Sound
+is everything. Sound and light are one.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And what does it all mean?
+
+I knew what it meant when I was there--part of it, at least--and should
+know again in a few hours. But this poor old earth-brain of mine, which
+I have had to put on once more as an old woman puts on a nightcap, is
+like my eyes and ears. It can now only understand what is of the
+earth--what _you_ can understand, Gogo, who are still of the earth. I
+forget, as one forgets an ordinary dream, as one sometimes forgets the
+answer to a riddle, or the last verse of a song. It is on the tip of the
+tongue; but there it sticks, and won't come any farther.
+
+Remember, it is only in your brain I am living now--your earthly brain,
+that has been my only home for so many happy years, as mine has
+been yours.
+
+How we have nestled!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But this I know: one must have had them all once--brains, ears, eyes,
+and the rest--on earth. 'Il faut avoir passé par là!' or no
+after-existence for man or beast would be possible or even conceivable.
+
+One cannot teach a born deaf-mute how to understand a musical score,
+nor a born blind man how to feel color. To Beethoven, who had once heard
+with the ear, his deafness made no difference, nor their blindness to
+Homer and Milton.
+
+Can you make out my little parable?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Sound and light and heat, and electricity and motion, and will and
+thought and remembrance, and love and hate and pity, and the desire to
+be born and to live, and the longing of all things alive and dead to get
+near each other, or to fly apart--and lots of other things besides! All
+that comes to the same--'C'est comme qui dirait bonnet blanc et blanc
+bonnet,' as Monsieur le Major used to say. 'C'est simple comme bonjour!'
+
+Where I am, Gogo, I can hear the sun shining on the earth and making
+the flowers blow, and the birds sing, and the bells peal for birth and
+marriage and death--happy, happy death, if you only knew--'C'est la clef
+des champs!'
+
+It shines on moons and planets, and I can hear it, and hear the echo
+they give back again. The very stars are singing; rather a long way off!
+but it is well worth their while with such an audience as lies between
+us and them; and they can't help it....
+
+I can't hear it here--not a bit--now that I've got my ears on; besides,
+the winds of the earth are too loud....
+
+Ah, that _is_ music, if you like; but men and women are stone-deaf to
+it--their ears are in the way! ...
+
+Those poor unseen flat fish that live in the darkness and mud at the
+bottom of deep seas can't catch the music men and women make upon the
+earth--such poor music as it is! But if ever so faint a murmur, borne on
+the wings and fins of a sunbeam, reaches them for a few minutes at
+mid-day, and they have a speck of marrow in their spines to feel it, and
+no ears or eyes to come between, they are better off than any man, Gogo.
+Their dull existence is more blessed than his.
+
+But alas for them, as yet! They haven't got the memory of the eye and
+ear, and without that no speck of spinal marrow will avail; they must be
+content to wait, like you.
+
+The blind and deaf?
+
+Oh yes; _là bas_, it is all right for the poor deaf-mutes and born
+blind of the earth; they can remember with the past eyes and ears of all
+the rest. Besides, it is no longer _they_. There is no _they_! That is
+only a detail.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+You must try and realize that it is just as though all space between us
+and the sun and stars were full of little specks of spinal marrow, much
+too small to be seen in any microscope--smaller than anything in the
+world. All space is full of them, shoulder to shoulder--almost as close
+as sardines in a box--and there is still room for more! Yet a single
+drop of water would hold them all, and not be the less transparent. They
+all remember having been alive on earth or elsewhere, in some form or
+other, and each knows all the others remember. I can only compare it
+to that.
+
+Once all that space was only full of stones, rushing, whirling,
+meeting, and crushing together, and melting and steaming in the
+white-heat of their own hurry. But now there's a crop of something
+better than stones, I can promise you! It goes on gathering, and being
+garnered and mingled and sifted and winnowed--the precious,
+indestructible harvest of how many millions of years of life!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And this I know: the longer and more strenuously and completely one
+lives one's life on earth the better for all. It is the foundation of
+everything. Though if men could guess what is in store for them when
+they die, without also knowing _that_, they would not have the patience
+to live--they wouldn't wait! For who would fardels bear? They would just
+put stones in their pockets, as you did, and make for the nearest pond.
+
+They mustn't!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Nothing is lost--nothing! From the ineffable, high, fleeting thought a
+Shakespeare can't find words to express, to the slightest sensation of
+an earthworm--nothing! Not a leaf's feeling of the light, not a
+loadstone's sense of the pole, not a single volcanic or electric thrill
+of the mother earth.
+
+All knowledge must begin on earth for _us_. It is the most favored
+planet in this poor system of ours just now, and for a few short
+millions of years to come. There are just a couple of others, perhaps
+three; but they are not of great consequence. 'Il y fait trop chaud--ou
+pas assez!' They are failures.
+
+The sun, the father sun, _le bon gros père_, rains life on to the
+mother earth. A poor little life it was at first, as you know--grasses
+and moss, and little wriggling, transparent things--all stomach; it is
+quite true! That is what we come from--Shakespeare, and you, and I!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After each individual death the earth retains each individual clay to
+be used again and again; and, as far as I can see, it rains back each
+individual essence to the sun--or somewhere near it--like a precious
+water-drop returned to the sea, where it mingles, after having been
+about and seen something of the world, and learned the use of five small
+wits--and remembering all! Yes, like that poor little exiled wandering
+water-drop in the pretty song your father used to sing, and which always
+manages to find its home at last--
+
+     _'Va passaggier' in fiume,
+     Va prigionier' in fonte,
+       Ma sempre ritorn' al mar.'_
+
+Or else it is as if little grains of salt were being showered into the
+Mare d'Auteuil, to melt and mingle with the water and each other till
+the Mare d'Auteuil itself was as salt as salt can be.
+
+Not till that Mare d'Auteuil of the sun is saturated with the salt of
+the earth, of earthly life and knowledge, will the purpose be complete,
+and then old mother earth may well dry up into a cinder like the moon;
+its occupation will be gone, like hers--'adieu, panier, les vendanges
+sont faites!'
+
+And, as for the sun and its surrounding ocean of life--ah, that is
+beyond _me_! but the sun will dry up, too, and its ocean of life no
+doubt be drawn to other greater suns. For everything seems to go on more
+or less in the same way, only crescendo, everywhere and forever.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+You must understand that it is not a bit like an ocean, nor a bit like
+water-drops, or grains of salt, or specks of spinal marrow; but it is
+only by such poor metaphors that I can give you a glimpse of what I
+mean, since you can no longer understand me, as you used to do on
+earthly things, by the mere touch of our hands.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Gogo, I am the only little water-drop, the one grain of salt that has
+not yet been able to dissolve and melt away in that universal sea; I am
+the exception.
+
+It is as though a long, invisible chain bound me still to the earth,
+and I were hung at the other end of it in a little transparent locket, a
+kind of cage, which lets me see and hear things all round, but keeps me
+from melting away.
+
+And soon I found that this locket was made of that half of you that is
+still in me, so that I couldn't dissolve, because half of me wasn't dead
+at all; for the chain linked me to that half of myself I had left in
+you, so that half of me actually wasn't there to be dissolved.... I am
+getting rather mixed!
+
+But oh, my heart's true love, how I hugged my chain, with you at the
+other end of it!
+
+With such pain and effort as you cannot conceive, I have crept along it
+back to you, like a spider on an endless thread of its own spinning.
+Such love as mine is stronger then death indeed!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have come to tell you that we are inseparable forever, you and I, one
+double speck of spinal marrow--'Philipschen!'--one little grain of salt,
+one drop. There is to be no parting for _us_--I can see that; but such
+extraordinary luck seems reserved for you and me alone up to now; and it
+is all our own doing.
+
+But not till you join me shall you and I be complete, and free to melt
+away in that universal ocean, and take our part, as One, in all is
+to be.
+
+That moment--you must not hasten it by a moment. Time is nothing. I'm
+even beginning to believe there's no such thing; there is so little
+difference, _là-bas_, between a year and a day. And as for space--dear
+me, an inch is as as an ell!
+
+Things cannot be measured like that.
+
+A midge's life is as long as a man's, for it has time to learn its
+business, and do all the harm it can, and fight, and make love, and
+marry, and reproduce its kind, and grow disenchanted and bored and sick
+and content to die--all in a summer afternoon. An average man can live
+to seventy years without doing much more.
+
+And then there are tall midges, and clever and good-looking ones, and
+midges of great personal strength and cunning, who can fly a little
+faster and a little farther than the rest, and live an hour longer to
+drink a whole drop more of some other creature's blood; but it does not
+make a very great difference!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+No, time and space mean just the same as 'nothing.'
+
+But for you they mean much, as you have much to do. Our joint life must
+be revealed--that long, sweet life of make-believe, that has been so
+much more real than reality. Ah! where and what were time or space to
+us then?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And you must tell all we have found out, and how; the way must be shown
+to others with better brains and better training than _we_ had. The
+value to mankind--to mankind here and hereafter--may be incalculable.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For some day, when all is found out that can be found out on earth, and
+made the common property of all (or even before that), the great man
+will perhaps arise and make the great guess that is to set us all free,
+here and hereafter. Who knows?
+
+I feel this splendid guesser will be some inspired musician of the
+future, as simple as a little child in all things but his knowledge of
+the power of sound; but even little children will have learned much in
+those days. He will want new notes and find them--new notes between the
+black and white keys. He will go blind like Milton and Homer, and deaf
+like Beethoven; and then, all in the stillness and the dark, all in the
+depths of his forlorn and lonely soul, he will make his best music, and
+out of the endless mazes of its counterpoint he will evolve a secret, as
+we did from the "Chant du Triste Commensal," but it will be a greater
+secret than ours. Others will have been very near this hidden treasure;
+but he will happen right _on_ it, and unearth it, and bring it to light.
+
+I think I see him sitting at the key-board, so familiar of old to the
+feel of his consummate fingers; painfully dictating his score to some
+most patient and devoted friend--mother, sister, daughter, wife--that
+score that he will never see or hear.
+
+What a stammerer! Not only blind and deaf, but _mad_--mad in the
+world's eyes, for fifty, a hundred, a thousand years. Time is nothing;
+but that score will survive....
+
+He will die of it, of course; and when he dies and comes to us, there
+will be joy from here to Sirius, and beyond.
+
+And one day they will find out on earth that he was only deaf and
+blind--not mad at all. They will hear and _understand_--they will know
+that he saw and heard as none had ever heard or seen before!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For 'as we sow we reap'; that is a true saying, and all the sowing is
+done here on earth, and the reaping beyond. Man is a grub; his dead
+clay, as he lies coffined in his grave, is the left-off cocoon he has
+spun for himself during his earthly life, to burst open and soar from
+with all his memories about him, even his lost ones. Like the
+dragon-fly, the butterfly, the moth ... and when _they_ die it is the
+same, and the same with a blade of grass. We are all, _tous tant que
+nous sommes_, little bags of remembrance that never dies; that's what
+we're _for_. But we can only bring with us to the common stock what
+we've got. As Père François used to say, 'La plus belle fille au monde
+ne peut donner que ce qu'elle a.'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Besides all this I am your earthly wife, Gogo--your loving, faithful,
+devoted wife, and I wish it to be known.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And then at last, in the fulness of time--a very few years--ah,
+then----
+
+"Once more shall Neuha lead her Torquil by the hand."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Oh, Mary!" I cried, "shall we be transcendently happy again? As happy
+as we were--_happier_ even?"
+
+Ah, Gogo, is a man happier than a mouse, or a mouse than a turnip, or
+a turnip than a lump of chalk? But what man would be a mouse or a
+turnip, or _vice versâ_? What turnip would be a lump--of anything but
+itself? Are two people happier than one? You and I, yes; because we
+_are_ one; but who else? It is one and all. Happiness is like time
+and space--we make and measure it ourselves; it is a fancy--as big, as
+little, as you please; just a thing of contrasts and comparisons, like
+health or strength or beauty or any other good--that wouldn't even be
+noticed but for sad personal experience of its opposite!--or
+its greater!
+
+"I have forgotten all I know but this, which is for you and me: we are
+inseparable forever. Be sure we shall not want to go back again for
+a moment."
+
+"And is there no punishment or reward?"
+
+Oh, there again! What a detail! Poor little naughty perverse
+midges--who were _born_ so--and _can't_ keep straight! poor little
+exemplary midges who couldn't go wrong if they tried! Is it worth while?
+Isn't it enough for either punishment or reward that the secrets of all
+midges' hearts shall be revealed, and for all other midges to see?
+Think of it!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There are battles to be fought and races to be won, but no longer
+against '_each other_.' And strength and swiftness to win them; but no
+longer any strong and swift. There is weakness and cowardice, but no
+longer any cowards or weaklings. The good and the bad and the worst and
+the best--it is all mixed up. But the good comes to the top; the bad
+goes to the bottom--it is precipitated, as papa used to say. It is not
+an agreeable sediment, with its once useful cruelty at the lowest bottom
+of all--out of sight, out of mind--all but forgotten. _C'est déjà
+le ciel_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"And the goal? The cause, the whither, and the why of it all? Ah!
+Gogo--as inscrutable, as unthinkable as ever, till the great guesser
+comes! At least so it seems to me, speaking as a fool, out of the depths
+of my poor ignorance; for I am a new arrival, and a complete outsider,
+with my chain and locket, waiting for you.
+
+"I have only picked up a few grains of sand on the shore of that sea--a
+few little shells, and I can't even show you what they are like. I see
+that it is no good even talking of it, alas! And I had promised myself
+_so_ much.
+
+"Oh! how my earthly education was neglected, and yours! and how I feel
+it now, with so much to say in words, mere words! Why, to tell you in
+words the little I can see, the very little--so that you could
+understand--would require that each of us should be the greatest poet
+and the greatest mathematician that ever were, rolled into one! How I
+pity you, Gogo--with your untrained, unskilled, innocent pen, poor
+scribe! having to write all this down--for you _must_--and do your poor
+little best, as I have done mine in telling you! You must let the heart
+speak, and not mind style or manner! Write _any_ how! write for the
+greatest need and the greatest number.
+
+"But do just try and see this, dearest, and make the best of it you can:
+as far as _I_ can make it out, everything everywhere seems to be an
+ever-deepening, ever-broadening stream that makes with inconceivable
+velocity for its own proper level, WHERE PERFECTION IS! ... and ever
+gets nearer and nearer, and never finds it, and fortunately never will!
+
+"Only that, unlike an earthly stream, and more like a fresh flowing tide
+up an endless, boundless, shoreless creek (if you can imagine that), the
+level it seeks is immeasurably higher than its source. And everywhere in
+it is Life, Life, Life! ever renewing and doubling itself, and ever
+swelling that mighty river which has no banks!
+
+"And everywhere in it like begets like, _plus_ a little better or a
+little worse; and the little worse finds its way into some backwater and
+sticks there, and finally goes to the bottom, and nobody cares. And the
+little better goes on bettering and bettering--not all man's folly or
+perverseness can hinder _that_, nor make that headlong torrent stay, or
+ebb, or roll backward for a moment--_c'est plus fort que nous_! ... The
+record goes on beating itself, the high-water-mark gets higher and
+higher till the highest on earth is reached that can be--and then, I
+suppose, the earth grows cold and the sun goes out--to be broken up into
+bits, and used all over again, perhaps! And betterness flies to warmer
+climes and higher systems, to better itself still! And so on, from
+better to better, from higher to higher, from warmer to warmer, and
+bigger to bigger--for ever and ever and ever!
+
+"But the final superlative of all, absolute all--goodness and
+all-highness, absolute all-wisdom, absolute omnipotence, beyond which
+there neither is nor can be anything more, will never be reached at
+all--since there are no such things; they are abstractions; besides
+which, attainment means rest, and rest stagnation, and stagnation an end
+of all! And there is no end, and never can be--no end to Time and all
+the things that are done in it--no end to Space and all the things that
+fill it, or all would come together in a heap and smash up in the
+middle--and there _is_ no middle!--no end, no beginning, no middle! _no
+middle_, Gogo! think of _that_! it is the most inconceivable thing
+of all!!!
+
+"So who shall say where Shakespeare and you and I come in--tiny links in
+an endless chain, so tiny that even Shakespeare is no bigger than we!
+And just a little way behind us, those little wriggling transparent
+things, all stomach, that we descend from; and far ahead of ourselves,
+but in the direct line of a long descent from _us_, an ever-growing
+conscious Power, so strong, so glad, so simple, so wise, so mild, and so
+beneficent, that what can we do, even now, but fall on our knees with
+our foreheads in the dust, and our hearts brimful of wonder, hope, and
+love, and tender shivering awe; and worship as a yet unborn, barely
+conceived, and scarce begotten _Child_--that which we have always been
+taught to worship as a _Father_--That which is not now, but _is_ to
+be--That which we shall all share in and be part and parcel of in the
+dim future--That which is slowly, surely, painfully weaving Itself out
+of us and the likes of us all through the limitless Universe, and Whose
+coming we can but faintly foretell by the casting of its shadow on our
+own slowly, surely, painfully awakening souls!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Then she went on to speak of earthly things, and ask questions in her
+old practical way. First of my bodily health, with the tenderest
+solicitude and the wisest advice--as a mother to a son. She even
+insisted on listening to my heart, like a doctor.
+
+Then she spoke at great length of the charities in which she had been
+interested, and gave me many directions which I was to write, as coming
+from myself, to certain people whose names and addresses she impressed
+upon me with great care.
+
+I have done as she wished, and most of these directions have been
+followed to the letter, with no little wonder on the world's part (as
+the world well knows) that such sagacious and useful reforms should have
+originated with the inmate of a criminal lunatic asylum.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At last the time came for us to part. She foresaw that I should have to
+wake in a few minutes, and said, rising----
+
+"And now, Gogo, the best beloved that ever was on earth, take me once
+more in your dear arms, and kiss me good-bye for a little while--_auf
+wiedersehen_. Come here to rest and think and remember when your body
+sleeps. My spirit will always be here with you. I may even be able to
+come back again myself--just this poor husk of me--hardly more to look
+at than a bundle of old clothes; but yet a world made up of love for
+_you_. Good-bye, good-bye, dearest and best. Time is nothing, but I
+shall count the hours. Good-bye...."
+
+Even as she strained me to her breast I awoke.
+
+[Illustration: "GOOD-BYE"]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I awoke, and knew that the dread black shadow of melancholia had passed
+away from me like a hideous nightmare--like a long and horrible winter.
+My heart was full of the sunshine of spring--the gladness of awaking to
+a new life.
+
+I smiled at my night attendant, who stared back at me in astonishment,
+and exclaimed----
+
+"Why, sir, blest if you ain't a new man altogether. There, now!"
+
+I wrung his hand, and thanked him for all his past patience, kindness,
+and forbearance with such effusion that his eyes had tears in them. I
+had not spoken for weeks, and he heard my voice for the first time.
+
+That day, also, without any preamble or explanation, I gave the doctor
+and the chaplain and the governor my word of honor that I would not
+attempt my life again, or any one else's, and was believed and trusted
+on the spot; and they unstrapped me.
+
+I was never so touched in my life.
+
+In a week I recovered much of my strength; but I was an old man. That
+was a great change.
+
+Most people age gradually and imperceptibly. To me old age had come of a
+sudden--in a night, as it were; but with it, and suddenly also, the
+resigned and cheerful acquiescence, the mild serenity, that are its
+compensation and more.
+
+My hope, my certainty to be one with Mary some day--that is my haven, my
+heaven--a consummation of completeness beyond which there is nothing to
+wish for or imagine. Come what else may, that is safe, and that is all I
+care for. She was able to care for me, and for many other things
+besides, and I love her all the more for it; but I can only care
+for _her_.
+
+Sooner or later--a year--ten years; it does not matter much. I also am
+beginning to disbelieve in the existence of time.
+
+That waking was the gladdest in my life--gladder even than the waking
+in my condemned cell the morning after my sentence of death, when
+another black shadow passed away--that of the scaffold.
+
+Oh, Mary! What has she not done for me--what clouds has she not
+dispelled!
+
+When night came round again I made once more, step by step, the journey
+from the Porte de la Muette to the Mare d'Auteuil, with everything the
+same--the gay wedding-feast, the blue and silver courier, the merry
+guests singing
+
+     _"Il était un petit navire."_
+
+Nothing was altered, even to the dull gray weather. But, oh, the
+difference to me!
+
+I longed to play at _bouchon_ with the hackney coachmen, or at _la balle
+au camp_ with my old schoolfellows. I could have even waltzed with
+"Monsieur Lartigue" and "le petit Cazal."
+
+I looked in Mère Manette's little mirror and saw my worn, gray, haggard,
+old face again; and liked it, and thought it quite good-looking. I sat
+down and rested by the fortifications as I had done the night before,
+for I was still tired, but with a most delicious fatigue; my very
+shabbiness was agreeable to me--_pauvre, mais honnête_. A convict, a
+madman, but a prince among men--still the beloved of Mary!
+
+And when at last I reached the spot I had always loved the best on earth
+ever since I first saw it as a child, I fell on my knees and wept for
+sheer excess of joy. It was mine indeed; it belonged to me as no land or
+water had ever belonged to any man before.
+
+Mary was not there, of course; I did not expect her.
+
+But, strange and incomprehensible as it seems, she had forgotten her
+gloves; she had left them behind her. One was on the bench, one was on
+the ground; poor old gloves that had been mended, with the well-known
+shape of her dear hand in them; every fold and crease preserved as in a
+mould--the very cast of her finger-nails; and the scent of sandal-wood
+she and her mother had so loved.
+
+I laid them side by side, palms upward, on the bench where we had sat
+the night before. No dream-wind has blown them away; no dream-thief has
+stolen them; there they lie still, and will lie till the great change
+comes over me, and I am one with their owner.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I am there every night--in the lovely spring or autumn
+sunshine--meditating, remembering, taking notes--dream-notes to be
+learned by heard, and used next day for a real purpose.
+
+I walk round and round, or sit on the benches, or lie in the grass by
+the brink, and smoke cigarettes without end, and watch the old
+amphibious life I found so charming half a century ago, and find it
+charming still.
+
+Sometimes I dive into the forest (which has now been razed to the
+ground. Ever since 1870 there is an open space all round the Mare
+d'Auteuil. I had seen it since then in a dream with Mary, who went to
+Paris after the war, and mad pilgrimages by day to all the places so
+dear to our hearts, and so changed; and again, when the night came,
+with me for a fellow-pilgrim. It was a sad disenchantment for us both).
+
+_My_ Mare d'Auteuil, where I spend so many hours, is the Mare d'Auteuil
+of Louis Philippe, unchangeable except for such slight changes as _will_
+occur, now and then, between the years 1839 and 1846: a broken bench
+mended, a new barrier put up by the high-road, a small wooden dike
+where the brink is giving way.
+
+[Illustration: "I AM THERE EVERY NIGHT."]
+
+And the thicket beside and behind it is dark and dense for miles, with
+many tall trees and a rich, tangled undergrowth.
+
+There is a giant oak which it is difficult to find in that labyrinth (it
+now stands, for the world, alone in the open; an ornament to the Auteuil
+race-course) I have often climbed it as a boy, with Mimsey and the
+rest; I cannot climb it now, but I love to lie on the grass in its
+shade, and dream in my dream there, shut in on all sides by fragrant,
+impenetrable verdure; with birds and bees and butterflies and
+dragon-flies and strange beetles and little field-mice with bright eyes,
+and lithe spotted snakes and lively brown squirrels and beautiful green
+lizards for my company. Now and then a gentle roebuck comes and feeds
+close by me without fear, and the mole throws up his little mound of
+earth and takes an airing.
+
+It is a very charming solitude.
+
+It amuses me to think by day, when broad awake in my sad English prison,
+and among my crazy peers, how this nightly umbrageous French solitude of
+mine, so many miles and years away, is now but a common, bare, wide
+grassy plain, overlooked by a gaudy, beflagged grand-stand. It is
+Sunday, let us say--and for all I know a great race may be going on--all
+Paris is there, rich and poor. Little red-legged soldiers, big
+blue-legged gendarmes, keep the course clear; the sun shines, the
+tricolour waves, the gay, familiar language makes the summer breeze
+musical. I dare say it is all very bright and animated, but the whole
+place rings with the vulgar din of the bookmakers, and the air is full
+of dust and foul with the scent of rank tobacco, the reek of struggling
+French humanity; and the gaunt Eiffel Tower looks down upon it all from
+the sky over Paris (so, at least, I am told) like a skeleton at a feast.
+
+Then twilight comes, and the crowds have departed; on foot, on
+horseback, on bicycles and tricycles, in every kind of vehicle; many by
+the _chemin de fer de ceinture_, the Auteuil station of which is close
+by ... all is quiet and bare and dull.
+
+Then down drops the silent night like a curtain, and beneath its
+friendly cover the strange transformation effects itself quickly, and
+all is made ready for _me_. The grand-stand evaporates, the railway
+station melts away into thin air; there is no more Eiffel Tower with its
+electric light! The sweet forest of fifty years ago rises suddenly out
+of the ground, and all the wild live things that once lived in it wake
+to their merry life again.
+
+A quiet deep old pond in a past French forest, hallowed by such
+memories! What _can_ be more enchanting? Oh, soft and sweet nostalgia,
+so soon to be relieved!
+
+Up springs the mellow sun, the light of other days, to its appointed
+place in the heavens--zenith, or east or west, according to order. A
+light wind blows from the south--everything is properly disinfected, and
+made warm and bright and comfortable--and lo! old Peter Ibbetson appears
+upon the scene, absolute monarch of all he surveys for the next eight
+hours--one whose right there are literally none to dispute.
+
+I do not encourage noisy gatherings there as a rule, nor by the pond; I
+like to keep the sweet place pretty much to myself; there is no
+selfishness in this, for I am really depriving nobody. Whoever comes
+there now, comes there nearly fifty years ago and does not know it; they
+must have all died long since.
+
+Sometimes it is a _garde champêtre_ in Louis Philippe's blue and silver,
+with his black pipe, his gaiters, his old flint gun, and his
+embroidered game-bag. He does well in the landscape.
+
+Sometimes it is a pair of lovers, if they are good-looking and
+well-behaved, or else the boys from Saindou's school to play fly the
+garter--_la raie_.
+
+Sometimes it is Monsieur le Curé, peacefully conning his "Hours," as
+with slow and thoughtful step he paces round and round. I can now read
+his calm, benevolent face by the light of half a century's experience of
+life, and have learned to love that still, black, meditative aspect
+which I found so antipathetic as a small boy--_he_ is no burner alive of
+little heretics! This world is big enough for us both--and so is the
+world to come! And he knows it. Now, at all events!
+
+[Illustration: "THIS WORLD IS BIG ENOUGH FOR US BOTH"]
+
+Sometimes even a couple of Prendergasts are admitted, or even three;
+they are not so bad, after all; they have the qualities of their faults,
+although you might not think it.
+
+But very often the old beloved shades arrive with their fishing-nets,
+and their high spirits, and their ringing Anglo-French--Charlie, and
+Alfred, and Madge, and the rest, and the grinning, barking, gyrating
+Médor, who dives after stones.
+
+Oh, how it does my heart good to see and hear them!
+
+They make me feel like a grandfather. Even Monsieur le Major is younger
+than I--his mustache less white than mine. He only comes to my chin; but
+I look up to him still, and love and revere him as when I was a
+little child.
+
+And Dr. Seraskier! I place myself between him and what he is looking at,
+so that he seems to be looking straight at me; but with a far-away look
+in his eyes, as is only natural. Presently something amuses him, and he
+smiles, and his eyes crinkle up as his daughter's used to do when she
+was a woman, and his majestic face becomes as that of an angel,
+like hers.
+
+_L'ange du sourire!_
+
+And my gay, young, light-hearted father, with his vivacity and
+rollicking laugh and eternal good-humor! He is just like a boy to me
+now, le beau Pasquier! He has got a new sling of his own invention; he
+pulls it out of his pocket, and slings stones high over the tree-tops
+and far away out of sight--to the joy of himself and everybody else--and
+does not trouble much as to where they will fall.
+
+My mother is young enough now to be my daughter; it is as a daughter, a
+sweet, kind, lovely daughter, that I love her now--a happily-married
+daughter with a tall, handsome husband who yodles divinely and slings
+stones, and who has presented me with a grandson--_beau comme le
+jour_--for whatever Peter Ibbetson may have been in his time, there is
+no gainsaying the singular comeliness of little Gogo Pasquier.
+
+And Mimsey is just a child angel! Monsieur le Major is infallible.
+
+"Elle a toutes les intelligences de la tête et du coeur! Vous verrez un
+jour, quand ça ira mieux; vous verrez!"
+
+That day has long come and gone; it is easy to see all that now--to have
+the eyes of Monsieur le Major.
+
+Ah, poor little Mimsey, with her cropped head and her pale face, and
+long, thin arms and legs, and grave, kind, luminous eyes, that have not
+yet learned to smile. What she is to _me!!!!_
+
+And Madame Seraskier, in all the youthful bloom and splendor of her
+sacred beauty! A chosen lily among women--the mother of Mary!
+
+She sits on the old bench by the willow, close to her daughter's gloves.
+Sometimes (a trivial and almost comic detail!) she actually seems to sit
+_upon_ them, to my momentary distress; but when she goes away, there
+they are still, not flattened a bit--the precious mould of those
+beautiful, generous hands to which I owe everything here and hereafter.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have not been again to my old home. I dread the sight of the avenue. I
+cannot face "Parva sed Apta."
+
+But I have seen Mary again--seven times.
+
+And every time she comes she brings a book with her, gilt-edged and
+bound in green morocco like the Byron we read when we were children, or
+in red morocco like the _Elegant Extracts_ out of which we used to
+translate Gray's "Elegy," and the "Battle of Hohenlinden," and
+Cunningham's "Pastorals" into French.
+
+Such is her fancy!
+
+But inside these books are very different. They are printed in cipher,
+and in a language I can only understand in my dream. Nothing that I, or
+any one else, has ever read in any living book can approach, for
+interest and importance, what I read in these. There are seven of them.
+
+I say to myself when I read them: it is perhaps well that I shall not
+remember this when I wake, after all!
+
+For I might be indiscreet and injudicious, and either say too much or
+not enough; and the world might come to a stand-still, all through me.
+For who would fardels bear, as Mary said! No! The world must be content
+to wait for the great guesser!
+
+Thus my lips are sealed.
+
+All I know is this: _that all will be well for us all, and of such a
+kind that all who do not sigh for the moon will be well content_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In such wise have I striven, with the best of my ability, to give some
+account of my two lives and Mary's. We have lived three lives between
+us--three lives in one.
+
+It has been a happy task, however poorly performed, and all the
+conditions of its performance have been singularly happy also.
+
+A cell in a criminal lunatic asylum! That does not sound like a bower in
+the Elysian Fields! It is, and has been for me.
+
+Besides the sun that lights and warms my inner life, I have been treated
+with a kindness and sympathy and consideration by everybody here, from
+the governor downward, that fills me with unspeakable gratitude.
+
+Most especially do I feel grateful to my good friends, the doctor, the
+chaplain, and the priest--best and kindest of men--each of whom has made
+up his mind about everything in heaven and earth and below, and each in
+a contrary sense to the two others!
+
+There is but one thing they are neither of them quite cocksure about,
+and that is whether I am mad or sane.
+
+And there is one thing--the only one on which they are agreed; namely,
+that, mad or sane, I am a great undiscovered genius!
+
+My little sketches, plain or colored, fill them with admiration and
+ecstasy. Such boldness and facility and execution, such an overwhelming
+fertility in the choice of subjects, such singular realism in the
+conception and rendering of past scenes, historical and otherwise, such
+astounding knowledge of architecture, character, costume, and what not,
+such local color--it is all as if I had really been there to see!
+
+I have the greatest difficulty in keeping my fame from spreading beyond
+the walls of the asylum. My modesty is as great as my talent!
+
+No, I do not wish this great genius to be discovered just yet. It must
+all go to help and illustrate and adorn the work of a much greater
+genius, from which it has drawn every inspiration it ever had.
+
+It is a splendid and delightful task I have before me: to unravel and
+translate and put in order these voluminous and hastily-penned
+reminiscences of Mary's, all of them written in the cipher we invented
+together in our dream--a very transparent cipher when once you have
+got the key!
+
+It will take five years at least, and I think that, without presumption,
+I can count on that, strong and active as I feel, and still so far from
+the age of the Psalmist.
+
+First of all, I intend
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Note_.--Here ends my poor cousin's memoir. He was found dead from
+effusion of blood on the brain, with his pen still in his hand, and his
+head bowed down on his unfinished manuscript, on the margin of which he
+had just sketched a small boy wheeling a toy wheelbarrow full of stones
+from one open door to another. One door is labelled _Passé_, the
+other _Avenir_.
+
+I arrived in England, after a long life spent abroad, at the time his
+death occurred, but too late to see him alive. I heard much about him
+and his latter days. All those whose duties brought them into contact
+with him seemed to have regarded him with a respect that bordered on
+veneration.
+
+I had the melancholy satisfaction of seeing him in his coffin. I had
+not seen him since he was twelve years old.
+
+As he lay there, in his still length and breadth, he appeared
+gigantic--the most magnificent human being I ever beheld; and the
+splendor of his dead face will haunt my memory till I die.
+
+MADGE PLUNKET.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Peter Ibbetson, by George Du Maurier
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PETER IBBETSON ***
+
+***** This file should be named 9817-8.txt or 9817-8.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        https://www.gutenberg.org/9/8/1/9817/
+
+Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Keren Vergon, Charlie
+Kirschner, and Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
diff --git a/9817-8.zip b/9817-8.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a95a6f0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/9817-8.zip
diff --git a/9817.txt b/9817.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2433cac
--- /dev/null
+++ b/9817.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,10624 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Peter Ibbetson, by George Du Maurier
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Peter Ibbetson
+
+Author: George Du Maurier
+
+Illustrator: George Du Maurier
+
+Posting Date: December 7, 2011 [EBook #9817]
+Release Date: February, 2006
+First Posted: October 20, 2003
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PETER IBBETSON ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Keren Vergon, Charlie
+Kirschner, and Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PETER IBBETSON
+
+by George du Maurier
+
+With an Introduction by His Cousin Lady **** ("Madge Plunket")
+
+Edited and Illustrated by George Du Maurier
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Part One
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+The writer of this singular autobiography was my cousin, who died at
+the ----- Criminal Lunatic Asylum, of which he had been an inmate
+three years.
+
+He had been removed thither after a sudden and violent attack of
+homicidal mania (which fortunately led to no serious consequences),
+from ----- Jail, where he had spent twenty-five years, having been
+condemned to penal servitude for life, for the murder of ---- ----,
+his relative.
+
+He had been originally sentenced to death.
+
+It was at ---- Lunatic Asylum that he wrote these memoirs, and I received
+the MS. soon after his decease, with the most touching letter, appealing
+to our early friendship, and appointing me his literary executrix.
+
+It was his wish that the story of his life should be published just as
+he had written it.
+
+I have found it unadvisable to do this. It would revive, to no useful
+purpose, an old scandal, long buried and forgotten, and thereby give
+pain or annoyance to people who are still alive.
+
+Nor does his memory require rehabilitation among those who knew him, or
+knew anything of him--the only people really concerned. His dreadful
+deed has long been condoned by all (and they are many) who knew the
+provocation he had received and the character of the man who had
+provoked him.
+
+On mature consideration, and with advice, I resolved (in order that his
+dying wishes should not be frustrated altogether) to publish the memoir
+with certain alterations and emendations.
+
+I have nearly everywhere changed the names of people and places;
+suppressed certain details, and omitted some passages of his life (most
+of the story of his school-days, for instance, and that of his brief
+career as a private in the Horse Guards) lest they should too easily
+lead to the identification and annoyance of people still alive, for he
+is strongly personal at times, and perhaps not always just; and some
+other events I have carefully paraphrased (notably his trial at the Old
+Bailey), and given for them as careful an equivalent as I could manage
+without too great a loss of verisimilitude.
+
+I may as well state at once that, allowing for these alterations, every
+incident of his _natural_ life as described by himself is absolutely
+true, to the minutest detail, as I have been able to ascertain.
+
+For the early part of it--the life at Passy he describes with such
+affection--I can vouch personally; I am the Cousin "Madge" to whom he
+once or twice refers.
+
+I well remember the genial abode where he lived with his parents (my
+dear uncle and aunt); and the lovely "Madame Seraskier," and her husband
+and daughter, and their house, "Parva sed Apta," and "Major Duquesnois,"
+and the rest.
+
+And although I have never seen him since he was twelve years old, when
+his parents died and he went to London (as most of my life has been
+spent abroad), I received occasional letters from him.
+
+I have also been able to obtain much information about him from others,
+especially from a relative of the late "Mr. and Mrs. Lintot," who knew
+him well, and from several officers in his regiment who remembered him;
+also from the "Vicar's daughter," whom he met at "Lady Cray's" and who
+perfectly recollects the conversation she had with him at dinner, his
+sudden indisposition, and his long interview with the "Duchess of
+Towers," under the ash-tree next morning; she was one of the
+croquet-players.
+
+He was the most beautiful boy I ever saw, and so charming, lively, and
+amiable that everybody was fond of him. He had a horror of cruelty,
+especially to animals (quite singular in a boy of his age), and was very
+truthful and brave.
+
+According to all accounts (and from a photograph in my possession), he
+grew up to be as handsome as a man can well be, a personal gift which he
+seems to have held of no account whatever, though he thought so much of
+it in others. But he also became singularly shy and reserved in manner,
+over-diffident and self-distrustful; of a melancholy disposition, loving
+solitude, living much alone, and taking nobody into his confidence; and
+yet inspiring both affection and respect. For he seems to have always
+been thoroughly gentlemanlike in speech, bearing, manner, and aspect.
+
+It is possible, although he does not say so, that having first enlisted,
+and then entered upon a professional career under somewhat inauspicious
+conditions, he felt himself to have fallen away from the social rank
+(such as it was) that belonged to him by birth; and he may have found
+his associates uncongenial.
+
+His old letters to me are charmingly open and effusive.
+
+Of the lady whom (keeping her title and altering her name) I have called
+the "Duchess of Towers," I find it difficult to speak. That they only
+met twice, and in the way he describes, is a fact about which there can
+be no doubt.
+
+It is also indubitable that he received in Newgate, on the morning after
+his sentence to death, an envelope containing violets, and the strange
+message he mentions. Both letter and violets are in my possession, and
+the words are in her handwriting; about that there can be no mistake.
+
+It is certain, moreover, that she separated from her husband almost
+immediately after my cousin's trial and condemnation, and lived in
+comparative retirement from the world, as it is certain that he went
+suddenly mad, twenty-five years later, in ---- Jail, a few hours after
+her tragic death, and before he could possibly have heard of it by the
+ordinary channels; and that he was sent to ---- Asylum, where, after his
+frenzy had subsided, he remained for many days in a state of suicidal
+melancholia, until, to the surprise of all, he rose one morning in high
+spirits, and apparently cured of all serious symptoms of insanity; so he
+remained until his death. It was during the last year of his life that
+he wrote his autobiography, in French and English.
+
+There is nothing to be surprised at, taking all the circumstances into
+consideration, that even so great a lady, the friend of queens and
+empresses, the bearer of a high title and an illustrious name, justly
+celebrated for her beauty and charm (and her endless charities), of
+blameless repute, and one of the most popular women in English society,
+should yet have conceived a very warm regard for my poor cousin; indeed,
+it was an open secret in the family of "Lord Cray" that she had done so.
+But for them she would have taken the whole world into her confidence.
+
+After her death she left him what money had come to her from her father,
+which he disposed of for charitable ends, and an immense quantity of MS.
+in cipher--a cipher which is evidently identical with that he used
+himself in the annotations he put under innumerable sketches he was
+allowed to make during his long period of confinement, which (through
+her interest, and no doubt through his own good conduct) was rendered as
+bearable to him as possible. These sketches (which are very
+extraordinary) and her Grace's MS. are now in my possession.
+
+They constitute a mystery into which I have not dared to pry.
+
+From papers belonging to both I have been able to establish beyond doubt
+the fact (so strangely discovered) of their descent from a common French
+ancestress, whose name I have but slightly modified and the tradition of
+whom still lingers in the "Departement de la Sarthe," where she was a
+famous person a century ago; and her violin, a valuable Amati, now
+belongs to me.
+
+Of the non-natural part of his story I will not say much.
+
+It is, of course, a fact that he had been absolutely and, to all
+appearance, incurably insane before he wrote his life.
+
+There seems to have been a difference of opinion, or rather a doubt,
+among the authorities of the asylum as to whether he was mad after the
+acute but very violent period of his brief attack had ended.
+
+Whichever may have been the case, I am at least convinced of this: that
+he was no romancer, and thoroughly believed in the extraordinary mental
+experience he has revealed.
+
+At the risk of being thought to share his madness--if he _was_ mad--I
+will conclude by saying that I, for one, believe him to have been sane,
+and to have told the truth all through.
+
+MADGE PLUNKET
+
+
+
+
+
+I am but a poor scribe; ill-versed in the craft of wielding words and
+phrases, as the cultivated reader (if I should ever happen to have one)
+will no doubt very soon find out for himself.
+
+[Illustration:]
+
+I have been for many years an object of pity and contempt to all who
+ever gave me a thought--to all but _one_! Yet of all that ever lived on
+this earth I have been, perhaps, the happiest and most privileged, as
+that reader will discover if he perseveres to the end.
+
+My outer and my inner life have been as the very poles--asunder; and if,
+at the eleventh hour, I have made up my mind to give my story to the
+world, it is not in order to rehabilitate myself in the eyes of my
+fellow-men, deeply as I value their good opinion; for I have always
+loved them and wished them well, and would fain express my goodwill and
+win theirs, if that were possible.
+
+It is because the regions where I have found my felicity are accessible
+to all, and that many, better trained and better gifted, will explore
+them to far better purpose than I, and to the greater glory and benefit
+of mankind, when once I have given them the clew. Before I can do this,
+and in order to show how I came by this clew myself, I must tell, as
+well as I may, the tale of my checkered career--in telling which,
+moreover, I am obeying the last behest of one whose lightest wish was
+my law.
+
+If I am more prolix than I need be, it must be set down to my want of
+experience in the art of literary composition--to a natural wish I have
+to show myself neither better nor worse than I believe myself to be; to
+the charm, the unspeakable charm, that personal reminiscences have for
+the person principally concerned, and which he cannot hope to impart,
+however keenly he may feel it, without gifts and advantages that have
+been denied to me.
+
+And this leads me to apologize for the egotism of this Memoir, which is
+but an introduction to another and longer one that I hope to publish
+later. To write a story of paramount importance to mankind, it is true,
+but all about one's outer and one's inner self, to do this without
+seeming somewhat egotistical, requires something akin to genius--and I
+am but a poor scribe.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     "_Combien j'ai douce souvenance
+     Du joli lieu de ma naissance_!"
+
+These quaint lines have been running in my head at intervals through
+nearly all my outer life, like an oft-recurring burden in an endless
+ballad--sadly monotonous, alas! the ballad, which is mine; sweetly
+monotonous the burden, which is by Chateaubriand.
+
+I sometimes think that to feel the full significance of this refrain one
+must have passed one's childhood in sunny France, where it was written,
+and the remainder of one's existence in mere London--or worse than mere
+London--as has been the case with me. If I had spent all my life from
+infancy upward in Bloomsbury, or Clerkenwell, or Whitechapel, my early
+days would be shorn of much of their retrospective glamour as I look
+back on them in these my after-years.
+
+     _"Combien j'ai douce souvenance!"_
+
+It was on a beautiful June morning in a charming French garden, where
+the warm, sweet atmosphere was laden with the scent of lilac and
+syringa, and gay with butterflies and dragon-flies and humblebees, that
+I began my conscious existence with the happiest day of all my
+outer life.
+
+It is true that I had vague memories (with many a blank between) of a
+dingy house in the heart of London, in a long street of desolating
+straightness, that led to a dreary square and back again, and nowhere
+else for me; and then of a troubled and exciting journey that seemed of
+jumbled days and nights. I could recall the blue stage-coach with the
+four tall, thin, brown horses, so quiet and modest and well-behaved; the
+red-coated guard and his horn; the red-faced driver and his husky voice
+and many capes.
+
+Then the steamer with its glistening deck, so beautiful and white it
+seemed quite a desecration to walk upon it--this spotlessness did not
+last very long; and then two wooden piers with a light-house on each,
+and a quay, and blue-bloused workmen and red-legged little soldiers with
+mustaches, and bare-legged fisher-women, all speaking a language that I
+knew as well as the other commoner language I had left behind; but which
+I had always looked upon as an exclusive possession of my father's and
+mother's and mine for the exchange of sweet confidence and the
+bewilderment of outsiders; and here were little boys and girls in the
+street, quite common children, who spoke it as well and better than I
+did myself.
+
+After this came the dream of a strange, huge, top-heavy vehicle, that
+seemed like three yellow carriages stuck together, and a mountain of
+luggage at the top under an immense black tarpaulin, which ended in a
+hood; and beneath the hood sat a blue-bloused man with a singular cap,
+like a concertina, and mustaches, who cracked a loud whip over five
+squealing, fussy, pugnacious white and gray horses, with bells on their
+necks and bushy fox-tails on their foreheads, and their own tails
+carefully tucked up behind.
+
+From the _coupe_ where I sat with my father and mother I could watch
+them well as they led us through dusty roads with endless apple-trees or
+poplars on either side. Little barefooted urchins (whose papas and
+mammas wore wooden shoes and funny white nightcaps) ran after us for
+French half-pennies, which were larger than English ones, and pleasanter
+to have and to hold! Up hill and down we went; over sounding wooden
+bridges, through roughly paved streets in pretty towns to large
+court-yards, where five other quarrelsome steeds, gray and white, were
+waiting to take the place of the old ones--worn out, but
+quarreling still!
+
+And through the night I could hear the gay music of the bells and hoofs,
+the rumbling of the wheels the cracking of the eternal whip, as I
+fidgeted from one familiar lap to the other in search of sleep; and
+waking out of a doze I could see the glare of the red lamps on the five
+straining white and gray backs that dragged us so gallantly through the
+dark summer night.
+
+[Illustration: "A STRANGE, HUGE, TOP-HEAVY VEHICLE."]
+
+Then it all became rather tiresome and intermittent and confused, till
+we reached at dusk next day a quay by a broad river; and as we drove
+along it, under thick trees, we met other red and blue and green lamped
+five-horsed diligences starting on their long journey just as ours was
+coming to an end.
+
+Then I knew (because I was a well-educated little boy, and heard my
+father exclaim, "Here's Paris at last!") that we had entered the capital
+of France--a fact that impressed me very much--so much, it seems, that I
+went to sleep for thirty-six hours at a stretch, and woke up to find
+myself in the garden I have mentioned, and to retain possession of that
+self without break or solution of continuity (except when I went to
+sleep again) until now.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The happiest day in all my outer life!
+
+For in an old shed full of tools and lumber at the end of the garden,
+and half-way between an empty fowl-house and a disused stable (each an
+Eden in itself) I found a small toy-wheelbarrow--quite the most
+extraordinary, the most unheard of and undreamed of, humorously,
+daintily, exquisitely fascinating object I had ever come across in all
+my brief existence.
+
+I spent hours--enchanted hours--in wheeling brick-bats from the stable
+to the fowl-house, and more enchanted hours in wheeling them all back
+again, while genial French workmen, who were busy in and out of the
+house where we were to live, stopped every now and then to ask
+good-natured questions of the "p'tit Anglais," and commend his knowledge
+of their tongue, and his remarkable skill in the management of a
+wheelbarrow. Well I remember wondering, with newly-aroused
+self-consciousness, at the intensity, the poignancy, the extremity of my
+bliss, and looking forward with happy confidence to an endless
+succession of such hours in the future.
+
+But next morning, though the weather was as fine, and the wheelbarrow
+and the brick-bats and the genial workmen were there, and all the scents
+and sights and sounds were the same, the first fine careless rapture was
+not to be caught again, and the glory and the freshness had departed.
+
+Thus did I, on the very dawning of life, reach at a single tide the
+high-water-mark of my earthly bliss--never to be reached again by me on
+this side of the ivory gate--and discover that to make the perfection of
+human happiness endure there must be something more than a sweet French
+garden, a small French wheelbarrow, and a nice little English boy who
+spoke French and had the love of approbation--a fourth dimension
+is required.
+
+I found it in due time.
+
+But if there were no more enchanted hours like the first, there were to
+be seven happy years that have the quality of enchantment as I look
+back on them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Oh, the beautiful garden! Roses, nasturtiums and convolvulus,
+wallflowers, sweet-pease and carnations, marigolds and sunflowers,
+dahlias and pansies and hollyhocks and poppies, and Heaven knows what
+besides! In my fond recollection they all bloom at once, irrespective of
+time and season.
+
+To see and smell and pick all these for the first time at the
+susceptible age of five! To inherit such a kingdom after five years of
+Gower Street and Bedford Square! For all things are relative, and
+everything depends upon the point of view. To the owner of Chatsworth
+(and to his gardeners) my beautiful French Garden would have seemed a
+small affair.
+
+[Illustration: LE P'TIT ANGLAIS.]
+
+And what a world of insects--Chatsworth could not beat _these_ (indeed,
+is no doubt sadly lacking in them)--beautiful, interesting, comic,
+grotesque, and terrible; from the proud humble-bee to the earwig and his
+cousin, the devil's coach-horse; and all those rampant, many footed
+things that pullulate in damp and darkness under big flat stones. To
+think that I have been friends with all these--roses and centipedes and
+all--and then to think that most of my outer life has been spent between
+bare whitewashed walls, with never even a flea or a spider to be friends
+with again!
+
+Our house (where, by-the-way, I had been born five years before), an old
+yellow house with green shutters and Mansard-roofs of slate, stood
+between this garden and the street--a long winding street, roughly
+flagged, with oil-lamps suspended across at long intervals; these lamps
+were let down with pulleys at dusk, replenished and lit, and then hauled
+up again to make darkness visible for a few hours on nights when the
+moon was away.
+
+Opposite to us was a boys' school--"Maison d'Education, Dirigee par M.
+Jules Saindou, Bachelier et Maitre es Lettres et es Sciences," and
+author of a treatise on geology, with such hauntingly terrific pictures
+of antediluvian reptiles battling in the primeval slime that I have
+never been able to forget them. My father, who was fond of science, made
+me a present of it on my sixth birthday. It cost me many a nightmare.
+
+From our windows we could see and hear the boys at play--at a proper
+distance French boys sound just like English ones, though they do not
+look so, on account of their blue blouses and dusky, cropped heads--and
+we could see the gymnastic fixtures in the play-ground, M. Saindou's
+pride. "Le portique! la poutre! le cheval! et les barres paralleles!"
+Thus they were described in M. Saindou's prospectus.
+
+On either side of the street (which was called "the Street of the
+Pump"), as far as eye could reach looking west, were dwelling-houses
+just like our own, only agreeably different; and garden walls overtopped
+with the foliage of horse-chestnut, sycamore, acacia, and lime; and here
+and there huge portals and iron gates defended by posts of stone gave
+ingress to mysterious abodes of brick and plaster and granite,
+many-shuttered, and embosomed in sun-shot greenery.
+
+Looking east one could see in the near distance unsophisticated shops
+with old-fashioned windows of many panes--Liard, the grocer; Corbin, the
+poulterer; the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker.
+
+And this delightful street, as it went on its winding way, led not to
+Bedford Square or the new University College Hospital, but to Paris
+through the Arc de Triomphe at one end, and to the river Seine at the
+other; or else, turning to the right, to St. Cloud through the Bois de
+Boulogne of Louis Philippe Premier, Roi des Francais--as different from
+the Paris and the Bois de Boulogne of to-day as a diligence from an
+express train.
+
+On one side of the beautiful garden was another beautiful garden,
+separated from ours by a high wall covered with peach and pear and plum
+and apricot trees; on the other, accessible to us through a small door
+in another lower wall clothed with jasmine, clematis, convolvulus, and
+nasturtium, was a long, straight avenue of almond-trees, acacia,
+laburnum, lilac, and may, so closely planted that the ivy-grown walls
+on either side could scarcely be seen. What lovely patches they made on
+the ground when the sun shone! One end of this abutted on "the Street of
+the Pump," from which it was fenced by tall, elaborately-carved iron
+gates between stone portals, and at the side was a "porte batarde,"
+guarded by le Pere et la Mere Francois, the old concierge and his old
+wife. Peace to their ashes, and Heaven rest their kindly, genial souls!
+
+The other end of the avenue, where there was also an iron gate, admitted
+to a large private park that seemed to belong to nobody, and of which we
+were free--a very wilderness of delight, a heaven, a terror of tangled
+thickets and not too dangerous chalk cliffs, disused old quarries and
+dark caverns, prairies of lush grass, sedgy pools, turnip fields,
+forests of pine, groves and avenues of horse-chestnut, dank valleys of
+walnut-trees and hawthorn, which summer made dark at noon; bare,
+wind-swept mountainous regions whence one could reconnoitre afar; all
+sorts of wild and fearsome places for savages and wild beasts to hide
+and small boys to roam quite safely in quest of perilous adventure.
+
+All this vast enclosure (full of strange singing, humming, whistling,
+buzzing, twittering, cooing, booming, croaking, flying, creeping,
+crawling, jumping, climbing, burrowing, splashing, diving things) had
+been neglected for ages--an Eden where one might gather and eat of the
+fruit of the tree of knowledge without fear, and learn lovingly the ways
+of life without losing one's innocence; a forest that had remade for
+itself a new virginity, and become primeval once more; where beautiful
+Nature had reasserted her own sweet will, and massed and tangled
+everything together as though a Beauty had been sleeping there
+undisturbed for close on a hundred years, and was only waiting for the
+charming Prince--or, as it turned out a few years later, alas! the
+speculative builder and the railway engineer--those princes of our day.
+
+My fond remembrance would tell me that this region was almost boundless,
+well as I remember its boundaries. My knowledge of physical geography,
+as applied to this particular suburb of Paris, bids me assign more
+modest limits to this earthly paradise, which again was separated by an
+easily surmounted fence from Louis Philippe's Bois de Boulogne; and to
+this I cannot find it in my heart to assign any limits whatever, except
+the pretty old town from which it takes its name, and whose principal
+street leads to that magical combination of river, bridge, palace,
+gardens, mountain, and forest, St. Cloud.
+
+What more could be wanted for a small boy fresh (if such be freshness)
+from the very heart of Bloomsbury?
+
+That not a single drop should be lacking to the full cup of that small
+boy's felicity, there was a pond on the way from Passy to St. Cloud--a
+memorable pond, called "La Mare d'Auteuil," the sole aquatic treasure
+that Louis Philippe's Bois de Boulogne could boast. For in those
+ingenuous days there existed no artificial lake fed by an artificial
+stream, no pre-Catelan, no Jardin d'Acclimatation. The wood was just a
+wood, and nothing more--a dense, wild wood, that covered many hundreds
+of acres, and sheltered many thousands of wild live things. Though
+mysteriously deep in the middle, this famous pond (which may have been
+centuries old, and still exists) was not large; you might almost fling a
+stone across it anywhere.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Bounded on three sides by the forest (now shorn away), it was just
+hidden from the dusty road by a fringe of trees; and one could have it
+all to one's self, except on Sunday and Thursday afternoons, when a few
+love-sick Parisians remembered its existence, and in its loveliness
+forgot their own.
+
+To be there at all was to be happy; for not only was it quite the most
+secluded, picturesque, and beautiful pond in all the habitable
+globe--that pond of ponds, the _only_ pond--but it teemed with a far
+greater number and variety of wonderful insects and reptiles than any
+other pond in the world. Such, at least, I believed must be the case,
+for they were endless.
+
+To watch these creatures, to learn their ways, to catch them (which we
+sometimes did), to take them home and be kind to them, and try to tame
+them, and teach them our ways (with never varying non-success, it is
+true, but in, oh, such jolly company!) became a hobby that lasted me, on
+and off, for seven years.
+
+La Mare d'Auteuil! The very name has a magic, from all the associations
+that gathered round it during that time, to cling forever.
+
+How I loved it! At night, snoozing in my warm bed, I would awesomely
+think of it, and how solemn it looked when I had reluctantly left it at
+dusk, an hour or two before; then I would picture it to myself, later,
+lying deep and cold and still under the stars, in the dark thicket, with
+all that weird, uncanny lite seething beneath its stagnant surface.
+
+Then gradually the water would sink, and the reeds, left naked, begin to
+move and rustle ominously, and from among their roots in the uncovered
+slush everything alive would make for the middle--hopping, gliding,
+writhing frantically....
+
+Down shrank the water; and soon in the slimy bottom, yards below, huge
+fat salamanders, long-lost and forgotten tadpoles as large as rats,
+gigantic toads, enormous flat beetles, all kinds of hairy, scaly, spiny,
+blear-eyed, bulbous, shapeless monsters without name, mud-colored
+offspring of the mire that had been sleeping there for hundreds of
+years, woke up, and crawled in and out, and wallowed and interwriggled,
+and devoured each other, like the great saurians and batrachians in my
+_Manuel de Geologie Elementaire_. Edition illustree a l'usage des
+enfants. Par Jules Saindou, Bachelier et Maitre es Lettres et
+es Sciences.
+
+Then would I wake up with a start, in a cold perspiration, an icy chill
+shooting through me that roughed my skin and stirred the roots of my
+hair, and ardently wish for to-morrow morning.
+
+In after-years, and far away among the cold fogs of Clerkenwell, when
+the frequent longing would come over me to revisit "the pretty place of
+my birth," it was for the Mare d'Auteuil I longed the most; _that_ was
+the loadstar, the very pole of my home-sick desires; always thither the
+wings of my hopeless fancy bore me first of all; it was, oh! to tread
+that sunlit grassy brink once more, and to watch the merry tadpoles
+swarm, and the green frog takes its header like a little man, and the
+water-rat swim to his hole among the roots of the willow, and the
+horse-leech thread his undulating way between the water-lily stems; and
+to dream fondly of the delightful, irrevocable past, on the very spot of
+all where I and mine were always happiest!
+
+     "...Qu'ils etaient beaux, les jours De France!"
+
+In the avenue I have mentioned (_the_ avenue, as it is still to me, and
+as I will always call it) there was on the right hand, half the way up,
+a _maison de sante_, or boarding-house, kept by one Madame Pele; and
+there among others came to board and lodge, a short while after our
+advent, four or five gentlemen who had tried to invade France, with a
+certain grim Pretender at their head, and a tame eagle as a symbol of
+empire to rally round.
+
+The expedition had failed; the Pretender had been consigned to a
+fortress; the eagle had found a home in the public slaughter-house of
+Boulogne-sur-Mer, which it adorned for many years, and where it fed as
+it had never probably fed before; and these, the faithful followers, le
+Colonel Voisil, le Major Duquesnois, le Capitaine Audenis, le Docteur
+Lombal (and one or two others whose names I have forgotten), were
+prisoners on parole at Madame Pele's, and did not seem to find their
+durance very vile.
+
+[Illustration: (no caption)]
+
+I grew to know and love them all, especially the Major Duquesnois, an
+almost literal translation into French of Colonel Newcome. He took to
+me at once, in spite of my Englishness, and drilled me, and taught me
+the exercise as it was performed in the Vieille Garden and told me a new
+fairy-tale, I verily believe, every afternoon for seven years.
+Scheherezade could do no more for a Sultan, and to save her own neck
+from the bowstring!
+
+Cher et bien ame "Vieux de la Vieille!" with his big iron-gray mustache,
+his black satin stock, his spotless linen, his long green frock-coat so
+baggy about the skirts, and the smart red ribbon in his button-hole! He
+little foresaw with what warm and affectionate regard his memory would
+be kept forever sweet and green in the heart of his hereditary foe and
+small English tyrant and companion!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Opposite Madame Pele's, and the only other dwelling besides hers and
+ours in the avenue, was a charming little white villa with a Grecian
+portico, on which were inscribed in letters of gold the words "Parva sed
+Apta"; but it was not tenanted till two or three years after
+our arrival.
+
+In the genial French fashion of those times we soon got on terms of
+intimacy with these and other neighbors, and saw much of each other at
+all times of the day.
+
+My tall and beautiful young mother (la belle Madame Pasquier, as she was
+gallantly called) was an Englishwoman who had been born and partly
+brought up in Paris.
+
+My gay and jovial father (le beau Pasquier, for he was also tall and
+comely to the eye) was a Frenchman, although an English subject, who had
+been born and partly brought up in London; for he was the child of
+emigres from France during the Reign of Terror.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+     "When in death I shall calm recline,
+        Oh take my heart to my mistress dear!
+      Tell her it lived upon smiles and wine
+       Of the brightest hue while it lingered here!"
+
+He was gifted with a magnificent, a phenomenal voice--a barytone and
+tenor rolled into one; a marvel of richness, sweetness, flexibility, and
+power--and had intended to sing at the opera; indeed, he had studied for
+three years at the Paris Conservatoire to that end; and there he had
+carried all before him, and given rise to the highest hopes. But his
+family, who were Catholics of the blackest and Legitimists of the
+whitest dye--and as poor as church rats had objected to such a godless
+and derogatory career; so the world lost a great singer, and the great
+singer a mine of wealth and fame.
+
+However, he had just enough to live upon, and had married a wife (a
+heretic!) who had just about as much, or as little; and he spent his
+time, and both his money and hers, in scientific inventions--to little
+purpose, for well as he had learned how to sing, he had not been to any
+conservatoire where they teach one how to invent.
+
+So that, as he waited "for his ship to come home," he sang only to amuse
+his wife, as they say the nightingale does; and to ease himself of
+superfluous energy, and to charm the servants, and le Pere et la Mere
+Francois, and the five followers of Napoleon, and all and everybody who
+cared to listen, and last and least (and most!), myself.
+
+For this great neglected gift of his, on which he set so little store,
+was already to me the most beautiful and mysterious thing in the world;
+and next to this, my mother's sweet playing on the harp and piano, for
+she was an admirable musician.
+
+It was her custom to play at night, leaving the door of my bedroom ajar,
+and also the drawing-room door, so that I could hear her till I fell
+asleep.
+
+Sometimes, when my father was at home, the spirit would move him to hum
+or sing the airs she played, as he paced up and down the room on the
+track of a new invention.
+
+And though he sang and hummed "pian-piano," the sweet, searching, manly
+tones seemed to fill all space.
+
+The hushed house became a sounding-board, the harp a mere subservient
+tinkle, and my small, excitable frame would thrill and vibrate under the
+waves of my unconscious father's voice; and oh, the charming airs
+he sang!
+
+His stock was inexhaustible, and so was hers; and thus an endless
+succession of lovely melodies went ringing through that happy period.
+
+And just as when a man is drowning, or falling from a height, his whole
+past life is said to be mapped out before his mental vision as in a
+single flash, so seven years of sweet, priceless home love--seven times
+four changing seasons of simple, genial, prae-imperial Frenchness; an
+ideal house, with all its pretty furniture, and shape, and color; a
+garden full of trees and flowers; a large park, and all the wild live
+things therein; a town and its inhabitants; a mile or two of historic
+river; a wood big enough to reach from the Arc de Triomphe to St. Cloud
+(and in it the pond of ponds); and every wind and weather that the
+changing seasons can bring--all lie embedded and embalmed for me in
+every single bar of at least a hundred different tunes, to be evoked at
+will for the small trouble and cost of just whistling or humming the
+same, or even playing it with one finger on the piano--when I had a
+piano within reach.
+
+Enough to last me for a lifetime--with proper economy, of course--it
+will not do to exhaust, by too frequent experiment, the strange capacity
+of a melodic bar for preserving the essence of by-gone things, and days
+that are no more.
+
+Oh, Nightingale! whether thou singest thyself or, better still, if thy
+voice by not in thy throat, but in thy fiery heart and subtle brain, and
+thou makest songs for the singing of many others, blessed be thy name!
+The very sound of it is sweet in every clime and tongue: Nightingale,
+Rossignol, Usignuolo, Bulbul! Even Nachtigall does not sound amiss in
+the mouth of a fair English girl who has had a Hanoverian for a
+governess! and, indeed, it is in the Nachtigall's country that the best
+music is made!
+
+[Illustration: "OH, NIGHTINGALE!"]
+
+And oh, Nightingale! never, never grudge thy song to those who love
+it--nor waste it upon those who do not....
+
+Thus serenaded, I would close my eyes, and lapped in darkness and
+warmth and heavenly sound, be lulled asleep--perchance to dream!
+
+For my early childhood was often haunted by a dream, which at first I
+took for a reality--a transcendant dream of some interest and importance
+to mankind, as the patient reader will admit in time. But many years of
+my life passed away before I was able to explain and account for it.
+
+I had but to turn my face to the wall, and soon I found myself in
+company with a lady who had white hair and a young face--a very
+beautiful young face.
+
+Sometimes I walked with her, hand in hand--I being quite a small
+child--and together we fed innumerable pigeons who lived in a tower by a
+winding stream that ended in a water-mill. It was too lovely, and I
+would wake.
+
+Sometimes we went into a dark place, where there was a fiery furnace
+with many holes, and many people working and moving about--among them a
+man with white hair and a young face, like the lady, and beautiful red
+heels to his shoes. And under his guidance I would contrive to make in
+the furnace a charming little cocked hat of colored glass--a treasure!
+And the sheer joy thereof would wake me.
+
+Sometimes the white-haired lady and I would sit together at a square
+box from which she made lovely music, and she would sing my favorite
+song--a song that I adored. But I always woke before this song came to
+an end, on account of the too insupportably intense bliss I felt on
+hearing it; and all I could remember when awake were the words
+"triste--comment--sale." The air, which I knew so well in my dream, I
+could not recall.
+
+It seemed as though some innermost core of my being, some childish holy
+of holies, secreted a source of supersubtle reminiscence, which, under
+some stimulus that now and again became active during sleep, exhaled
+itself in this singular dream--shadowy and slight, but invariably
+accompanied by a sense of felicity so measureless and so penetrating
+that I would always wake in a mystic flutter of ecstasy, the bare
+remembrance of which was enough to bless and make happy many a
+succeeding hour.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Besides this happy family of three, close by (in the Street of the
+Tower) lived my grandmother Mrs. Biddulph, and my Aunt Plunket, a widow,
+with her two sons, Alfred and Charlie, and her daughter Madge. They also
+were fair to look at--extremely so--of the gold-haired, white-skinned,
+well-grown Anglo-Saxon type, with frank, open, jolly manners, and no
+beastly British pride.
+
+So that physically, at least, we reflected much credit on the English
+name, which was not in good odor just then at Passy-les-Paris, where
+Waterloo was unforgotten. In time, however, our nationality was condoned
+on account of our good looks--"non Angli sed angeli!" as M. Saindou was
+gallantly pleased to exclaim when he called (with a prospectus of his
+school) and found us all gathered together under the big apple-tree
+on our lawn.
+
+But English beauty in Passy was soon to receive a memorable addition to
+its ranks in the person of a certain Madame Seraskier, who came with an
+invalid little daughter to live in the house so modestly described in
+gold as "Parva sed Apta."
+
+She was the English, or rather the Irish, wife of a Hungarian patriot
+and man of science, Dr. Seraskier (son of the famous violinist); an
+extremely tall, thin man, almost gigantic, with a grave, benevolent
+face, and a head like a prophet's; who was, like my father, very much
+away from his family--conspiring perhaps--or perhaps only inventing
+(like my father), and looking out "for his ship to come home!"
+
+[Illustration: "SHE TOPPED MY TALL MOTHER."]
+
+This fair lady's advent was a sensation--to me a sensation that never
+palled or wore itself away; it was no longer now "la belle Madame
+Pasquier," but "la divine Madame Seraskier"--beauty-blind as the French
+are apt to be.
+
+She topped my tall mother by more than half a head; as was remarked by
+Madame Pele, whose similes were all of the kitchen and dining-room,
+"elle lui mangerait des petits pates sur la tete!" And height, that
+lends dignity to ugliness, magnifies beauty on a scale of geometrical
+progression--2, 4, 8, 16, 32--for every consecutive inch, between five
+feet five, let us say, and five feet ten or eleven (or thereabouts),
+which I take to have been Madame Seraskier's measurement.
+
+She had black hair and blue eyes--of the kind that turns violet in a
+novel--and a beautiful white skin, lovely hands and feet, a perfect
+figure, and features chiselled and finished and polished and turned out
+with such singular felicitousness that one gazed and gazed till the
+heart was full of a strange jealous resentment at any one else having
+the right to gaze on something so rare, so divinely, so sacredly
+fair--any one in the world but one's self!
+
+But a woman can be all this without being Madame Seraskier--she was much
+more.
+
+For the warmth and genial kindness of her nature shone through her eyes
+and rang in her voice. All was of a piece with her--her simplicity, her
+grace, her naturalness and absence of vanity; her courtesy, her
+sympathy, her mirthfulness.
+
+I do not know which was the most irresistible: she had a slight Irish
+accent when she spoke English, a less slight English accent when she
+spoke French!
+
+I made it my business to acquire both.
+
+Indeed, she was in heart and mind and body what we should _all_ be but
+for the lack of a little public spirit and self-denial (under proper
+guidance) during the last few hundred years on the part of a few
+thousand millions of our improvident fellow-creatures.
+
+There should be no available ugly frames for beautiful souls to be
+hurried into by carelessness or mistake, and no ugly souls should be
+suffered to creep, like hermit-crabs, into beautiful shells never
+intended for them. The outward and visible form should mark the inward
+and spiritual grace; that it seldom does so is a fact there is no
+gainsaying. Alas! such beauty is such an exception that its possessor,
+like a prince of the blood royal, is pampered and spoiled from the very
+cradle, and every good and generous and unselfish impulse is corroded by
+adulation--that spontaneous tribute so lightly won, so quickly paid, and
+accepted so royally as a due.
+
+So that only when by Heaven's grace the very beautiful are also very
+good, is it time for us to go down on our knees, and say our prayers in
+thankfulness and adoration; for the divine has been permitted to make
+itself manifest for a while in the perishable likeness of our
+poor humanity.
+
+A beautiful face! a beautiful tune! Earth holds nothing to beat these,
+and of such, for want of better materials, we have built for ourselves
+the kingdom of Heaven.
+
+     _"Plus oblige, et peut davantage
+       Un beau visage
+     Qu'un homme arme--
+       Et rien n'est meilleur que d'entendre
+     Air doux et tendre
+     Jadis aime!"_
+
+My mother soon became the passionately devoted friend of the divine
+Madame Seraskier; and I, what would I not have done--what danger would I
+not have faced--what death would I not have died for her!
+
+I did not die; I lived her protestant to be, for nearly fifty years. For
+nearly fifty years to recollect the rapture and the pain it was to look
+at her; that inexplicable longing ache, that dumb, delicious, complex,
+innocent distress, for which none but the greatest poets have ever found
+expression; and which, perhaps, they have not felt half so acutely,
+these glib and gifted ones, as _I_ did, at the susceptible age of seven,
+eight, nine, ten, eleven, and twelve.
+
+She had other slaves of my sex. The five Napoleonic heroes did homage
+each after his fashion: the good Major with a kind of sweet fatherly
+tenderness touching to behold; the others with perhaps less unselfish
+adoration; notably the brave Capitaine Audenis, of the fair waxed
+mustache and beautiful brown tail coat, so tightly buttoned with gilt
+buttons across his enormous chest, and imperceptible little feet so
+tightly imprisoned in shiny tipped female cloth boots, with buttons of
+mother-of-pearl; whose hobby was, I believe, to try and compensate
+himself for the misfortunes of war by more successful attempts in
+another direction. Anyhow he betrayed a warmth that made my small bosom
+a Gehenna, until she laughed and snubbed him into due propriety and
+shamefaced self-effacement.
+
+It soon became evident that she favored two, at least, out of all this
+little masculine world--the Major myself; and a strange trio we made.
+
+Her poor little daughter, the object of her passionate solicitude, a
+very clever and precocious child, was the reverse of beautiful, although
+she would have had fine eyes but for her red lashless lids. She wore her
+thick hair cropped short, like a boy, and was pasty and sallow in
+complexion, hollow-cheeked, thick-featured, and overgrown, with long
+thin hands and feet, and arms and legs of quite pathetic length and
+tenuity; a silent and melancholy little girl, who sucked her thumb
+perpetually, and kept her own counsel. She would have to lie in bed for
+days together, and when she got well enough to sit up, I (to please her
+mother) would read to her _Le Robinson Suisse_, _Sandford and Merton_,
+_Evenings at Home_, _Les Contes de Madame Perrault_, the shipwreck from
+"Don Juan," of which we never tired, and the "Giaour," the "Corsair,"
+and "Mazeppa"; and last, but not least, _Peter Parleys Natural History_,
+which we got to know by heart.
+
+And out of this latter volume I would often declaim for her benefit what
+has always been to me the most beautiful poem in the world, possibly
+because it was the first I read for myself, or else because it is so
+intimately associated with those happy days. Under an engraving of a
+wild duck (after Bewick, I believe) were quoted W.C. Bryant's lines "To
+a Water-fowl." They charmed me then and charm me now as nothing else has
+quite charmed me; I become a child again as I think of them, with a
+child's virgin subtlety of perception and magical susceptibility to
+vague suggestions of the Infinite.
+
+Poor little Mimsey Seraskier would listen with distended eyes and quick
+comprehension. She had a strange fancy that a pair of invisible beings,
+"La fee Tarapatapoum," and "Le Prince Charmant" (two favorite characters
+of M. le Major's) were always in attendance upon us--upon her and
+me--and were equally fond of us both; that is, "La fee Tarapatapoum" of
+me, and "Le Prince Charmant" of her--and watched over us and would
+protect us through life.
+
+"O! ils sont joliment bien ensemble, tous les deux--ils sont
+inseparables!" she would often exclaim, _apropos_ of these visionary
+beings; and _apropos_ of the water-fowl she would say--
+
+"Il aime beaucoup cet oiseau-la, le Prince Charmant! dis encore, quand
+il vole si haut, et qu'il fait froid, et qu'il est fatigue, et que la
+nuit vient, mais qu'il ne veut pas descendre!"
+
+And I would re-spout--
+
+        _"'All day thy wings have fanned,
+     At that far height, the cold, thin atmosphere,
+     Yet stoop not, weary, to the welcome land,
+           Though the dark night be near!'"_
+
+And poor, morbid, precocious, overwrought Mimsey's eyes would fill, and
+she would meditatively suck her thumb and think unutterable things.
+
+And then I would copy Bewick's wood-cuts for her, as she sat on the arm
+of my chair and patiently watched; and she would say: "La fee
+Tarapatapoum trouve que tu dessines dans la perfection!" and treasure up
+these little masterpieces--"pour l'album de la fee Tarapatapoum!"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+There was one drawing she prized above all others--a steel engraving
+in a volume of Byron, which represented two beautiful beings of either
+sex, walking hand in hand through a dark cavern. The man was in sailor's
+garb; the lady, who went barefoot and lightly clad, held a torch; and
+underneath was written--
+
+     _"And Neuha led her Torquil by the hand,
+     And waved along the vaults her flaming brand."_
+
+I spent hours in copying it for her, and she preferred the copy to the
+original, and would have it that the two figures were excellent
+portraits of her Prince and Fairy.
+
+Sometimes during these readings and sketchings under the apple-tree on
+the lawn, the sleeping Medor (a huge nondescript sort of dog, built up
+of every breed in France, with the virtues of all and the vices of none)
+would wag his three inches of tail, and utter soft whimperings of
+welcome in his dream; and she would say--
+
+"C'est le Prince Charmant qui lui dit; 'Medor donne la patte!'"
+
+Or our old tomcat would rise from his slumbers with his tail up, and rub
+an imaginary skirt; and it was--
+
+"Regarde Mistigris! La fee Tarapatapoum est en train de lui frotter les
+oreilles!'"
+
+We mostly spoke French, in spite of strict injunctions to the contrary
+from our fathers and mothers, who were much concerned lest we should
+forget our English altogether.
+
+In time we made a kind of ingenious compromise; for Mimsey, who was
+full of resource, invented a new language, or rather two, which we
+called Frankingle and Inglefrank, respectively. They consisted in
+anglicizing French nouns and verbs and then conjugating and pronouncing
+them Englishly, or _vice versa_.
+
+For instance, it was very cold, and the school-room window was open, so
+she would say in Frankingle--
+
+"Dispeach yourself to ferm the feneeter, Gogo. It geals to pier-fend! we
+shall be inrhumed!" or else, if I failed to immediately
+understand--"Gogo, il frise a splitter les stonnes--maque aste et chute
+le vindeau; mais chute--le donc vite! Je snize deja!" which was
+Inglefrank.
+
+With this contrivance we managed to puzzle and mystify the uninitiated,
+English and French alike. The intelligent reader, who sees it all in
+print, will not be so easily taken in.
+
+When Mimsey was well enough, she would come with my cousins and me into
+the park, where we always had a good time--lying in ambush for red
+Indians, rescuing Madge Plunket from a caitiff knight, or else hunting
+snakes and field-mice and lizards, and digging for lizard's eggs, which
+we would hatch at home--that happy refuge for all manner of beasts, as
+well as little boys and girls. For there were squirrels, hedgehogs, and
+guinea-pigs; an owl, a raven, a monkey, and white mice; little birds
+that had strayed from the maternal nest before they could fly (they
+always died!), the dog Medor, and any other dog who chose; not to
+mention a gigantic rocking-horse made out of a real stuffed pony--the
+smallest pony that had ever been!
+
+Often our united high spirits were too boisterous for Mimsey. Dreadful
+headaches would come on, and she would sit in a corner, nursing a
+hedgehog with one arm and holding her thumb in her mouth with the other.
+Only when we were alone together was she happy, and then, _moult
+tristement!_
+
+On summer evenings whole parties of us, grown-up and small, would walk
+through the park and the Bois de Boulogne to the "Mare d'Auteuil"; as we
+got near enough for Medor to scent the water, he would bark and grin and
+gyrate, and go mad with excitement, for he had the gift of diving after
+stones, and liked to show it off.
+
+There we would catch huge olive-colored water-beetles, yellow
+underneath; red-bellied newts; green frogs, with beautiful spots and a
+splendid parabolic leap; gold and silver fish, pied with purply brown. I
+mention them in the order of their attractiveness. The fish were too
+tame and easily caught, and their beauty of too civilized an order; the
+rare, flat, vicious dytiscus "took the cake."
+
+Sometimes, even, we would walk through Boulogne to St. Cloud, to see the
+new railway and the trains--an inexhaustible subject of wonder and
+delight--and eat ices at the "Tete Noire" (a hotel which had been the
+scene of a terrible murder, that led to a cause celebre); and we would
+come back through the scented night, while the glowworms were shining in
+the grass, and the distant frogs were croaking in the Mare d'Auteuil.
+Now and then a startled roebuck would gallop in short bounds across
+the path, from thicket to thicket, and Medor would go mad again and wake
+the echoes of the new Paris fortification, which were still in the
+course of construction.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+He had not the gift of catching roebucks!
+
+If my father were of the party, he would yodel Tyrolese melodies, and
+sing lovely songs of Boieldieu, Herold, and Gretry; or "Drink to me only
+with thine eyes," or else the "Bay of Dublin" for Madame Seraskier, who
+had the nostalgia of her beloved country whenever her beloved
+husband was away.
+
+Or else we would break out into a jolly chorus and march to the tune--
+
+          _"Marie, trempe ton pain,
+            Marie, trempe ton pain,
+     Marie, trempe ton pain dans la soupe;
+            Marie, trempe ton pain,
+            Marie, trempe ton pain,
+     Marie, trempe ton pain dans le vin!"_
+
+Or else--
+
+     _"La--soupe aux choux--se fait dans la marmite;
+     Dans--la marmite--se fait la soupe aux choux."_
+
+which would give us all the nostalgia of supper.
+
+Or else, again, if it were too hot to sing, or we were too tired, M. le
+Major, forsaking the realms of fairy-land, and uncovering his high bald
+head as he walked, would gravely and reverently tell us of his great
+master, of Brienne, of Marengo, and Austerlitz; of the farewells at
+Fontainebleau, and the Hundred Days--never of St. Helena; he would not
+trust himself to speak to us of that! And gradually working his way to
+Waterloo, he would put his hat on, and demonstrate to us, by A+B, how,
+virtually, the English had lost the day, and why and wherefore. And on
+all the little party a solemn, awe-struck stillness would fall as we
+listened, and on some of us the sweet nostalgia of bed!
+
+Oh, the good old time!
+
+The night was consecrated for me by the gleam and scent and rustle of
+Madame Seraskier's gown, as I walked by her side in the deepening dusk--a
+gleam of yellow, or pale blue, or white--a scent of sandalwood--a rustle
+that told of a light, vigorous tread on firm, narrow, high-arched feet,
+that were not easily tired; of an anxious, motherly wish to get back to
+Mimsey, who was not strong enough for these longer expeditions.
+
+On the shorter ones I used sometimes to carry Mimsey on my back most of
+the way home (to please her mother)--a frail burden, with her poor,
+long, thin arms round my neck, and her pale, cold cheek against my
+ear--she weighed nothing! And when I was tired M. le Major would relieve
+me, but not for long. She always wanted to be carried by Gogo (for so I
+was called, for no reason whatever, unless it was that my name
+was Peter).
+
+She would start at the pale birches that shone out against the gloom,
+and shiver if a bough scraped her, and tell me all about the
+Erl-king--"mais comme ils sont la tous les deux" (meaning the Prince and
+the Fairy) "il n'y a absolument rien a craindre."
+
+And Mimsey was _si bonne camarade_, in spite of her solemnity and poor
+health and many pains, so grateful for small kindnesses, so appreciative
+of small talents, so indulgent to small vanities (of which she seemed to
+have no more share than her mother), and so deeply humorous in spite of
+her eternal gravity--for she was a real tomboy at heart--that I soon
+carried her, not only to please her mother, but to please herself, and
+would have done anything for her.
+
+As for M. le Major, he gradually discovered that Mimsey was half a
+martyr and half a saint, and possessed all the virtues under the sun.
+
+"Ah, vous ne la comprenez pas, cette enfant; vous verrez un jour quand
+ca ira mieux! vous verrez! elle est comme sa mere ... elle a toutes les
+intelligences de la tete et du coeur!" and he would wish it had pleased
+Heaven that he should be her grandfather--on the maternal side.
+
+_L'art d'etre grandpere!_ This weather-beaten, war-battered old soldier
+had learned it, without ever having had either a son or a daughter of
+his own. He was a _born_ grandfather!
+
+Moreover, Mimsey and I had many tastes and passions in common--music,
+for instance, as well as Bewick's wood-cuts and Byron's poetry, and
+roast chestnuts and domestic pets; and above all, the Mare d'Auteuil,
+which she preferred in the autumn, when the brown and yellow leaves were
+eddying and scampering and chasing each other round its margin, or
+drifting on its troubled surface, and the cold wet wind piped through
+the dishevelled boughs of the forest, under the leaden sky.
+
+She said it was good to be there then, and think of home and the
+fireside; and better still, when home was reached at last, to think of
+the desolate pond we had left; and good, indeed, it was to trudge home
+by wood and park and avenue at dusk, when the bats were about, with
+Alfred and Charlie and Mimsey and Madge and Medor; swishing our way
+through the lush, dead leaves, scattering the beautiful, ripe
+horse-chestnut out of its split creamy case, or picking up acorns and
+beechnuts here and there as we went.
+
+And, once home, it was good, very good, to think how dark and lonesome
+and shivery it must be out there by the _mare_, as we squatted and
+chatted and roasted chestnuts by the wood fire in the school-room before
+the candles were lit--_entre chien et loup_, as was called the French
+gloaming--while Therese was laying the tea-things, and telling us the
+news, and cutting bread and butter; and my mother played the harp in the
+drawing-room above; till the last red streak died out of the wet west
+behind the swaying tree-tops, and the curtains were drawn, and there was
+light, and the appetites were let loose.
+
+I love to sit here, in my solitude and captivity, and recall every
+incident of that sweet epoch--to ache with the pangs of happy
+remembrance; than which, for the likes of me, great poets tell us there
+is no greater grief. This sorrow's crown of sorrow is my joy and my
+consolation, and ever has been; and I would not exchange it for youth,
+health, wealth, honor, and freedom; only for thrice happy childhood
+itself once more, over and over again, would I give up its thrice happy
+recollections.
+
+That it should not be all beer and skittles with us, and therefore apt
+to pall, my cousins and I had to work pretty hard. In the first place,
+my dear mother did all she could to make me an infant prodigy of
+learning. She tried to teach me Italian, which she spoke as fluently as
+English or French (for she had lived much in Italy), and I had to
+translate the "Gierusalemme Liberata" into both those latter
+languages--a task which has remained unfinished--and to render the
+"Allegro" and the "Penseroso" into Miltonian French prose, and "Le Cid"
+into Corneillian English. Then there were Pinnock's histories of Greece
+and Rome to master, and, of course, the Bible; and, every Sunday, the
+Collect, the Gospel, and the Epistle to get by heart. No, it was not all
+beer and skittles.
+
+It was her pleasure to teach, but, alas! not mine to learn; and we cost
+each other many a sigh, but loved each other all the more, perhaps.
+
+Then we went in the mornings, my cousins and I, to M. Saindou's,
+opposite, that we might learn French grammar and French-Latin and
+French-Greek. But on three afternoons out of the weekly six Mr. Slade, a
+Cambridge sizar stranded in Paris, came to anglicize (and neutralize)
+the Latin and Greek we had learned in the morning, and to show us what
+sorry stuff the French had made of them and of their quantities.
+
+Perhaps the Greek and Latin quantities are a luxury of English growth--a
+mere social test--a little pitfall of our own invention, like the letter
+_h_, for the tripping up of unwary pretenders; or else, French
+education being so deplorably cheap in those days, the school-masters
+there could not afford to take such fanciful superfluities into
+consideration; it was not to be done at the price.
+
+In France, be it remembered, the King and his greengrocer sent their
+sons to the same school (which did not happen to be M. Saindou's, by the
+way, where it was nearly all greengrocer and no King); and the fee for
+bed, board, and tuition, in all public schools alike, was something like
+thirty pounds a year.
+
+The Latin, in consequence, was without the distinction that comes of
+exclusiveness, and quite lacked that aristocratic flavor, so grateful
+and comforting to scholar and ignoramus alike, which the costly British
+public-school system (and the British accent) alone can impart to a dead
+language. When French is dead we shall lend it a grace it never had
+before; some of us even manage to do so already.
+
+That is (no doubt) why the best French writers so seldom point their
+morals and adorn their tales, as ours do, with the usual pretty,
+familiar, and appropriate lines out of Horace or Virgil; and why Latin
+is so little quoted in French talk, except here and there by a weary
+shop-walker, who sighs--
+
+"Varium et mutabile semper femina!" as he rolls up the unsold silk; or
+exclaims, "O rus! quando te aspiciam!" as he takes his railway ticket
+for Asnieres on the first fine Sunday morning in spring.
+
+But this is a digression, and we have wandered far away from Mr. Slade.
+
+Good old Slade!
+
+We used to sit on the tone posts outside the avenue gate and watch for
+his appearance at a certain distant corner of the winding street.
+
+With his green tail coat, his stiff shirt collar, his flat thumbs stuck
+in the armholes of his nankeen waistcoat, his long flat feet turned
+inward, his reddish mutton-chop whiskers his hat on the back of his
+head, and his clean, fresh, blooming, virtuous, English face--the sight of
+him was not sympathetic when he appeared at last.
+
+[Illustration: "GOOD OLD SLADE"]
+
+Occasionally, in the course of his tuition, illness or domestic affairs
+would, to his great regret, detain him from our midst, and the beatitude
+we would experience when the conviction gradually dawned upon us that
+we were watching for him in vain was too deep for either words or deeds
+or outward demonstration of any sort. It was enough to sit on our stone
+posts and let it steal over us by degrees.
+
+These beatitudes were few and far between. It would be infelicitous,
+perhaps, to compare the occasional absences of a highly respectable
+English tutor to an angel's visits, but so we felt them.
+
+And then he would make up for it next afternoon, that conscientious
+Englishman; which was fair enough to our parents, but not to us. And
+then what extra severity, as interest for the beggarly loan of half an
+afternoon! What rappings on ink-stained knuckles with a beastly, hard,
+round, polished, heavy-wooded, business-like English ruler!
+
+It was our way in those days to think that everything English was
+beastly--an expression our parents thought we were much too fond
+of using.
+
+But perhaps we were not without some excuse for this unpardonable
+sentiment. For there was _another_ English family in Passy--the
+Prendergasts, an older family than ours--that is, the parents (and
+uncles and aunts) were middle-aged, the grandmother dead, and the
+children grown up. We had not the honor of their acquaintance. But
+whether that was their misfortune and our fault (or _vice versa_) I
+cannot tell. Let us hope the former.
+
+They were of an opposite type to ours, and, though I say it, their type
+was a singularly unattractive one; perhaps it may have been the original
+of those caricatures of our compatriots by which French comic artists
+have sought to avenge Waterloo. It was stiff, haughty, contemptuous. It
+had prominent front teeth, a high nose, a long upper lip, a receding
+jaw; it had dull, cold, stupid, selfish green eyes, like a pike's, that
+swerved neither to right nor left, but looked steadily over peoples'
+heads as it stalked along in its pride of impeccable British
+self-righteousness.
+
+At the sudden sight of it (especially on Sundays) all the cardinal
+virtues became hateful on the spot and respectability a thing to run
+away from. Even that smooth, close-shaven cleanliness was so
+Puritanically aggressive as to make one abhor the very idea of soap.
+
+Its accent, when it spoke French (in shops), instead of being musical
+and sweet and sympathetic, like Madame Seraskier's, was barbarous and
+grotesque, with dreadful "ongs," and "angs," and "ows," and "ays"; and
+its manner overbearing, suspicious, and disdainful; and then we could
+hear its loud, insolent English asides; and though it was tall and
+straight and not outwardly deformed, it looked such a kill-joy skeleton
+at a feast, such a portentous carnival mask of solemn emptiness, such a
+dreary, doleful, unfunny figure of fun, that one felt Waterloo might
+some day be forgiven, even in Passy; but the Prendergasts, _never_!
+
+I have lived so long away from the world that, for all I know, this
+ancient British type, this "grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous
+bird of yore," may have become extinct, like another, but less
+unprepossessing bird--the dodo; whereby our state is the more gracious.
+
+But in those days, and generalizing somewhat hastily as young people
+are apt to do, we grew to think that England must be full of
+Prendergasts, and did not want to go there.
+
+To this universal English beastliness of things we made a few
+exceptions, it is true, but the list was not long: tea, mustard,
+pickles, gingerbread-nuts, and, of all things in the world, the English
+loaf of household bread that came to us once a week as a great treat and
+recompense for our virtues, and harmonized so well with Passy butter. It
+was too delicious! But there was always a difficulty, a dilemma--whether
+to eat it with butter alone, or with "cassonade" (French brown
+sugar) added.
+
+Mimsey knew her own mind, and loved it with French brown sugar, and if
+she were not there I would save for her half of my slices, and carefully
+cassonade them for her myself.
+
+On the other hand, we thought everything French the reverse of
+beastly--except all the French boys we knew, and at M. Saindou's there
+were about two hundred; then there were all the boys in Passy (whose
+name was legion, and who _did not_ go to M. Saindou's), and we knew all
+the boys in Passy. So that we were not utterly bereft of material for
+good, stodgy, crusty, patriotic English prejudice.
+
+Nor did the French boys fail to think us beastly in return, and
+sometimes to express the thought; especially the little vulgar boys,
+whose playground was the street--the _voyous de Passy_. They hated our
+white silk chimney-pot hats and large collars and Eton jackets, and
+called us "sacred godems," as their ancestors used to call ours in the
+days of Joan of Arc. Sometimes they would throw stones, and then there
+were collisions, and bleedings of impertinent little French noses, and
+runnings away of cowardly little French legs, and dreadful wails of "O
+la, la! O, la, la--maman!" when they were overtaken by English ones.
+
+Not but what _our_ noses were made to bleed now and then,
+unvictoriously, by a certain blacksmith--always the same young
+blacksmith--Boitard!
+
+It is always a young blacksmith who does these things--or a young
+butcher.
+
+Of course, for the honor of Great Britain, one of us finally licked him
+to such a tune that he has never been able to hold up his head since. It
+was about a cat. It came off at dusk, one Christmas Eve, on the "Isle of
+Swans," between Passy and Grenelle (too late to save the cat).
+
+I was the hero of this battle. "It's now or never," I thought, and saw
+scarlet, and went for my foe like a maniac. The ring was kept by Alfred
+and Charlie helped, oddly enough, by a couple of male Prendergasts, who
+so far forgot themselves as to take an interest in the proceedings.
+Madge and Mimsey looked on, terrified and charmed.
+
+It did not last long, and was worthy of being described by Homer, or
+even in _Bell's Life_. That is one of the reasons why I will not
+describe it. The two Prendergasts seemed to enjoy it very much while it
+lasted, and when it was over they remembered themselves again, and said
+nothing, and stalked away.
+
+As we grew older and wiser we had permission to extend our explorations
+to Meudon, Versailles, St. Germain, and other delightful places; to ride
+thither on hired horses, after having duly learned to ride at the famous
+"School of Equitation," in the Rue Duphot.
+
+[Illustration: "OMINOUS BIRDS OF YORE."]
+
+Also, we swam in those delightful summer baths in the Seine, that are so
+majestically called "Schools of Natation," and became past masters in
+"la coupe" (a stroke no other Englishman but ourselves has ever been
+quite able to manage), and in all the different delicate "nuances" of
+header-taking--"la coulante," "la hussarde," "la tete-beche," "la tout
+ce que vous voudrez."
+
+Also, we made ourselves at home in Paris, especially old Paris.
+
+For instance, there was the island of St. Louis, with its stately old
+mansions _entre cour et jardin,_ behind grim stone portals and high
+walls where great magistrates and lawyers dwelt in dignified
+seclusion--the nobles of the rove: but where once had dwelt, in days
+gone by, the greater nobles of the sword-crusaders, perhaps, and knights
+templars, like Brian de Bois Guilbert.
+
+And that other more famous island, la Cite, where Paris itself was born,
+where Notre Dame reared its twin towers above the melancholy, gray,
+leprous walls and dirty brown roofs of the Hotel-Dieu.
+
+Pathetic little tumble down old houses, all out of drawing and
+perspective, nestled like old spiders' webs between the buttresses of
+the great cathedral and on two sides of the little square in front (the
+Place du Parvis Notre Dame) stood ancient stone dwellings, with high
+slate roofs and elaborately wrought iron balconies. They seemed to have
+such romantic histories that I never tired of gazing at them, and
+wondering what the histories could be; and now I think of it, one of
+these very dwellings must have been the Hotel de Gondelaurier, where,
+according to the most veracious historian that ever was, poor Esmeralda
+once danced and played the tambourine to divert the fair damsel
+Fleur-de-Lys de Gondelaurier and her noble friends, all of whom she so
+transcended in beauty, purity, goodness, and breeding (although she was
+but an untaught, wandering gypsy girl, out of the gutter); and there,
+before them all and the gay archer, she was betrayed to her final
+undoing by her goat, whom she had so imprudently taught how to spell
+the beloved name of "Phebus."
+
+Close by was the Morgue, that grewsome building which the great etcher
+Meryon has managed to invest with some weird fascination akin to that it
+had for me in those days--and has now, as I see it with the charmed
+eyes of Memory.
+
+La Morgue! what a fatal twang there is about the very name!
+
+[Illustration: SETTLING AN OLD SCORE.]
+
+After gazing one's fill at the horrors within (as became a
+healthy-minded English boy) it was but a step to the equestrian statue
+of Henri Quatre, on the Pont-Neuf (the oldest bridge in Paris, by the
+way); there, astride his long-tailed charger, he smiled, _le roy vert et
+galant,_ just midway between either bank of the historic river, just
+where it was most historic; and turned his back on the Paris of the
+Bourgeois King with the pear-shaped face and the mutton-chop whiskers.
+
+And there one stood, spellbound in indecision, like the ass of Buridan
+between two sacks of oats; for on either side, north or south of the
+Pont-Neuf, were to be found enchanting slums, all more attractive the
+ones than the others, winding up and down hill and roundabout and in and
+out, like haunting illustrations by Gustave Dore to _Drolatick Tales_ by
+Balzac (not seen or read by me till many years later, I beg to say).
+
+Dark, narrow, silent, deserted streets that would turn up afterwards in
+many a nightmare--with the gutter in the middle and towerlets and stone
+posts all along the sides; and high fantastic walls (where it was
+_defendre d'afficher_), with bits of old battlement at the top, and
+overhanging boughs of sycamore and lime, and behind them gray old
+gardens that dated from the days of Louis le Hutin and beyond! And
+suggestive names printed in old rusty iron letters at the street
+corners--"Rue Videgousset," "Rue Coupe-gorge," "Rue de la Vieille
+Truanderie," "Impasse de la Tour de Nesle," etc., that appealed to the
+imagination like a chapter from Hugo or Dumas.
+
+And the way to these was by long, tortuous, busy thoroughfares, most
+irregularly flagged, and all alive with strange, delightful people in
+blue blouses, brown woollen tricots, wooden shoes, red and white cotton
+nightcaps, rags and patches; most graceful girls, with pretty,
+self-respecting feet, and flashing eyes, and no head-dress but their own
+hair; gay, fat hags, all smile; thin hags, with faces of appalling
+wickedness or misery; precociously witty little gutter-imps of either
+sex; and such cripples! jovial hunchbacks, lusty blind beggars, merry
+creeping paralytics, scrofulous wretches who joked and punned about
+their sores; light-hearted, genial, mendicant monsters without arms or
+legs, who went ramping through the mud on their bellies from one
+underground wine-shop to another; and blue-chinned priests and
+barefooted brown monks and demure Sisters of Charity, and here and there
+a jolly chiffonnier with his hook, and his knap-basket behind; or a
+cuirassier, or a gigantic carbineer, or gay little "Hunter of Africa,"
+or a couple of bold gendarmes riding abreast, with their towering black
+_bonnets a poil;_ or a pair of pathetic little red-legged soldiers,
+conscripts just fresh from the country, with innocent light eyes and
+straw-coloured hair and freckled brown faces, walking hand in hand, and
+staring at all the pork-butchers' shops--and sometimes at the
+pork-butcher's wife!
+
+Then a proletarian wedding procession--headed by the bride and
+bridegroom, an ungainly pair in their Sunday best--all singing noisily
+together. Then a pauper funeral, or a covered stretcher, followed by
+sympathetic eyes on its way to the Hotel-Dieu; or the last sacrament,
+with bell and candle, bound for the bedside of some humble agonizer _in
+extremis_--and we all uncovered as it went by.
+
+And then, for a running accompaniment of sound the clanging chimes, the
+itinerant street cries, the tinkle of the _marchand de coco,_ the drum,
+the _cor de chasse,_ the organ of Barbary, the ubiquitous pet parrot,
+the knife-grinder, the bawling fried-potato monger, and, most amusing of
+all, the poodle-clipper and his son, strophe and antistrophe, for every
+minute the little boy would yell out in his shrill treble that "his
+father clipped poodles for thirty sous, and was competent also to
+undertake the management of refractory tomcats," upon which the father
+would growl in his solemn bass, "My son speaks the truth"--_L'enfant
+dit vrai!_
+
+And rising above the general cacophony the din of the eternally cracking
+whip, of the heavy carwheel jolting over the uneven stones, the stamp
+and neigh of the spirited little French cart-horse and the music of his
+many bells, and the cursing and swearing and _hue! dia!_ of his driver!
+It was all entrancing.
+
+Thence home--to quite, innocent, suburban Passy--by the quays, walking
+on the top of the stone parapet all the way, so as to miss nothing (till
+a gendarme was in sight), or else by the Boulevards, the Rue de Rivoli,
+the Champs Elysees, the Avenue de St. Cloud, and the Chaussee de la
+Muette. What a beautiful walk! Is there another like it anywhere as it
+was then, in the sweet early forties of this worn-out old century, and
+before this poor scribe had reached his teens?
+
+Ah! it is something to have known that Paris, which lay at one's feet as
+one gazed from the heights of Passy, with all its pinnacles and spires
+and gorgeously-gilded domes, its Arch of Triumph, its Elysian Fields,
+its Field of Mars, its Towers of our Lady, its far-off Column of July,
+its Invalids, and Vale of Grace, and Magdalen, and Place of the Concord,
+where the obelisk reared its exotic peak by the beautiful unforgettable
+fountains.
+
+There flowed the many-bridged winding river, always the same way, unlike
+our tidal Thames, and always full; just beyond it was spread that
+stately, exclusive suburb, the despair of the newly rich and recently
+ennobled, where almost every other house bore a name which read like a
+page of French history; and farther still the merry, wicked Latin
+quarter and the grave Sorbonne, the Pantheon, the Garden of Plants; on
+the hither side, in the middle distance, the Louvre, where the kings of
+France had dwelt for centuries; the Tuileries, where "the King of the
+French" dwelt then, and just for a little while yet.
+
+Well I knew and loved it all; and most of all I loved it when the sun
+was setting at my back, and innumerable distant windows reflected the
+blood-red western flame. It seemed as though half Paris were on fire,
+with the cold blue east for a background.
+
+Dear Paris!
+
+Yes, it is something to have roamed over it as a small boy--a small
+English boy (that is, a small boy unattended by his mother or his
+nurse), curious, inquisitive, and indefatigable; full of imagination;
+all his senses keen with the keenness that belongs to the morning of
+life: the sight of a hawk, the hearing of a bat, almost the scent of
+a hound.
+
+Indeed, it required a nose both subtle and unprejudiced to understand
+and appreciate and thoroughly enjoy that Paris--not the Paris of M. le
+Baron Haussmann, lighted by gas and electricity, and flushed and drained
+by modern science; but the "good old Paris" of Balzac and Eugene Sue and
+_Les Mysteres_--the Paris of dim oil-lanterns suspended from iron
+gibbets (where once aristocrats had been hung); of water-carriers who
+sold water from their hand-carts, and delivered it at your door (_au
+cinqueme_) for a penny a pail--to drink of, and wash in, and cook
+with, and all.
+
+There were whole streets--and these by no means the least fascinating
+and romantic--where the unwritten domestic records of every house were
+afloat in the air outside it--records not all savory or sweet, but
+always full of interest and charm!
+
+One knew at a sniff as one passed the _porte cochere_ what kind of
+people lived behind and above; what they ate and what they drank, and
+what their trade was; whether they did their washing at home, and burned
+tallow or wax, and mixed chicory with their coffee, and were over-fond
+of Gruyere cheese--the biggest, cheapest, plainest, and most formidable
+cheese in the world; whether they fried with oil or butter, and liked
+their omelets overdone and garlic in their salad, and sipped
+black-currant brandy or anisette as a liqueur; and were overrun with
+mice, and used cats or mouse-traps to get rid of them, or neither; and
+bought violets, or pinks, or gillyflowers in season, and kept them too
+long; and fasted on Friday with red or white beans, or lentils, or had a
+dispensation from the Pope--or, haply, even dispensed with the Pope's
+dispensation.
+
+For of such a telltale kind were the overtones in that complex, odorous
+clang.
+
+I will not define its fundamental note--ever there, ever the same; big
+with a warning of quick-coming woe to many households; whose unheeded
+waves, slow but sure, and ominous as those that rolled on great
+occasions from le Bourdon de Notre Dame (the Big Ben of Paris), drove
+all over the gay city and beyond, night and day--penetrating every
+corner, overflowing the most secret recesses, drowning the very incense
+by the altar-steps.
+
+     "_Le pauvre en sa cabane ou le chaume le couvre
+         Est sujet a ses lois;
+     Et la garde qui veille aux barrieres du Louvre
+         N'en defend point nos rois_."
+
+And here, as I write, the faint, scarcely perceptible, ghost-like
+suspicion of a scent--a mere nostalgic fancy, compound, generic,
+synthetic and all-embracing--an abstract olfactory symbol of the "Tout
+Paris" of fifty years ago, comes back to me out of the past; and fain
+would I inhale it in all its pristine fulness and vigour. For scents,
+like musical sounds, are rare sublimaters of the essence of memory (this
+is a prodigious fine phrase--I hope it means something), and scents
+need not be seductive in themselves to recall the seductions of scenes
+and days gone by.
+
+Alas! scents cannot be revived at will, like an
+
+     "_Air doux et tendre
+         Jadis aime_!"
+
+Oh, that I could hum or whistle an old French smell! I could evoke all
+Paris, sweet, prae-imperial Paris, in a single whiff!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In such fashion did we three small boys, like the three musketeers (the
+fame of whose exploits was then filling all France), gather and pile up
+sweet memories, to chew the cud thereof in after years, when far away
+and apart.
+
+Of all that _bande joyeuse_--old and young and middle-aged, from M. le
+Major to Mimsey Seraskier--all are now dead but me--all except dear
+Madge, who was so pretty and light-hearted; and I have never seen
+her since.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thus have I tried, with as much haste as I could command (being one of
+the plodding sort) to sketch that happy time, which came to an end
+suddenly and most tragically when I was twelve years old.
+
+My dear and jovial happy-go-lucky father was killed in a minute by the
+explosion of a safety lamp of his own invention, which was to have
+superseded Sir Humphry Davy's, and made our fortune! What a brutal
+irony of fate.
+
+So sanguine was he of success, so confident that his ship had come home
+at last, that he had been in treaty for a nice little old manor in Anjou
+(with a nice little old castle to match), called la Mariere, which had
+belonged to his ancestors, and from which we took our name (for we were
+Pasquier de la Mariere, of quite a good old family); and there we were
+to live on our own land, as _gentilshommes campagnards_, and be French
+for evermore, under a paternal, pear-faced bourgeois king as a temporary
+_pis-aller_ until Henri Cinq, Comte de Chambord, should come to his own
+again, and make us counts and barons and peers of France--Heaven
+knows what for!
+
+My mother, who was beside herself with grief, went over to London, where
+this miserable accident had occurred, and had barely arrived there when
+she was delivered of a still-born child, and died almost immediately;
+and I became an orphan in less than a week, and a penniless one. For it
+turned out that my father had by this time spent every penny of his own
+and my mother's capital, and had, moreover, died deeply in debt. I was
+too young and too grief-stricken to feel anything but the terrible
+bereavement, but it soon became patent to me that an immense alteration
+was to be made in my mode of life.
+
+A relative of my mother's, Colonel Ibbetson (who was well off) came to
+Passy to do his best for me, and pay what debts had been incurred in the
+neighborhood, and settle my miserable affairs.
+
+After a while it was decided by him and the rest of the family that I
+should go back with him to London, there to be disposed of for the
+best, according to his lights.
+
+And on a beautiful June Morning, redolent of lilac and syringa, gay with
+dragon-flies and butterflies and bumblebees, my happy childhood ended as
+it had begun. My farewells were heartrending (to me), but showed that I
+could inspire affection as well as feel it, and that was some
+compensation for my woe.
+
+"Adieu, cher Monsieur Gogo. Bonne chance, et le Bon Dieu vous benisse,"
+said le Pere et la Mere Francois. Tears trickled down the Major's hooked
+nose on to his mustache, now nearly white.
+
+Madame Seraskier strained me to her kind heart, and blessed and kissed
+me again and again, and rained her warm tears on my face; and hers was
+the last figure I saw as our fly turned into the Rue de la Tour on our
+way to London, Colonel Ibbetson exclaiming--
+
+"Gad! who's the lovely young giantess that seems so fond of you, you
+little rascal, hey? By George! you young Don Giovanni, I'd have given
+something to be in your place! And who's that nice old man with the long
+green coat and the red ribbon? A _vieille moustache_, I suppose: almost
+like a gentleman. Precious few Frenchmen can do that!"
+
+Such was Colonel Ibbetson.
+
+And then and there, even as he spoke, a little drop of sullen, chill
+dislike to my guardian and benefactor, distilled from his voice, his
+aspect, the expression of his face, and his way of saying things,
+suddenly trickled into my consciousness--never to be whiped away!
+
+As for so poor Mimsey, her grief was so overwhelming that she could not
+come out and wish me goodbye like the others; and it led, as I
+afterwards heard, to a long illness, the worst she ever had; and when
+she recovered it was to find that her beautiful mother was no more.
+
+[Illustration:]
+
+Madame Seraskier died of the cholera, and so did le Pere et la Mere
+Francois, and Madame Pele, and one of the Napoleonic prisoners (not M.
+le Major), and several other people we had known, including a servant of
+our own, Therese, the devoted Therese, to whom we were all devoted in
+return. That malodorous tocsin, which I have compared to the big bell of
+Notre Dame, had warned, and warned, and warned in vain.
+
+The _maison de sante_ was broken up. M. le Major and his friends went
+and roosted on parole elsewhere, until a good time arrived for them,
+when their lost leader came back and remained--first as President of the
+French Republic, then as Emperor of the French themselves. No more
+parole was needed after that.
+
+My grandmother and Aunt Plunket and her children fled in terror to
+Tours, and Mimsey went to Russia with her father.
+
+Thus miserably ended that too happy septennate, and so no more at
+present of
+
+     "_Le joli lieu de ma naissance_!"
+
+
+
+
+Part Two
+
+
+The next decade of my outer life is so uninteresting, even to myself,
+that I will hurry through it as fast as I can. It will prove dull
+reading, I fear.
+
+[Illustration:]
+
+My Uncle Ibbetson (as I now called him) took to me and arranged to
+educate and start me in life, and make "a gentleman" of me--an "English
+gentleman." But I had to change my name and adopt his; for some reason I
+did not know, he seemed to hate my father's very name. Perhaps it was
+because he had injured my father through life in many ways, and my
+father had always forgiven him; a very good reason! Perhaps it was
+because he had proposed to my mother three times when she was a girl,
+and had been thrice refused! (After the third time, he went to India for
+seven years, and just before his departure my father and mother were
+married, and a year after that I was born.)
+
+So Pierre Pasquier de la Mariere, _alias_ Monsieur Gogo, became Master
+Peter Ibbetson, and went to Bluefriars, the gray-coat school, where he
+spent six years--an important slice out of a man's life, especially
+at that age.
+
+I hated the garb, I hated the surroundings--the big hospital at the
+back, and that reek of cruelty, drunkenness, and filth, the
+cattle-market--where every other building was either a slaughter-house,
+a gin-palace, or a pawnbroker's shop, more than all I hated the gloomy
+jail opposite, where they sometimes hanged a man in public on a Monday
+morning. This dismal prison haunted my dreams when I wanted to dream of
+Passy, of my dear dead father and mother and Madame Seraskier.
+
+For the first term or two they were ever in my thoughts, and I was
+always trying to draw their profiles on desks and slates and copybooks,
+till at last all resemblance seemed to fade out of them; and then I drew
+M. le Major till his side face became quite demoralized and impossible,
+and ceased to be like anything in life. Then I fell back on others: le
+Pere Francois, with his eternal _bonnet de colon_ and sabots stuffed
+with straw; the dog Medor, the rocking-horse, and all the rest of the
+menagerie; the diligence that brought me away from Paris; the heavily
+jack-booted couriers in shiny hats and pigtails, and white breeches, and
+short-tailed blue coats covered with silver buttons, who used to ride
+through Passy, on their way to and fro between the Tuileries and St.
+Cloud, on little, neighing, gray stallions with bells round their necks
+and tucked-up tails, and beautiful heads like the horses' heads in the
+Elgin Marbles.
+
+In my sketches they always looked and walked and trotted the same way:
+to the left, or westward as it would be on the map. M. le Major, Madame
+Seraskier, Medor, the diligences and couriers, were all bound westward
+by common consent--all going to London, I suppose, to look after me, who
+was so dotingly fond of them.
+
+Some of the boys used to admire these sketches and preserve them--some
+of the bigger boys would value my idealized (!) profiles of Madame
+Seraskier, with eyelashes quite an inch in length, and an eye three
+times the size of her mouth; and thus I made myself an artistic
+reputation for a while. But it did not last long, for my vein was
+limited; and soon another boy came to the school, who surpassed me in
+variety and interest of subject, and could draw profiles looking either
+way with equal ease; he is now a famous Academician, and seems to have
+preserved much of his old facility.[A]
+
+[Footnote A: _Note_.--I have here omitted several pages, containing a
+description in detail of my cousin's life "at Bluefriars"; and also the
+portraits (not always flattering) which he has written of masters and
+boys, many of whom are still alive, and some of whom have risen to
+distinction; but these sketches would be without special interest unless
+the names were given as well, and that would be unadvisable for many
+reasons. Moreover, there is not much in what I have left out that has
+any bearing on his subsequent life, or the development of his character.
+MADGE PLUNKET.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thus, on the whole, my school career was neither happy nor unhappy, nor
+did I distinguish myself in any way, nor (though I think I was rather
+liked than otherwise) make any great or lasting friendships; on the
+other hand. I did not in any way disgrace myself, nor make a single
+enemy that I knew of. Except that I grew our of the common tall and
+very strong, a more commonplace boy than I must have seemed (after my
+artistic vein gad run itself dry) never went to a public school. So much
+for my outer life at Bluefriars.
+
+[Illustration: A DREAM OF CHIVALRY]
+
+But I had an inner world of my own, whose capital was Passy, whose fauna
+and flora were not to be surpassed by anything in Regent's Park or the
+Zoological Gardens.
+
+It was good to think of it by day, to dream of it by night, _although I
+had not yet learned how to dream!_
+
+There were soon other and less exclusive regions, however, which I
+shared with other boys of that bygone day. Regions of freedom and
+delight, where I heard the ominous crack of Deerslayer's rifle, and was
+friends with Chingachgook and his noble son--the last, alas! of the
+Mohicans: where Robin Hood and Friar Tuck made merry, and exchanged
+buffets with Lion-hearted Richard under the green-wood tree: where
+Quentin Durward, happy squire of dames, rode midnightly by their side
+through the gibbet-and-gipsy-haunted forests of Touraine.... Ah! I had
+my dream of chivalry!
+
+Happy times and climes! One must be a gray-coated school-boy, in the
+heart of foggy London, to know that nostalgia.
+
+Not, indeed, but what London has its merits. Sam Weller lived there, and
+Charley Bates, and the irresistible Artful Dodger--and Dick Swiveller,
+and his adorable Marchioness, who divided my allegiance with Rebecca of
+York and sweet Diana Vernon.
+
+It was good to be an English boy in those days, and care for such
+friends as these! But it was good to be a French boy also; to have known
+Paris, to possess the true French feel of things--and the language.
+
+Indeed, bilingual boys--boys double-tongued from their very birth
+(especially in French and English)--enjoy certain rare privileges. It is
+not a bad thing for a school-boy (since a school-boy he must be) to hail
+from two mother-countries if he can, and revel now and then in the
+sweets of homesickness for that of his two mother-countries in which he
+does not happen to be; and read _Les Trois Mousquetaires_ in the
+cloisters of Bluefriars, or _Ivanhoe_ in the dull, dusty prison-yard
+that serves for a playground in so many a French _lycee_!
+
+Without listening, he hears all round him the stodgy language of every
+day, and the blatant shouts of his school-fellows, in the voices he
+knows so painfully well--those shrill trebles, those cracked barytones
+and frog-like early basses! There they go, bleating and croaking and
+yelling; Dick, Tom, and Harry, or Jules, Hector, and Alphonse! How
+vaguely tiresome and trivial and commonplace they are--those too
+familiar sounds; yet what an additional charm they lend to that so
+utterly different but equally familiar word-stream that comes silently
+flowing into his consciousness through his rapt eyes! The luxurious
+sense of mental exclusiveness and self-sequestration is made doubly
+complete by the contrast!
+
+And for this strange enchantment to be well and thoroughly felt, both
+his languages must be native; not acquired, however perfectly. Every
+single word must have its roots deep down in a personal past so remote
+for him as to be almost unremembered; the very sound and printed aspect
+of each must be rich in childish memories of home; in all the countless,
+nameless, priceless associations that make it sweet and fresh and
+strong, and racy of the soil.
+
+Oh! Porthos, Athos, and D'Artagnan--how I loved you, and your immortal
+squires, Planchet, Grimaud, Mousqueton! How well and wittily you spoke
+the language I adored--better even than good Monsieur Lallemand, the
+French master at Bluefriars, who could wield the most irregular
+subjunctives as if they had been mere feathers--trifles light as air.
+
+Then came the Count of Monte-Cristo, who taught me (only too well) his
+terrible lesson of hatred and revenge; and _Les Mysteres de Paris, Le
+Juif Errant_, and others.
+
+But no words that I can think of in either mother-tongue can express
+what I felt when first, through these tear-dimmed eyes of mine, and deep
+into my harrowed soul, came silently flowing the never-to-be-forgotten
+history of poor Esmeralda,[A] my first love! whose cruel fate filled
+with pity, sorrow, and indignation the last term of my life at school.
+It was the most important, the most solemn, the most epoch-making event
+of my school life. I read it, reread it, and read it again. I have not
+been able to read it since; it is rather long! but how well I remember
+it, and how short it seemed then! and oh! how short those
+well-spent hours!
+
+[Footnote A: Notre Dame de Paris, par Victor Hugo.]
+
+That mystic word [Greek: Anagkae]! I wrote it on the flyleaf of all my
+books. I carved it on my desk. I intoned it in the echoing cloisters! I
+vowed I would make a pilgrimage to Notre Dame some day, that I might
+hunt for it in every hole and corner there, and read it with my own
+eyes, and feel it with my own forefinger.
+
+And then that terrible prophetic song the old hag sings in the dark
+slum--how it haunted me, too! I could not shake it out of my troubled
+consciousness for months:
+
+     _Grouille, greve, greve, grouille,
+     File, File, ma quenouille:_
+
+     _File sa corde au bourreau
+     Qui siffle dans le preau.
+
+     [Greek:"'Anagkae!'Anagkae!'Anagkae_!"]
+
+Yes; it was worth while having been a little French boy just for a few
+years.
+
+I especially found it so during the holidays, which I regularly spent at
+Bluefriars; for there was a French circulating library in Holborn, close
+by--a paradise. It was kept by a delightful old French lady who had seen
+better days, and was very kind to me, and did not lend me all the books
+I asked for!
+
+Thus irresistibly beguiled by these light wizards of our degenerate age,
+I dreamed away most of my school life, utterly deaf to the voices of the
+older enchanters--Homer, Horace, Virgil--whom I was sent to school on
+purpose to make friends with; a deafness I lived to deplore, like other
+dunces, when it was too late.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And I was not only given to dream by day--I dreamed by night; my sleep
+was full of dreams--terrible nightmares, exquisite visions, strange
+scenes full of inexplicable reminiscence; all vague and incoherent, like
+all men's dreams that have hitherto been; _for I had not yet learned how
+to dream_.
+
+A vast world, a dread and beautiful chaos, an ever-changing kaleidoscope
+of life, too shadowy and dim to leave any lasting impression on the
+busy, waking mind; with here and there more vivid images of terror or
+delight, that one remembered for a few hours with a strange wonder and
+questioning, as Coleridge remembered his Abyssinian maid who played
+upon the dulcimer (a charming and most original combination).
+
+The whole cosmos is in a man's brains--as much of it, at least, as a
+man's brains will hold; perhaps it is nowhere else. And when sleep
+relaxes the will, and there are no earthly surroundings to distract
+attention--no duty, pain, or pleasure to compel it--riderless Fancy
+takes the bit in its teeth, and the whole cosmos goes mad and has its
+wild will of us.
+
+[Illustration: "NOTRE DAME DE PARIS."]
+
+Ineffable false joys, unspeakable false terror and distress, strange
+phantoms only seen as in a glass darkly, chase each other without rhyme
+or reason, and play hide-and-seek across the twilit field and through
+the dark recesses of our clouded and imperfect consciousness.
+
+And the false terrors and distress, however unspeakable, are no worse
+than such real terrors and distress as are only too often the waking lot
+of man, or even so bad; but the ineffable false joys transcend all
+possible human felicity while they last, and a little while it is! We
+wake, and wonder, and recall the slight foundation on which such
+ultra-human bliss has seemed to rest. What matters the foundation if but
+the bliss be there, and the brain has nerves to feel it?
+
+Poor human nature, so richly endowed with nerves of anguish, so
+splendidly organized for pain and sorrow, is but slenderly equipped
+for joy.
+
+What hells have we not invented for the afterlife! Indeed, what hells we
+have often made of this, both for ourselves and others, and at really
+such a very small cost of ingenuity, after all!
+
+Perhaps the biggest and most benighted fools have been the best
+hell-makers.
+
+Whereas the best of our heavens is but a poor perfunctory conception,
+for all that the highest and cleverest among us have done their very
+utmost to decorate and embellish it, and make life there seem worth
+living. So impossible it is to imagine or invent beyond the sphere of
+our experience.
+
+Now, these dreams of mine (common to many) of the false but ineffable
+joys, are they not a proof that there exist in the human brain hidden
+capacities, dormant potentialities of bliss, unsuspected hitherto, to
+be developed some day, perhaps, and placed within the reach of all,
+wakers and sleepers alike?
+
+A sense of ineffable joy, attainable at will, and equal in intensity and
+duration to (let us say) an attack of sciatica, would go far to equalize
+the sorrowful, one-sided conditions under which we live.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But there is one thing which, as a school-boy, I never dreamed--namely,
+that I, and one other holding a torch, should one day, by common
+consent, find our happiness in exploring these mysterious caverns of the
+brain; and should lay the foundations of order where only misrule had
+been before: and out of all those unreal, waste, and transitory realms
+of illusion, evolve a real, stable, and habitable world, which all who
+run may reach.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At last I left school for good, and paid a visit to my Uncle Ibbetson in
+Hopshire, where he was building himself a lordly new pleasure-house on
+his own land, as the old one he had inherited a year or two ago was no
+longer good enough for him.
+
+It was an uninteresting coast on the German Ocean, without a rock, or a
+cliff, or a pier, or a tree; even without cold gray stones for the sea
+to break on--nothing but sand!--a bourgeois kind of sea, charmless in
+its best moods, and not very terrible in its wrath, except to a few
+stray fishermen whom it employed, and did not seem to reward very
+munificently.
+
+Inland it was much the same. One always thought of the country as gray,
+until one looked and found that it was green; and then, if one were old
+and wise, one thought no more about it, and turned one's gaze inward.
+Moreover, it seemed to rain incessantly.
+
+But it was the country and the sea, after Bluefriars and the
+cloisters--after Newgate, St. Bartholomew, and Smithfield.
+
+And one could fish and bathe in the sea after all, and ride in the
+country, and even follow the hounds, a little later; which would have
+been a joy beyond compare if one had not been blessed with an uncle who
+thought one rode like a French tailor, and told one so, and mimicked
+one, in the presence of charming young ladies who rode in perfection.
+
+In fact, it was heaven itself by comparison, and would have remained so
+longer but for Colonel Ibbetson's efforts to make a gentleman of me--an
+English gentleman.
+
+What is a gentleman? It is a grand old name; but what does it mean?
+
+At one time, to say of a man that he is a gentleman, is to confer on him
+the highest title of distinction we can think of; even if we are
+speaking of a prince.
+
+At another, to say of a man that he is _not_ a gentleman is almost to
+stigmatize him as a social outcast, unfit for the company of his
+kind--even if it is only one haberdasher speaking of another.
+
+_Who_ is a gentleman, and yet who _is not_?
+
+The Prince of Darkness was one, and so was Mr. John Halifax, if we are
+to believe those who knew them best; and so was one "Pelham," according
+to the late Sir Edward Bulwer, Earl of Lytton, etc.; and it certainly
+seemed as if _he_ ought to know.
+
+And I was to be another, according to Roger Ibbetson, Esquire, of
+Ibbetson Hall, late Colonel of the--, and it certainly seemed as if
+he ought to know too! The word was as constantly on his lips (when
+talking to _me_) as though, instead of having borne her Majesty's
+commission, he were a hairdresser's assistant who had just come into an
+independent fortune.
+
+This course of tuition began pleasantly enough, before I left London, by
+his sending me to his tailors, who made me several beautiful suits;
+especially an evening suit, which has lasted me for life, alas; and
+these, after the uniform of the gray-coat school, were like an
+initiation to the splendors of freedom and manhood.
+
+Colonel Ibbetson--or Uncle Ibbetson, as I used to call him--was my
+mother's first cousin; my grandmother, Mrs. Biddulph, was the sister of
+his father, the late Archdeacon Ibbetson, a very pious, learned, and
+exemplary divine, of good family.
+
+But his mother (the Archdeacon's second wife) had been the only child
+and heiress of an immensely rich pawnbroker, by name Mendoza; a
+Portuguese Jew, with a dash of colored blood in his veins besides, it
+was said; and, indeed, this remote African strain still showed itself in
+Uncle Ibbetson's thick lips, wide open nostrils, and big black eyes with
+yellow whites--and especially in his long, splay, lark-heeled feet,
+which gave both himself and the best bootmaker in London a great deal
+of trouble.
+
+Otherwise, and in spite of his ugly face, he was not without a certain
+soldier-like air of distinction, being very tall and powerfully built.
+He wore stays, and an excellent wig, for he was prematurely bald; and he
+carried his hat on one side, which (in my untutored eyes) made him look
+very much like a "_swell_," but not quite like a _gentleman_.
+
+To wear your hat jauntily cocked over one eye, and yet "look like a
+gentleman!"
+
+It can be done, I am told; and has been, and is even still! It is not,
+perhaps, a very lofty achievement--but such as it is, it requires a
+somewhat rare combination of social and physical gifts in the wearer;
+and the possession of either Semitic or African blood does not seem to
+be one of these.
+
+[Illustration: "PORTRAIT CHARMANT, PORTRAIT DE MON AMIE ..."]
+
+Colonel Ibbetson could do a little of everything--sketch (especially a
+steam-boat on a smooth sea, with beautiful thick smoke reflected in the
+water), play the guitar, sing chansonnettes and canzonets, write society
+verses, quote De Musset--
+
+     _"Avez-vous vu dans Barcelone
+     Une Andalouse au sein bruni?"_
+
+He would speak French whenever he could, even to an English ostler, and
+then recollect himself suddenly, and apologize for his thoughtlessness;
+and even when he spoke English, he would embroider it with little
+two-penny French tags and idioms: "Pour tout potage"; "Nous avons change
+tout cela"; "Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galere?" etc.; or
+Italian, "Chi lo sa?" "Pazienza!" "Ahime!" or even Latin, "Eheu
+fugaces," and "Vidi tantum!" for he had been an Eton boy. It must have
+been very cheap Latin, for I could always understand it myself! He drew
+the line at German and Greek; fortunately, for so do I. He was a
+bachelor, and his domestic arrangements had been irregular, and I will
+not dwell upon them; but his house, as far as it went, seemed to promise
+better things.
+
+His architect, Mr. Lintot, an extraordinary little man, full of genius
+and quite self-made, became my friend and taught me to smoke, and drink
+gin and water.
+
+He did his work well; but of an evening he used to drink more than was
+good for him, and rave about Shelley, his only poet. He would recite
+"The Skylark" (his only poem) with uncertain _h_'s, and a rather
+cockney accent--
+
+     "'_Ail to thee blythe sperrit!
+     Bird thou never wert,
+     That from 'eaven, or near it
+     Po'rest thy full 'eart
+     In profuse strains of hunpremeditated hart_."
+
+As the evening wore on his recitations became "low comic," and quite
+admirable for accent and humour. He could imitate all the actors in
+London (none of which I had seen) so well as to transport me with
+delight and wonder; and all this with nobody but me for an audience, as
+we sat smoking and drinking together in his room at the "Ibbetson Arms."
+
+I felt grateful to adoration.
+
+Later still, he would become sentimental again; and dilate to me on the
+joys of his wedded life, on the extraordinary of intellect and beauty of
+Mrs. Lintot. First he would describe to me the beauties of her mind, and
+compare her to "L.E.L." and Felicia Hemans. Then he would fall back on
+her physical perfections; there was nobody worthy to be compared to her
+in these--but I draw the veil.
+
+He was very egotistical. Whatever he did, whatever he liked, whatever
+belonged to him, was better than anything else in world; and he was
+cleverer than any one else, except Mrs. Lintot, to whom he yielded the
+palm; and then he would cheer up and become funny again.
+
+In fact his self-satisfaction was quite extraordinary; and what is more
+extraordinary still, it was not a bit offensive--at least, to me;
+perhaps because he was such a tiny little man; or because much of this
+vanity of his seemed to have no very solid foundation, for it was not of
+the gifts I most admired in him that he was vainest; or because it came
+out most when he was most tipsy, and genial tipsiness redeems so much;
+or else because he was most vain about things I should never have been
+vain about myself; and the most unpardonable vanity in others is that
+which is secretly our own, whether we are conscious of it or not.
+
+[Illustration: "I FELT GRATEFUL TO ADORATION."]
+
+And then he was the first funny man I had ever met. What a gift it is!
+He was always funny when he tried to be, whether one laughed with him or
+at him, and I loved him for it. Nothing on earth is more pathetically
+pitiable than the funny man when he still tries and succeeds no longer.
+
+The moment Lintot's vein was exhausted, he had the sense to leave off
+and begin to cry, which was still funny; and then I would jump out of
+his clothes and into his bed and be asleep in a second, with the tears
+still trickling down his little nose--and even that was funny!
+
+But next morning he was stern and alert and indefatiguable, as though
+gin and poetry and conjugal love had never been, and fun were a
+capital crime.
+
+Uncle Ibbetson thought highly of him as an architect, but not otherwise;
+he simply made use of him.
+
+"He's a terrible little snob, of course, and hasn't got an _h_ in his
+head" (as if _that_ were a capital crime); "but he's very clever--look
+at that campanile--and then he's cheap, my boy, cheap."
+
+There were several fine houses in fine parks not very far from Ibbetson
+Hall; but although Uncle Ibbetson appeared in name and wealth and social
+position to be on a par with their owners, he was not on terms of
+intimacy with any of them, or even of acquaintance, as far as I know,
+and spoke of them with contempt, as barbarians--people with whom he had
+nothing in common. Perhaps they, too, had found out this
+incompatibility, especially the ladies; for, school-boy as I was, I was
+not long in discovering that his manner towards those of the other sex
+was not always such as to please either of them or their husbands or
+fathers or brothers. The way he looked at them was enough. Indeed, most
+of his lady-friends and acquaintances through life had belonged to the
+_corps de ballet_, the _demi-monde_, etc.--not, I should imagine, the
+best school of manners in the world.
+
+On the other hand, he was very friendly with some families in the town;
+the doctor's, the rector's, his own agent's (a broken-down brother
+officer and bosom friend, who had ceased to love him since he received
+his pay); and he used to take Mr. Lintot and me to parties there; and he
+was the life of those parties.
+
+He sang little French songs, with no voice, but quite a good French
+accent, and told little anecdotes with no particular point, but in
+French and Italian (so that the point was never missed); and we all
+laughed and admired without quite knowing why, except that he was the
+lord of the manor.
+
+On these festive occasions poor Lintot's confidence and power of amusing
+seemed to desert him altogether; he sat glum in a corner.
+
+Though a radical and a sceptic, and a peace-at-any-price man, he was
+much impressed by the social status of the army and the church.
+
+Of the doctor, a very clever and accomplished person, and the best
+educated man for miles around, he thought little; but the rector, the
+colonel, the poor captain, even, now a mere land-steward, seemed to fill
+him with respectful awe. And for his pains he was cruelly snubbed by
+Mrs. Captain and Mrs. Rector and their plain daughters, who little
+guessed what talents he concealed, and thought him quite a common little
+man, hardly fit to turn over the leaves of their music.
+
+It soon became pretty evident that Ibbetson was very much smitten with
+a Mrs. Deane, the widow of a brewer, a very handsome woman indeed, in
+her own estimation and mine, and everybody else's, except Mr. Lintot's,
+who said, "Pooh, you should see my wife!"
+
+Her mother, Mrs. Glyn, excelled us all in her admiration of Colonel
+Ibbetson.
+
+For instance, Mrs. Deane would play some common little waltz of the
+cheap kind that is never either remembered or forgotten, and Mrs. Glyn
+would exclaim, "_Is_ not that _lovely_?"
+
+And Ibbetson would say: "Charming! charming! Whose is it? Rossini's?
+Mozart's?"
+
+"Why, no, my dear colonel. Don't you remember? _It's your own_!"
+
+"Ah, so it is! I had quite forgotten." And general laughter and applause
+would burst forth at such a natural mistake on the part of our
+great man.
+
+Well, I could neither play nor sing, and found it far easier by this
+time to speak English than French, especially to English people who were
+ignorant of any language but their own. Yet sometimes Colonel Ibbetson
+would seem quite proud of me.
+
+"Deux metres, bien sonnes!" he would say, alluding to my stature, "et le
+profil d'Antinoues!" which he would pronounce without the two little dots
+on the _u_.
+
+And afterwards, if he had felt his evening a pleasant one, if he had
+sung all he knew, if Mrs. Deane had been more than usually loving and
+self-surrendering, and I had distinguished myself by skilfully turning
+over the leaves when her mother had played the piano, he would tell me,
+as we walked home together, that I "did credit to his name, and that I
+would make an excellent figure in the world as soon as I had _decrasse_
+myself; that I must get another dress-suit from his tailor, just an
+eighth of an inch longer in the tails; that I should have a commission
+in his old regiment (the Eleventeenth Royal Bounders), a deuced crack
+cavalry regiment; and see the world and break a few hearts (it is not
+for nothing that our friends have pretty wives and sisters); and finally
+marry some beautiful young heiress of title, and make a home for him
+when he was a poor solitary old fellow. Very little would do for him: a
+crust of bread, a glass of wine and water, and a clean napkin, a couple
+of rooms, and an old piano and a few good books. For, of course,
+Ibbetson Hall would be mine and every penny he possessed in the world."
+
+[Illustration:]
+
+All this in confidential French--lest the very clouds should hear
+us--and with the familiar thee and thou of blood-relationship, which I
+did not care to return.
+
+It did not seem to bode very serious intentions towards Mrs. Deane, and
+would scarcely have pleased her mother.
+
+Or else, if something had crossed him, and Mrs. Deane had flirted
+outrageously with somebody else, and he had not been asked to sing (or
+somebody else had), he would assure me in good round English that I was
+the most infernal lout that ever disgraced a drawing-room, or ate a man
+out of house and home, and that he was sick and ashamed of me. "Why
+can't you sing, you d--d French milksop? The d--d roulade-monger of a
+father of yours could sing fast enough, if he could do nothing else,
+confound him! Why can't you talk French, you infernal British booby? Why
+can't you hand round the tea and muffins, confound you! Why, twice Mrs.
+Glyn dropped her pocket-handkerchief and had to pick it up herself!
+What, 'at the other end of the room,' were you? Well, you should have
+skipped _across_ the room, and picked it up, and handed it to her with a
+pretty speech, like a gentleman! When I was your age I was _always_ on
+the lookout for ladies' pocket-handkerchiefs to drop--or their fans! I
+never missed _one_!"
+
+Then he would take me out to shoot with him (for it was quite essential
+that an English gentleman should be a sportsman)--a terrible ordeal to
+both of us.
+
+A snipe that I did not want to kill in the least would sometimes rise
+and fly right and left like a flash of lightning, and I would miss
+it--always; and he would d--n me for a son of a confounded French
+Micawber, and miss the next himself, and get into a rage and thrash his
+dog, a pointer that I was very fond of. Once he thrashed her so cruelly
+that I saw scarlet, and nearly yielded to the impulse of emptying both
+my barrels in his broad back. If I had done so it would have passed for
+a mere mishap, after all, and saved many future complications.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One day he pointed out to me a small bird pecking in a field--an
+extremely pretty bird--I think it was a skylark--and whispered to me in
+his most sarcastic manner--
+
+"Look here, you Peter without any salt, do you think, if you were to
+kneel down and rest your gun comfortably on this gate without making a
+noise, and take a careful aim, you could manage to shoot that bird
+_sitting_? I've heard of some Frenchmen who would be equal to _that_!"
+
+I said I would try, and, resting my gun as he told me, I carefully aimed
+a couple of yards above the bird's head, and mentally ejaculating,
+
+     "'_All to thee blythe sperrit_!"
+
+I fired both barrels (for fear of any after-mishap to Ibbetson), and the
+bird naturally flew away.
+
+After this he never took me out shooting with him again; and, indeed, I
+had discovered to my discomfiture that I, the friend and admirer and
+would-be emulator of Natty Bumppo the Deerslayer, I, the familiar of the
+last of the Mohicans and his scalp-lifting father, could not bear the
+sight of blood--least of all, of blood shed by myself, and for my own
+amusement.
+
+The only beast that ever fell to my gun during those shootings with
+Uncle Ibbetson was a young rabbit, and that more by accident than
+design, although I did not tell Uncle Ibbetson so.
+
+As I picked it off the ground, and felt its poor little warm narrow
+chest, and the last beats of its heart under its weak ribs, and saw the
+blood on its fur, I was smitten with pity, shame, and remorse; and
+settled with myself that I would find some other road to English
+gentlemanhood than the slaying of innocent wild things whose happy life
+seems so well worth living.
+
+[Illustration: "'AIL TO THEE BLYTHE SPERRIT!"]
+
+I must eat them, I suppose, but I would never shoot them any more; my
+hands, at least, should be clean of blood henceforward.
+
+Alas, the irony of fate!
+
+The upshot of all this was that he confided to Mrs. Deane the task of
+licking his cub of a nephew into shape. She took me in hand with right
+good-will, began by teaching me how to dance, that I might dance with
+her at the coming hunt ball; and I did so nearly all night, to my
+infinite joy and triumph, and to the disgust of Colonel Ibbetson, who
+could dance much better than I--to the disgust, indeed, of many smart
+men in red coats and black, for she was considered the belle of
+the evening.
+
+[Illustration: THE DANCING LESSON.]
+
+Of course I fell, or fancied I fell, in love with her. To her mother's
+extreme distress, she gave me every encouragement, partly for fun,
+partly to annoy Colonel Ibbetson, whom she had apparently grown to hate.
+And, indeed, from the way he spoke of her to me (this trainer of English
+gentlemen), he well deserved that she should hate him. He never had the
+slightest intention of marrying her--that is certain; and yet he had
+made her the talk of the place.
+
+And here I may state that Ibbetson was one of those singular men who go
+through life afflicted with the mania that they are fatally
+irresistible to women.
+
+He was never weary of pursuing them--not through any special love of
+gallantry for its own sake, I believe, but from the mere wish to appear
+as a Don Giovanni in the eyes of others. Nothing made him happier than
+to be seen whispering mysteriously in corners with the prettiest woman
+in the room. He did not seem to perceive that for one woman silly or
+vain or vulgar enough to be flattered by his idiotic persecution, a
+dozen would loathe the very sight of him, and show it plainly enough.
+
+This vanity had increased with years and assumed a very dangerous form.
+He became indiscreet, and, more disastrous still, he told lies! The very
+dead--the honored and irreproachable dead--were not even safe in their
+graves. It was his revenge for unforgotten slights.
+
+He who kisses and tells, he who tells even though he has not
+kissed--what can be said for him, what should be done to him?
+
+Ibbetson one day expiated this miserable craze with his life, and the
+man who took it--more by accident than design, it is true--has not yet
+found it in his heart to feel either compunction or regret.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So there was a great row between Ibbetson and myself. He d----d and
+confounded and abused me in every way, and my father before me, and
+finally struck me; and I had sufficient self-command not to strike him
+back, but left him then and there with as much dignity as I
+could muster.
+
+Thus unsuccessfully ended my brief experience of English country life--a
+little hunting and shooting and fishing, a little dancing and flirting;
+just enough of each to show me I was unfit for all.
+
+A bitter-sweet remembrance, full of humiliation, but not altogether
+without charm. There was the beauty of sea and open sky and changing
+country weather; and the beauty of Mrs. Deane, who made a fool of me to
+revenge herself on Colonel Ibbetson for trying to make a fool of her,
+whereby he became the laughing-stock of the neighborhood for at least
+nine days.
+
+And I revenged myself on both--heroically, as I thought; though where
+the heroism comes in, and where the revenge, does not appear
+quite patent.
+
+For I ran away to London, and enlisted in her Majesty's Household
+Cavalry, where I remained a twelvemonth, and was happy enough, and
+learned a great deal more good than harm.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Then I was bought out and articled to Mr. Lintot, architect and
+surveyor: a conclave of my relatives agreeing to allow me ninety pounds
+a year for three years; then all hands were to be washed of me
+altogether.[A]
+
+[Footnote A: _Note_.--I have thought it better to leave out, in its
+entirety, my cousin's account of his short career as a private soldier.
+It consists principally of personal descriptions that are not altogether
+unprejudiced; he seems never to have quite liked those who were placed
+in authority above him, either at school or in the army. MADGE PLUNKET.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So I took a small lodging in Pentonville, to be near Mr. Lintot, and
+worked hard at my new profession for three years, during which nothing
+of importance occurred in my outer life. After this Lintot employed me
+as a salaried clerk, and I do not think he had any reason to complain of
+me, nor did he make any complaint. I was worth my hire, I think, and
+something over; which I never got and never asked for.
+
+Nor did I complain of him; for with all his little foibles of vanity,
+irascibility, and egotism, and a certain close-fistedness, he was a good
+fellow and a very clever one.
+
+His paragon of a wife was by no means the beautiful person he had made
+her out to be, nor did anybody but he seem to think her so.
+
+She was a little older than himself; very large and massive, with stern
+but not irregular features, and a very high forehead; she had a slight
+tendency to baldness, and colorless hair that she wore in an austere
+curl on each side of her face, and a menacing little topknot on her
+occiput. She had been a Unitarian and a governess, was fond of good long
+words, like Dr. Johnson, and very censorious.
+
+But one of my husband's intimate friends, General----, who was cornet in
+the Life Guards in my poor cousin's time, writes me that "he remembers
+him well, as far and away the tallest and handsomest lad in the whole
+regiment, of immense physical strength, unimpeachable good conduct, and
+a thorough gentleman from top to toe."
+
+Her husband's occasional derelictions in the matter of grammar and
+accent must have been very trying to her!
+
+[Illustration: PENTONVILLE.]
+
+She knew her own mind about everything under the sun, and expected that
+other people should know it, too, and be of the same mind as herself.
+And yet she was not proud; indeed, she was a very dragon of humility,
+and had raised injured meekness to the rank of a militant virtue. And
+well she knew how to be master and mistress in her own house!
+
+But with all this she was an excellent wife to Mr. Lintot and a devoted
+mother to his children, who were very plain and subdued (and adored
+their father); so that Lintot, who thought her Venus and Diana and
+Minerva in one, was the happiest man in all Pentonville.
+
+And, on the whole, she was kind and considerate to me, and I always did
+my best to please her.
+
+Moreover (a gift for which I could never be too grateful), she presented
+me with an old square piano, which had belonged to her mother, and had
+done duty in her school-room, till Lintot gave her a new one (for she
+was a highly cultivated musician of the severest classical type). It
+became the principal ornament of my small sitting-room, which it nearly
+filled, and on it I tried to learn my notes, and would pick out with one
+finger the old beloved melodies my father used to sing, and my mother
+play on the harp.
+
+To sing myself was, it seems, out of the question; my voice (which I
+trust was not too disagreeable when I was content merely to speak)
+became as that of a bull-frog under a blanket whenever I strove to
+express myself in song; my larynx refused to produce the notes I held so
+accurately in my mind, and the result was disaster.
+
+On the other hand, in my mind I could sing most beautifully. Once on a
+rainy day, inside an Islington omnibus, I mentally sang "Adelaida" with
+the voice of Mr. Sims Reeves--an unpardonable liberty to take; and
+although it is not for me to say so, I sang it even better than he, for
+I made myself shed tears--so much so that a kind old gentleman sitting
+opposite seemed to feel for me very much.
+
+I also had the faculty of remembering any tune I once heard, and would
+whistle it correctly ever after--even one of Uncle Ibbetson's waltzes!
+
+As an instance of this, worth recalling, one night I found myself in
+Guildford Street, walking in the same direction as another belated
+individual (only on the other side of the road), who, just as the moon
+came out of a cloud, was moved to whistle.
+
+He whistled exquisitely, and, what was more, he whistled quite the most
+beautiful tune I had ever heard. I felt all its changes and modulations,
+its majors and minors, just as if a whole band had been there to play
+the accompaniment, so cunning and expressive a whistler was he.
+
+And so entranced was I that I made up my mind to cross over and ask him
+what it was--"Your melody or your life!" But he suddenly stopped at No.
+48, and let himself in with his key before I could prefer my
+humble request.
+
+Well, I went whistling that tune all next day, and for many days after,
+without ever finding out what it was; till one evening, happening to be
+at the Lintots. I asked Mrs. Lintot (who happened to be at the piano) if
+she knew it, and began to whistle it once more. To my delight and
+surprise she straightway accompanied it all through (a wonderful
+condescension in so severe a purist), and I did not make a single
+wrong note.
+
+"Yes," said Mrs. Lintot, "it's a pretty, catchy little tune--of a kind
+to achieve immediate popularity."
+
+Now, I apologize humbly to the reader for this digression; but if he be
+musical he will forgive me, for that tune was the "Serenade" of
+Schubert, and I had never even heard Schubert's name!
+
+And having thus duly apologized, I will venture to transgress and
+digress anew, and mention here a kind of melodic malady, a singular
+obsession to which I am subject, and which I will call unconscious
+musical cerebration.
+
+I am never without some tune running in my head--never for a moment; not
+that I am always aware of it; existence would be insupportable if I
+were. What part of my brain sings it, or rather in what part of my brain
+it sings itself, I cannot imagine--probably in some useless corner full
+of cobwebs and lumber that is fit for nothing else.
+
+But it never leaves off; now it is one tune, now another; now a song
+_without_ words, now _with_; sometimes it is near the surface, so to
+speak, and I am vaguely conscious of it as I read or work, or talk or
+think; sometimes to make sure it is there I have to dive for it deep
+into myself, and I never fail to find it after a while, and bring it up
+to the top. It is the "Carnival of Venice," let us say; then I let it
+sink again, and it changes without my knowing; so that when I take
+another dive the "Carnival of Venice" has become "Il Mio Tesoro," or the
+"Marseillaise," or "Pretty Little Polly Perkins of Paddington Green."
+And Heaven knows what tunes, unheard and unperceived, this internal
+barrel-organ has been grinding meanwhile.
+
+Sometimes it intrudes itself so persistently as to become a nuisance,
+and the only way to get rid of it is to whistle or sing myself. For
+instance, I may be mentally reciting for my solace and delectation some
+beloved lyric like "The Waterfowl," or "Tears, Idle Tears," or "Break,
+Break, Break"; and all the while, between the lines, this fiend of a
+subcerebral vocalist, like a wandering minstrel in a distant square,
+insists on singing, "Cheer, Boys, Cheer," or, "Tommy, make room for
+your uncle" (tunes I cannot abide), with words, accompaniment, and all,
+complete, and not quite so refined an accent as I could wish; so that I
+have to leave off my recitation and whistle "J'ai du Bon Tabac" in quite
+a different key to exorcise it.
+
+But this, at least, I will say for this never still small voice of mine:
+its intonation is always perfect; it keeps ideal time, and its quality,
+though rather thin and somewhat nasal and quite peculiar, is not
+unsympathetic. Sometimes, indeed (as in that Islington omnibus), I can
+compel it to imitate, _a s'y meprendre_, the tones of some singer I have
+recently heard, and thus make for myself a ghostly music which is not to
+be despised.
+
+Occasionally, too, and quite unbidden, it would warble little impromptu
+inward melodies of my own composition, which often seemed to me
+extremely pretty, old-fashioned, and quaint; but one is not a fair judge
+of one's own productions, especially during the heat of inspiration; and
+I had not the means of recording them, as I had never learned the
+musical notes. What the world has lost!
+
+Now whose this small voice was I did not find out till many years later,
+_for it was not mine_!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In spite of such rare accomplishments and resources within myself, I was
+not a happy or contented young man; nor had my discontent in it anything
+of the divine.
+
+I disliked my profession, for which I felt no particular aptitude, and
+would fain have followed another--poetry, science, literature, music,
+painting, sculpture; for all of which I most unblushingly thought myself
+better fitted by the gift of nature.
+
+I disliked Pentonville, which, although clean, virtuous, and
+respectable, left much to be desired on the score of shape, color,
+romantic tradition, and local charm; and I would sooner have lived
+anywhere else: in the Champs-Elysees, let us say--yes, indeed, even on
+the fifth branch of the third tree on the left-hand side as you leave
+the Arc de Triomphe, like one of those classical heroes in Henri
+Murger's _Vie de Boheme_.
+
+I disliked my brother apprentices, and did not get on well with them,
+especially a certain very clever but vicious and deformed youth called
+Judkins, who seemed to have conceived an aversion for me from the first;
+he is now an associate of the Royal Academy. They thought I gave myself
+airs because I did not share in their dissipations; such dissipations as
+I could have afforded would have been cheap and nasty indeed.
+
+Yet such pothouse dissipation seemed to satisfy them, since they took
+not only a pleasure in it, but a pride.
+
+They even took a pride in a sick headache, and liked it, if it were the
+result of a debauch on the previous night; and were as pompously
+mock-modest about a black eye, got in a squabble at the Argyll Rooms, as
+if it had been the Victoria Cross. To pass the night in a police cell
+was such glory that it was worth while pretending they had done so when
+it was untrue.
+
+They looked upon me as a muff, a milksop, and a prig, and felt the
+greatest contempt for me; and if they did not openly show it, it was
+only because they were not quite so fond of black eyes as they made out.
+
+So I left them to their inexpensive joys, and betook myself to pursuits
+of my own, among others to the cultivation of my body, after methods I
+had learned in the Life Guards. I belonged to a gymnastic and fencing
+and boxing club, of which I was a most assiduous frequenter; a more
+persevering dumb-beller and Indian-clubber never was, and I became in
+time an all-round athlete, as wiry and lean as a greyhound, just under
+fifteen stone, and four inches over six feet in height, which was
+considered very tall thirty years ago; especially in Pentonville, where
+the distinction often brought me more contumely than respect.
+
+Altogether a most formidable person; but that I was of a timid nature,
+afraid to hurt, and the peacefulest creature in the world.
+
+My old love for slums revived, and I found out and haunted the worst in
+London. They were very good slums, but they were not the slums of
+Paris--they manage these things better in France.
+
+Even Cow Cross (where the Metropolitan Railway now runs between King's
+Cross and Farringdon Street)--Cow Cross, that whilom labyrinth of
+slaughter-houses, gin-shops, and thieves' dens, with the famous Fleet
+Ditch running underneath it all the while, lacked the fascination and
+mystery of mediaeval romance. There were no memories of such charming
+people as Le roi des Truands and Gringoire and Esmeralda; with a sigh
+one had to fall back on visions of Fagin and Bill Sykes and Nancy.
+
+_Quelle degringolade_!
+
+And as to the actual denizens! One gazed with a dull, wondering pity at
+the poor, pale, rickety children; the slatternly, coarse women who never
+smiled (except when drunk); the dull, morose, miserable men. How they
+lacked the grace of French deformity, the ease and lightness of French
+depravity, the sympathetic distinction of French grotesqueness. How
+unterrible they were, who preferred the fist to the noiseless and
+insidious knife! who fought with their hands instead of their feet,
+quite loyally; and reserved the kicks of their hobnailed boots for their
+recalcitrant wives!
+
+And then there was no Morgue; one missed one's Morgue badly.
+
+And Smithfield! It would split me truly to the heart (as M. le Major
+used to say) to watch the poor beasts that came on certain days to make
+a short station in that hideous cattle-market, on their way to the
+slaughter-house.
+
+What bludgeons have I seen descend on beautiful, bewildered, dazed, meek
+eyes, so thickly fringed against the country sun; on soft, moist, tender
+nostrils that clouded the poisonous reek with a fragrance of the far-off
+fields! What torture of silly sheep and genially cynical pigs!
+
+The very dogs seemed demoralized, and brutal as their masters. And there
+one day I had an adventure, a dirty bout at fisticuffs, most humiliating
+in the end for me and which showed that chivalry is often its own
+reward, like virtue, even when the chivalrous are young and big and
+strong, and have learned to box.
+
+A brutal young drover wantonly kicked a sheep, and, as I thought, broke
+her hind-leg, and in my indignation I took him by the ear and flung him
+round onto a heap of mud and filth. He rose and squared at me in a most
+plucky fashion; he hardly came up to my chin, and I refused to fight
+him. A crowd collected round us, and as I tried to explain to the
+by-standers the cause of our quarrel, he managed to hit me in the face
+with a very muddy fist.
+
+"Bravo, little 'un!" shouted the crowd, and he squared up again. I felt
+wretchedly ashamed and warded off all his blows, telling him that I
+could not hit him or I should kill him.
+
+"Yah!" shouted the crowd again; "go it, little un! Let 'im 'ave it! The
+long un's showing the white feather," etc., and finally I gave him a
+slight backhander that made his nose bleed and seemed to demoralize him
+completely. "Yah!" shouted the crowd; "'it one yer own size!"
+
+I looked round in despair and rage, and picking out the biggest man I
+could see, said, "Are _you_ big enough?" The crowd roared with laughter.
+
+"Well, guv'ner, I dessay I might do at a pinch," he replied; and I tried
+to slap his face, but missed it, and received such a tremendous box on
+the ear that I was giddy for a second or two, and when I recovered I
+found him still grinning at me. I tried to hit him again and again, but
+always missed; and at last, without doing me any particular damage, he
+laid me flat three times running onto the very heap where I had flung
+the drover, the crowd applauding madly. Dazed, hatless, and panting, and
+covered with filth, I stared at him in hopeless impotence. He put out
+his hand, and said, "You're all right, ain't yer, guv'ner? I 'ope I
+'aven't 'urt yer! My name's Tom Sayers. If you'd a 'it me, I should 'a'
+gone down like a ninepin, and I ain't so sure as I should ever 'ave got
+up again."
+
+He was to become the most famous fighting-man in England!
+
+I wrung his hand and thanked him, and offered him a sovereign, which he
+refused; and then he led me into a room in a public-house close by,
+where he washed and brushed me down, and insisted on treating me to a
+glass of brandy-and-water.
+
+I have had a fondness for fighting-men ever since, and a respect for the
+noble science I had never felt before. He was many inches shorter than
+I, and did not look at all the Hercules he was.
+
+He told me I was the strongest built man for a youngster that he had
+ever seen, barring that I was "rather leggy." I do not know if he was
+sincere or not, but no possible compliment could have pleased me more.
+Such is the vanity of youth.
+
+And here, although it savors somewhat of vaingloriousness, I cannot
+resist the temptation of relating another adventure of the same kind,
+but in which I showed to greater advantage.
+
+It was on a boxing-day (oddly enough), and I was returning with Lintot
+and one of his boys from a walk in the Highgate Fields. As we plodded our
+dirty way homeward through the Caledonian Road we were stopped by a
+crowd outside a public-house. A gigantic drayman (they always seem
+bigger than they really are) was squaring up to a poor drunken lout of a
+navvy not half his size, who had been put up to fight him, and who was
+quite incapable of even an attempt it self-defence; he could scarcely
+lift his arms, I thought at first it was only horse-play; and as little
+Joe Lintot wanted to see, I put him up on my shoulder, just as the
+drayman, who had been drinking, but was not drunk, and had a most
+fiendishly brutal face, struck the poor tipsy wretch with all his might
+between the eyes, and felled him (it was like pole-axing a bullock), to
+the delight of the crowd.
+
+Little Joe, a very gentle and sensitive boy, began to cry; and his
+father, who had the pluck of a bull-terrier, wanted to interfere, in
+spite of his diminutive stature. I was also beside myself with
+indignation, and pulling off my coat and hat, which I gave to Lintot,
+made my way to the drayman, who was offering to fight any three men in
+the crowd, an offer that met with no response.
+
+"Now, then, you cowardly skunk!" I said, tucking up my shirt-sleeves;
+"stand up, and I will knock every tooth down your ugly throat."
+
+His face went the colors of a mottled Stilton cheese, and he asked what
+I meddled with him for. A ring formed itself, and I felt the sympathy of
+the crowd _with_ me this time--a very agreeable sensation!
+
+"Now, then, up with your arms! I'm going to kill you!"
+
+"I ain't going to fight you, mister; I ain't going to fight _nobody_.
+Just you let me alone!"
+
+[Illustration:]
+
+"Oh yes, you are, or you're going on your marrow-bones to be pardon for
+being a brutal, cowardly skunk"; and I gave him a slap on the face that
+rang like a pistol-shot--a most finished, satisfactory, and successful
+slap this time. My finger-tips tingle at the bare remembrance.
+
+He tried to escape, but was held opposite to me. He began to snivel and
+whimper, and said he had never meddled with me, and asked what should I
+meddle with him for?
+
+"Then down on your knees--quick--this instant!" and I made as if I were
+going to begin serious business at once, and no mistake.
+
+So down he plumped on his knees, and there he actually fainted from
+sheer excess of emotion.
+
+As I was helped on with my coat, I tasted, for once in my life the
+sweets of popularity, and knew what it was to be the idol of a mob.
+
+Little Joey Lintot and his brothers and sisters, who had never held me
+in any particular regard before that I knew of, worshipped me from that
+day forward.
+
+And I should be insincere if I did not confess that on that one occasion
+I was rather pleased with myself, although the very moment I stood
+opposite the huge, hulking, beer-sodden brute (who had looked so
+formidable from afar) I felt, with a not unpleasant sense of relief,
+that he did not stand a chance. He was only big, and even at that I
+beat him.
+
+The real honors of the day belonged to Lintot, who, I am convinced, was
+ready to act the David to that Goliath. He had the real stomach for
+fighting, which I lacked, as very tall men are often said to do.
+
+And that, perhaps, is why I have made so much of my not very wonderful
+prowess on that occasion; not, indeed, that I am physically a coward--at
+least, I do not think so. If I thought I were I should avow it with no
+more shame than I should avow that I had a bad digestion, or a weak
+heart, which makes cowards of us all.
+
+It is that I hate a row, and violence, and bloodshed, even from a
+nose--any nose, either my own or my neighbor's.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There are slums at the east end of London that many fashionable people
+know something of by this time; I got to know them by heart. In addition
+to the charm of the mere slum, there was the eternal fascination of the
+seafaring element; of Jack ashore--a lovable creature who touches
+nothing but what he adorns it in his own peculiar fashion.
+
+I constantly haunted the docks, where the smell of tar and the sight of
+ropes and masts filled me with unutterable longings for the sea--for
+distant lands--for anywhere but where it was my fate to be.
+
+I talked to ship captains and mates and sailors, and heard many
+marvellous tales, as the reader may well believe, and framed for myself
+visions of cloudless skies, and sapphire seas, and coral reefs, and
+groves of spice, and dusky youths in painted plumage roving, and
+friendly isles where a lovely half-clad, barefooted Neuha would wave her
+torch, and lead me, her Torquil, by the hand through caverns of bliss!
+
+Especially did I haunt a wharf by London Bridge, from whence two
+steamers--the _Seine_ and the _Dolphin_, I believe--started on alternate
+days for Boulogne-sur-Mer.
+
+I used to watch the happy passengers bound for France, some of them, in
+their holiday spirits, already fraternizing together on the sunny deck,
+and fussing with camp-stools and magazines and novels and bottles
+of bitter beer, or retiring before the funnel to smoke the pipe of
+peace.
+
+[Illustration: THE BOULOGNE STEAMER.]
+
+The sound of the boiler getting up steam--what delicious music it was!
+Would it ever get up steam for me? The very smell of the cabin, the very
+feel of the brass gangway and the brass-bound, oil-clothed steps were
+delightful; and down-stairs, on the snowy cloth, were the cold beef and
+ham, the beautiful fresh mustard, the bottles of pale ale and stout. Oh,
+happy travellers, who could afford all this, and France into
+the bargain!
+
+Soon would a large white awning make the after-deck a paradise, from
+which, by-and-by, to watch the quickly gliding panorama of the Thames.
+The bell would sound for non-passengers like me to go ashore--"Que
+diable allait-il faire dans cette galere!" as Uncle Ibbetson would have
+said. The steamer, disengaging itself from the wharf with a pleasant
+yoho-ing of manly throats and a slow, intermittent plashing of the
+paddle-wheels, would carefully pick its sunny, eastward way among the
+small craft of the river, while a few handkerchiefs were waved in a
+friendly, make-believe farewell--_auf wiedersehen_!
+
+Oh, to stand by that unseasonably sou'-westered man at the wheel, and
+watch St. Paul's and London Bridge and the Tower of London fade out of
+sight--never, never to see them again. No _auf wiedersehen_ for me!
+
+Sometimes I would turn my footsteps westward and fill my hungry, jealous
+eyes with a sight of the gay summer procession in Hyde Park, or listen
+to the band in Kensington Gardens, and see beautiful, welldressed
+women, and hear their sweet, refined voices and happy laughter; and a
+longing would come into my heart more passionate than my longing for the
+sea and France and distant lands, and quite as unutterable. I would even
+forget Neuha and her torch.
+
+After this it was a dreary downfall to go and dine for tenpence all by
+myself, and finish up with a book at my solitary lodgings in
+Pentonville. The book would not let itself be read; it sulked and had to
+be laid down, for "beautiful woman! beautiful girl!" spelled themselves
+between me and the printed page. Translate me those words into French, O
+ye who can even render Shakespeare into French Alexandrines--"Belle
+femme? Belle fille?" Ha! ha!
+
+If you want to get as near it as you can, you will have to write, "Belle
+Anglaise," or "Belle Americaine;" only then will you be understood, even
+in France!
+
+Ah! elle etait bien belle, Madame Seraskier!
+
+At other times, more happily inspired, I would slake my thirst for
+nature by long walks into the country. Hampstead was my Passy--the
+Leg-of-Mutton Pond my Mare d'Auteuil; Richmond was my St. Cloud, with
+Kew Gardens for a Bois de Boulogne; and Hampton Court made a very fair
+Versailles--how incomparably fairer, even a pupil of Lintot's
+should know.
+
+And after such healthy fatigue and fragrant impressions the tenpenny
+dinner had a better taste, the little front parlor in Pentonville was
+more like a home, the book more like a friend.
+
+For I read all I could get in English or French.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Novels, travels, history, poetry, science--everything came as grist to
+that most melancholy mill, my mind.
+
+I tried to write; I tried to draw; I tried to make myself an inner life
+apart from the sordid, commonplace ugliness of my outer one--a private
+oasis of my own; and to raise myself a little, if only mentally, above
+the circumstances in which it had pleased the Fates to place me.[A]
+
+[Footnote A: _Note_--It Is with great reluctance that I now come to my
+cousin's account of deplorable opinions he held, at that period of his
+life, on the most important subject that can ever engross the mind of
+man. I have left out _much_, but I feel that in suppressing it
+altogether, I should rob his sad story of all its moral significance;
+for it cannot be doubted that most of his unhappiness is attributable to
+the defective religious training of his childhood, and that his parents
+(otherwise the best and kindest people I have ever known) incurred a
+terrible responsibility when they determined to leave him "unbiased," as
+he calls it, at that tender and susceptible age when the mind is
+     "Wax to receive, marble to retain."
+                                 Madge Plunket.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It goes without saying that, like many thoughtful youths of a melancholy
+temperament, impecunious and discontented with their lot, and much given
+to the smoking of strong tobacco (on an empty stomach), I continuously
+brooded on the problems of existence--free-will and determinism, the
+whence and why and whither of man, the origin of evil, the immortality
+of the soul, the futility of life, etc., and made myself very miserable
+over such questions.
+
+Often the inquisitive passer-by, had he peeped through the blinds of
+No.--Wharton Street, Pentonville, late at night, would have been
+rewarded by the touching spectacle of a huge, rawboned ex-private in her
+Majesty's Life Guards, with his head bowed over the black and yellow
+key-board of a venerable square piano-forte (on which he could not
+play), dropping the bitter tear of loneliness and _Weltschmertz_ combined.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+It never once occurred to me to seek relief in the bosom of any Church.
+
+Some types are born and not made. I was a born "infidel;" if ever there
+was a congenital agnostic, one agnostically constituted from his very
+birth, it was I. Not that I had ever heard such an expression as
+agnosticism; it is an invention of late years....
+
+     "_J'avais fait de la prose toute ma vie sans le savoir!_"
+
+But almost the first conscious dislike I can remember was for the black
+figure of the priest, and there were several of these figures in Passy.
+
+Monsieur le Major called them _maitres corbeaux_, and seemed to hold
+them in light esteem. Dr. Seraskier hated them; his gentle Catholic wife
+had grown to distrust them. My loving, heretic mother loved them not; my
+father, a Catholic born and bred, had an equal aversion. They had
+persecuted his gods--the thinkers, philosophers, and scientific
+discoverers--Galileo, Bruno, Copernicus; and brought to his mind the
+cruelties of the Holy Inquisition, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew; and
+I always pictured them as burning little heretics alive if they had
+their will--Eton jackets, white chimney-pot hats, and all!
+
+I have no doubt they were in reality the best and kindest of men.
+
+The parson (and parsons were not lacking in Pentonville) was not so
+insidiously repellent as the blue-cheeked, blue-chinned Passy priest;
+but he was by no means to me a picturesque or sympathetic apparition,
+with his weddedness, his whiskers, his black trousers, his frock-coat,
+his tall hat, his little white tie, his consciousness of being a
+"gentleman" by profession. Most unattractive, also, were the cheap,
+brand-new churches wherein he spoke the word to his dreary-looking,
+Sunday-clad flock, with scarcely one of whom his wife would have sat
+down to dinner--especially if she had been chosen from among them.
+
+[Illustration: SUNDAY IN PENTONVILLE.]
+
+To watch that flock pouring in of a Sunday morning, or afternoon, or
+evening, at the summons of those bells, and pouring out again after the
+long service, and banal, perfunctory sermon, was depressing. Weekdays,
+in Pentonville, were depressing enough; but Sundays were depressing
+beyond words, though nobody seemed to think so but myself. Early
+training had acclimatized them.
+
+I have outlived those physical antipathies of my salad days; even the
+sight of an Anglican bishop is no longer displeasing to me, on the
+contrary; and I could absolutely rejoice in the beauty of a cardinal.
+
+Indeed, I am now friends with both a parson and a priest, and do not
+know which of the two I love and respect the most. They ought to hate
+me, but they do not; they pity me too much, I suppose. I am too negative
+to rouse in either the deep theological hate; and all the little hate
+that the practice of love and charity has left in their kind hearts is
+reserved for each other--an unquenchable hate in which they seem to
+glory, and which rages all the more that it has to be concealed. It
+saddens me to think that I am a bone of contention between them.
+
+And yet, for all my unbelief, the Bible was my favorite book, and the
+Psalms my adoration; and most truly can I affirm that my mental attitude
+has ever been one of reverence and humility.
+
+But every argument that has ever been advanced against Christianity (and
+I think I know them all by this time) had risen spontaneously and
+unprompted within me, and they have all seemed to me unanswerable, and
+indeed, as yet, unanswered. Nor had any creed of which I ever heard
+appeared to me either credible or attractive or even sensible, but for
+the central figure of the Deity--a Deity that in no case could ever
+be mine.
+
+The awe-inspiring and unalterable conception that had wrought itself
+into my consciousness, whether I would or no, was that of a Being
+infinitely more abstract, remote, and inaccessible than any the genius
+of mankind has ever evolved after its own image and out of the needs of
+its own heart--inscrutable, unthinkable, unspeakable; above all human
+passions, beyond the reach of any human appeal; One upon whose
+attributes it was futile to speculate--One whose name was _It_,
+not _He_.
+
+The thought of total annihilation was uncongenial, but had no terror.
+
+Even as a child I had shrewdly suspected that hell was no more than a
+vulgar threat for naughty little boys and girls, and heaven than a
+vulgar bribe, from the casual way in which either was meted out to me as
+my probable portion, by servants and such people, according to the way I
+behaved. Such things were never mentioned to me by either my father or
+mother, or M. le Major, or the Seraskiers--the only people in whom
+I trusted.
+
+But for the bias against the priest, I was left unbiassed at that tender
+and susceptible age. I had learned my catechism and read my Bible, and
+used to say the Lord's Prayer as I went to bed, and "God bless papa and
+mamma" and the rest, in the usual perfunctory manner.
+
+Never a word against religion was said in my hearing by those few on
+whom I had pinned my childish faith; on the other hand, no such
+importance was attached to it, apparently, as was attached to the
+virtues of truthfulness, courage, generosity, self-denial, politeness,
+and especially consideration for others, high or low, human and
+animal alike.
+
+I imagine that my parents must have compromised the matter between them,
+and settled that I should work out all the graver problems of existence
+for myself, when I came to a thinking age, out of my own conscience,
+and such knowledge of life as I should acquire, and such help as they
+would no doubt have given me, according to their lights, had
+they survived.
+
+I did so, and made myself a code of morals to live by, in which religion
+had but a small part.
+
+For me there was but one sin, and that was cruelty, because I hated it;
+though Nature, for inscrutable purposes of her own, almost teaches it as
+a virtue. All sins that did not include cruelty were merely sins against
+health, or taste, or common-sense, or public expediency.
+
+Free-will was impossible. We could only _seem_ to will freely, and that
+only within the limits of a small triangle, whose sides were heredity,
+education, and circumstance--a little geometrical arrangement of my own,
+of which I felt not a little proud, although it does not quite go on
+all-fours--perhaps because it is only a triangle.
+
+That is, we could will fast enough--_too_ fast; but could not will _how_
+to will--fortunately, for we were not fit as yet, and for a long time to
+come, to be trusted, constituted as we are!
+
+Even the characters of a novel must act according to the nature,
+training, and motives their creator the novelist has supplied them with,
+or we put the novel down and read something else; for human nature must
+be consistent with itself in fiction as well as in fact. Even in its
+madness there must be a method, so how could the will be free?
+
+To pray for any personal boon or remission of evil--to bend the knee, or
+lift one's voice in praise or thanksgiving for any earthly good that had
+befallen one, either through inheritance, or chance, or one's own
+successful endeavor--was in my eyes simply futile; but, putting its
+futility aside, it was an act of servile presumption, of wheedling
+impertinence, not without suspicion of a lively sense of favors to come.
+
+It seemed to me as though the Jews--a superstitious and business-like
+people, who know what they want and do not care how they get it--must
+have taught us to pray like that.
+
+It was not the sweet, simple child innocently beseeching that to-morrow
+might be fine for its holiday, or that Santa Claus would be generous; it
+was the cunning trader, fawning, flattering, propitiating, bribing with
+fulsome, sycophantic praise (an insult in itself), as well as
+burnt-offerings, working for his own success here and hereafter, and his
+enemy's confounding.
+
+It was the grovelling of the dog, without the dog's single-hearted love,
+stronger than even its fear or its sense of self-interest.
+
+What an attitude for one whom God had made after His own image--even
+towards his Maker!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The only permissible prayer was a prayer for courage or resignation; for
+that was a prayer turned inward, an appeal to what is best in
+ourselves--our honor, our stoicism, our self-respect.
+
+And for a small detail, grace before and after meals seemed to me
+especially self-complacent and iniquitous, when there were so many with
+scarcely ever a meal to say grace for. The only decent and proper grace
+was to give half of one's meal away--not, indeed, that I was in the
+habit of doing so! But at least I had the grace to reproach myself for
+my want of charity, and that was my only grace.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Fortunately, since we had no free-will of our own, the tendency that
+impelled us was upward, like the sparks, and bore us with it
+willy-nilly--the good and the bad, and the worst and the best.
+
+By seeing this clearly, and laying it well to heart, the motive was
+supplied to us for doing all we could in furtherance of that upward
+tendency--_pour aider le bon Dieu_--that we might rise the faster and
+reach Him the sooner, if He were! And when once the human will has been
+set going, like a rocket or a clock or a steam-engine, and in the right
+direction, what can it not achieve?
+
+We should in time control circumstance instead of being controlled
+thereby; education would day by day become more adapted to one
+consistent end; and, finally, conscience-stricken, we should guide
+heredity with our own hands instead of leaving it to blind chance;
+unless, indeed, a well-instructed paternal government wisely took the
+reins, and only sanctioned the union of people who were thoroughly in
+love with each other, after due and careful elimination of the unfit.
+
+Thus, cruelty should at least be put into harness, and none of its
+valuable energy wasted on wanton experiments, as it is by Nature.
+
+And thus, as the boy is father to the man, should the human race one
+day be father to--what?
+
+That is just where my speculations would arrest themselves; that was the
+X of a sum in rule of three, not to be worked out by Peter Ibbetson,
+Architect and Surveyor, Wharton Street, Pentonville.
+
+As the orang-outang is to Shakespeare, so is Shakespeare to ... X?
+
+As the female chimpanzee is to the Venus of Milo, so is the Venus of
+Milo to ... X?
+
+Finally, multiply these two X's by each other, and try to conceive the
+result!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Such was, crudely, the simple creed I held at this time; and, such as it
+was, I had worked it all out for myself, with no help from outside--a
+poor thing, but mine own; or, as I expressed it in the words of De
+Musset, "Mon verre n'est pas grand--mais je bois dans mon verre."
+
+For though such ideas were in the air, like wholesome clouds, they had
+not yet condensed themselves into printed words for the million. People
+did not dare to write about these things, as they do at present, in
+popular novels and cheap magazines, that all who run may read, and learn
+to think a little for themselves, and honestly say what they think,
+without having to dread a howl of execration, clerical and lay.
+
+And it was not only that I thought like this and could not think
+otherwise; it was that I felt like this and could not feel otherwise;
+and I should have appeared to myself as wicked, weak, and base had I
+ever even _desired_ to think or feel otherwise, however personally
+despairing of this life--a traitor to what I jealously guarded as my
+best instincts.
+
+And yet to me the faith of others, if but unaggressive, humble, and
+sincere, had often seemed touching and pathetic, and sometimes even
+beautiful, as childish things seem sometimes beautiful, even in those
+who are no longer children, and should have put them away. It had caused
+many heroic lives, and rendered many obscure lives blameless and happy;
+and then its fervor and passion seemed to burn with a lasting flame.
+
+At brief moments now and then, and especially in the young, unfaith can
+be as fervent and as passionate as faith, and just as narrow and
+unreasonable, as _I_ found; but alas! its flame was intermittent, and
+its light was not a kindly light.
+
+It had no food for babes; it could not comfort the sick or sorry, nor
+resolve into submissive harmony the inner discords of the soul; nor
+compensate us for our own failures and shortcomings, nor make up to us
+in any way for the success and prosperity of others who did not choose
+to think as we did.
+
+It was without balm for wounded pride, or stay for weak despondency, or
+consolation for bereavement; its steep and rugged thoroughfares led to
+no promised land of beatitude, and there were no soft resting-places
+by the way.
+
+Its only weapon was steadfastness; its only shield, endurance; its
+earthly hope, the common weal; its earthly prize, the opening of all
+roads to knowledge, and the release from a craven inheritance of fear;
+its final guerdon--sleep? Who knows?
+
+Sleep was not bad.
+
+So that simple, sincere, humble, devout, earnest, fervent, passionate,
+and over-conscientious young unbelievers like myself had to be very
+strong and brave and self-reliant (which I was not), and very much in
+love with what they conceived to be the naked Truth (a figure of
+doubtful personal attractions at first sight), to tread the ways of life
+with that unvarying cheerfulness, confidence, and serenity which the
+believer claims as his own special and particular appanage.
+
+So much for my profession of unfaith, shared (had I but known it) by
+many much older and wiser and better educated than I, and only reached
+by them after great sacrifice of long-cherished illusions, and terrible
+pangs of soul-questioning--a struggle and a wrench that I was spared
+through my kind parents' thoughtfulness when I was a little boy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It thus behooved me to make the most of this life; since, for all I
+knew, or believed, or even hoped to the contrary, to-morrow we must die.
+
+Not, indeed, that I might eat and drink and be merry; heredity and
+education had not inclined me that way, I suppose, and circumstances did
+not allow it; but that I might try and live up to the best ideal I could
+frame out of my own conscience and the past teaching of mankind. And
+man, whose conception of the Infinite and divine has been so inadequate,
+has furnished us with such human examples (ancient and modern, Hebrew,
+Pagan, Buddhist, Christian, Agnostic, and what not) as the best of us
+can only hope to follow at a distance.
+
+I would sometimes go to my morning's work, my heart elate with lofty
+hope and high resolve.
+
+How easy and simple it seemed to lead a life without fear, or reproach,
+or self-seeking, or any sordid hope of personal reward, either here or
+hereafter!--a life of stoical endurance, invincible patience and
+meekness, indomitable cheerfulness and self-denial!
+
+After all, it was only for another forty or fifty years at the most, and
+what was that? And after that--_que scais-je?_
+
+The thought was inspiring indeed!
+
+By luncheon-time (and luncheon consisted of an Abernethy biscuit and a
+glass of water, and several pipes of shag tobacco, cheap and rank) some
+subtle change would come over the spirit of my dream.
+
+Other people did not have high resolves. Some people had very bad
+tempers, and rubbed one very much the wrong way.
+
+What a hideous place was Pentonville to slave away one's life in! ...
+
+What a grind it was to be forever making designs for little new shops in
+Rosoman Street, and not making them well, it seemed! ...
+
+Why should a squinting, pock-marked, bowlegged, hunch-backed little
+Judkins (a sight to make a recruiting-sergeant shudder) forever taunt
+one with having enlisted as a private soldier? ...
+
+And then why should one be sneeringly told to "hit a fellow one's own
+size," merely because, provoked beyond endurance, one just grabbed him
+by the slack of his trousers and gently shook him out of them onto the
+floor, terrified but quite unhurt? ...
+
+And so on, and so on; constant little pin-pricks, sordid humiliations,
+ugliness, meannesses, and dirt, that called forth in resistance all that
+was lowest and least commendable in one's self.
+
+One has attuned one's nerves to the leading of a forlorn hope, and a
+gnat gets into one's eye, or a little cinder grit, and there it sticks;
+and there is no question of leading any forlorn hope, after all, and
+never will be; all _that_ was in the imagination only: it is always
+gnats and cinder grits, gnats and cinder grits.
+
+By the evening I had ignominiously broken down, and was plunged in the
+depths of an exasperated pessimism too deep even for tears, and would
+have believed myself the meanest and most miserable of mankind, but that
+everybody else, without exception, was even meaner and miserabler
+than myself.
+
+They could still eat and drink and be merry. I could not, and did not
+even want to.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And so on, day after day, week after week, for months and years....
+
+Thus I grew weary in time of my palling individuality, ever the same
+through all these uncontrollable variations of mood.
+
+Oh, that alternate ebb and flow of the spirits! It is a disease, and,
+what is most distressing, it is no real change; it is more sickeningly
+monotonous than absolute stagnation itself. And from that dreary seesaw
+I could never escape, except through the gates of dreamless sleep, the
+death in life; for even in our dreams we are still ourselves. There
+was no rest!
+
+I loathed the very sight of myself in the shop-windows as I went by; and
+yet I always looked for it there, in the forlorn hope of at least
+finding some alteration, even for the worse. I passionately longed to be
+somebody else; and yet I never met anybody else I could have borne to be
+for a moment.
+
+And then the loneliness of us!
+
+Each separate unit of our helpless race is inexorably bounded by the
+inner surface of his own mental periphery, a jointless armor in which
+there is no weak place, never a fault, never a single gap of egress for
+ourselves, of ingress for the nearest and dearest of our fellow-units.
+At only five points can we just touch each other, and all that is--and
+that only by the function of our poor senses--from the outside. In vain
+we rack them that we may get a little closer to the best beloved and
+most implicitly trusted; ever in vain, from the cradle to the grave.
+
+Why should so fantastic a thought have persecuted me so cruelly? I knew
+nobody with whom I should have felt such a transfusion of soul even
+tolerable for a second. I cannot tell! But it was like a gadfly which
+drove me to fatigue my body that I should have by day the stolid peace
+of mind that comes of healthy physical exhaustion; that I should sleep
+at night the dreamless sleep--the death in life!
+
+"Of such materials wretched men are made!" Especially wretched young
+men; and the wretcheder one is, the more one smokes; and the more one
+smokes, the wretcheder one gets--a vicious circle!
+
+Such was my case. I grew to long for the hour of my release (as I
+expressed it pathetically to myself), and caressed the idea of suicide.
+I even composed for myself a little rhymed epitaph in French which I
+thought very neat--
+
+     Je n'etais point. Je fus.
+         Je ne suis plus.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Oh, to perish in some noble cause--to die saving another's life, even
+another's worthless life, to which he clung!
+
+I remember formulating this wish, in all sincerity, one moonlit night as
+I walked up Frith Street, Soho. I came upon a little group of excited
+people gathered together at the foot of a house built over a shop. From
+a broken window-pane on the second floor an ominous cloud of smoke rose
+like a column into the windless sky. An ordinary ladder was placed
+against the house, which, they said, was densely inhabited; but no
+fire-engine or fire-escape had arrived as yet, and it appeared useless
+to try and rouse the inmates by kicking and beating at the door
+any longer.
+
+A brave man was wanted--a very brave man, who would climb the ladder,
+and make his way into the house through the broken window. Here was a
+forlorn hope to lead at last!
+
+Such a man was found. To my lasting shame and contrition, it was not I.
+
+He was short and thick and middle-aged, and had a very jolly red face
+and immense whiskers--quite a common sort of man, who seemed by no means
+tired of life.
+
+His heroism was wasted, as it happened; for the house was an empty one,
+as we all heard, to our immense relief, before he had managed to force a
+passage into the burning room. His whiskers were not even singed!
+
+Nevertheless, I slunk home, and gave up all thoughts of
+self-destruction--even in a noble cause; and there, in penance, I
+somewhat hastily committed to flame the plodding labor of many
+midnights--an elaborate copy in pen and ink, line for line, of Retel's
+immortal wood-engraving "Der Tod als Freund," which Mrs. Lintot had been
+kind enough to lend me--and under which I had written, in beautiful
+black Gothic letters and red capitals (and without the slightest sense
+of either humor or irreverence), the following poem, which had cost me
+infinite pains:
+
+               I.
+
+        _F, i, fi--n, i, ni!
+     Bon dieu Pere, j'ai fini...
+     Vous qui m'avez lant puni,
+       Dans ma triste vie,
+     Pour tant d'horribles forfaits
+     Que je ne commis jamais
+     Laissez-moi jouir en paix
+       De mon agonie!_
+
+               II.
+
+     _Les faveurs que je Vous dois,
+     Je les compte sur mes doigts:_
+     _Tout infirme que je sois,
+        Ca se fait bien vite!
+     Prenez patience, et comptez
+     Tous mes maux--puis computez
+     Toutes Vos severites--
+       Vous me tiendrez quitte!_
+
+               III.
+
+     _Ne pour souffrir, et souffrant--
+     Bas, honni, bete, ignorant,
+     Vieux, laid, chetif--et mourant
+        Dans mon trou sans plainte,
+     Je suis aussi sans desir
+     Autre que d'en bien finir--
+     Sans regret, sans repentir--
+        Sans espoir ni crainte!_
+
+               IV.
+
+     _Pere inflexible et jaloux,
+     Votre Fils est mort pour nous!
+     Aussi, je reste envers Vous
+         Si bien sans rancune,
+     Que je voudrais, sans facon,
+     Faire, au seuil de ma prison,
+     Quelque petite oraison ...
+         Je n'en sais pas une!_
+
+               V.
+
+     _J'entends sonner l'Angelus
+     Qui rassemble Vos Elus:
+     Pour moi, du bercail exclus.
+         C'est la mort qui sonne!
+     Prier ne profite rien ...
+     Pardonner est le seul bien:_
+     _C'est le Votre, et c'est le mien:
+        Moi, je Vous pardonne!_
+
+               VI.
+
+     _Soyez d'un egard pareil!
+     S'il est quelque vrai sommeil
+     Sans ni reve, ni reveil,
+        Ouvrez-m'en la porte--
+     Faites que l'immense Oubli
+     Couvre, sous un dernier pli,
+     Dans mon corps enseveli,
+        Ma conscience morte!_
+
+Oh me duffer! What a hopeless failure was I in all things, little and
+big.
+
+
+
+
+Part Three
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+I had no friends but the Lintots and their friends. "Les amis de nos
+amis sont nos amis!"
+
+My cousin Alfred had gone into the army, like his father before him. My
+cousin Charlie had gone into the Church, and we had drifted completely
+apart. My grandmother was dead. My Aunt Plunket, a great invalid, lived
+in Florence. Her daughter, Madge, was in India, happily married to a
+young soldier who is now a most distinguished general.
+
+The Lintots held their heads high as representatives of a liberal
+profession, and an old Pentonville family. People were generally
+exclusive in those days--an exclusiveness that was chiefly kept up by
+the ladies. There were charmed circles even in Pentonville.
+
+Among the most exclusive were the Lintots. Let us hope, in common
+justice, that those they excluded were at least able to exclude others.
+
+I have eaten their bread and salt, and it would ill become me to deny
+that their circle was charming as well as charmed. But I had no gift for
+making friends, although I was often attracted by people the very
+opposite of myself; especially by little, clever, quick, but not too
+familiar men; but even if they were disposed to make advances, a
+miserable shyness and stiffness of manner on my part, that I could not
+help, would raise a barrier of ice between us.
+
+They were most hospitable people, these good Lintots, and had many
+friends, and gave many parties, which my miserable shyness prevented me
+from enjoying to the full. They were both too stiff and too free.
+
+In the drawing-room, Mrs. Lintot and one or two other ladies, severely
+dressed, would play the severest music in a manner that did not mitigate
+its severity. They were merciless! It was nearly always Bach, or Hummel,
+or Scarlatti, each of whom, they would say, could write both like an
+artist and a gentleman--a very rare but indispensable combination,
+it seemed.
+
+Other ladies, young and middle-aged, and a few dumb-struck youths like
+myself, would be suffered to listen, but never to retaliate--never to
+play or sing back again.
+
+If one ventured to ask for a song without words by Mendelssohn--or a
+song with words, even by Schubert, even with German words--one was
+rebuked and made to blush for the crime of musical frivolity.
+
+Meanwhile, in Lintot's office (built by himself in the back garden),
+grave men and true, pending the supper hour, would smoke and sip
+spirits-and-water, and talk shop; formally at first, and with much
+politeness. But gradually, feeling their way, as it were, they would
+relax into social unbuttonment, and drop the "Mister" before each
+other's names (to be resumed next morning), and indulge in lively
+professional chaff, which would soon become personal and free and
+boisterous--a good-humored kind of warfare in which I did not shine, for
+lack of quickness and repartee. For instance, they would ask one whether
+one would rather be a bigger fool than one looked, or look a bigger fool
+than one was; and whichever way one answered the question, the retort
+would be that "that was impossible!" amid roars of laughter from all
+but one.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+So that I would take a middle course, and spend most of the evening on
+the stairs and in the hall, and study (with an absorbing interest much
+too well feigned to look natural) the photographs of famous cathedrals
+and public buildings till supper came; when, by assiduously attending on
+the ladies, I would cause my miserable existence to be remembered, and
+forgiven; and soon forgotten again, I fear.
+
+I hope I shall not be considered an overweening coxcomb for saying that,
+on the whole, I found more favor with the ladies than with the
+gentlemen; especially at supper-time.
+
+After supper there would be a change--for the better, some thought.
+Lintot, emboldened by good-cheer and good-fellowship, would become
+unduly, immensely, uproariously funny, in spite of his wife. He had a
+genuine gift of buffoonery. His friends would whisper to each other
+that Lintot was "on," and encourage him. Bach and Hummel and Scarlatti
+were put on the shelf, and the young people would have a good time.
+There were comic songs and negro melodies, with a chorus all round.
+Lintot would sing "Vilikins and his Dinah," in the manner of Mr. Robson,
+so well that even Mrs. Lintot's stern mask would relax into indulgent
+smiles. It was irresistible. And when the party broke up, we could all
+(thanks to our host) honestly thank our hostess "for a very pleasant
+evening," and cheerfully, yet almost regretfully, wish her good-night.
+
+It is good to laugh sometimes--wisely if one can; if not, _quocumque
+modo_! There are seasons when even "the crackling of thorns under a pot"
+has its uses. It seems to warm the pot--all the pots--and all the
+emptiness thereof, if they be empty.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Once, indeed, I actually made a friend, but he did not last me very
+long.
+
+It happened thus: Mrs. Lintot gave a grander party than usual. One of
+the invited was Mr. Moses Lyon, the great picture-dealer--a client of
+Lintot's; and he brought with him young Raphael Merridew, the already
+famous painter, the most attractive youth I had ever seen. Small and
+slight, but beautifully made, and dressed in the extreme of fashion,
+with a handsome face, bright and polite manners, and an irresistible
+voice, he became his laurels well; he would have been sufficiently
+dazzling without them. Never had those hospitable doors in Myddelton
+Square been opened to so brilliant a guest.
+
+I was introduced to him, and he discovered that the bridge of my nose
+was just suited for the face of the sun-god in his picture of "The
+Sun-god and the Dawn-maiden," and begged I would favor him with a
+sitting or two.
+
+Proud indeed was I to accede to such a request, and I gave him many
+sittings. I used to rise at dawn to sit, before my work at Lintot's
+began; and to sit again as soon as I could be spared.
+
+It seems I not only had the nose and brow of a sun-god (who is not
+supposed to be a very intellectual person), but also his arms and his
+torso; and sat for these, too. I have been vain of myself ever since.
+
+During these sittings, which he made delightful, I grew to love him as
+David loved Jonathan.
+
+We settled that we would go to the Derby together in a hansom. I engaged
+the smartest hansom in London days beforehand. On the great Wednesday
+morning I was punctual with it at his door in Charlotte Street. There
+was another hansom there already--a smarter hansom still than mine, for
+it was a private one--and he came down and told me he had altered his
+mind, and was going with Lyon, who had asked him the evening before.
+
+"One of the first picture-dealers in London, my dear fellow. Hang it
+all, you know, I couldn't refuse--awfully sorry!"
+
+So I drove to the Derby in solitary splendor, but the bright weather,
+the humors of the road, all the gay scenes were thrown away upon me,
+such was the bitterness of my heart.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+In the early afternoon I saw Merridew lunching on the top of a drag,
+among some men of smart and aristocratic appearance. He seemed to be the
+life of the party, and gave me a good-humored nod as I passed. I soon
+found Lyon sitting disconsolate in his hansom, scowling and solitary; he
+invited me to lunch with him, and disembosomed himself of a load of
+bitterness as intense as mine (which I kept to myself). The shrewd
+Hebrew tradesman was sunk in the warm-hearted, injured friend. Merridew
+had left Lyon for the Earl of Chiselhurst, just as he had left me
+for Lyon.
+
+That was a dull Derby for us both!
+
+A few days later I met Merridew, radiant as ever. All he said was:
+
+"Awful shame of me to drop old Lyon for Chiselhurst, eh? But an earl, my
+dear fellow! Hang it all, you know! Poor old Mo had to get back in his
+hansom all by himself, but he's bought the 'Sun-god' all the same."
+
+Merridew soon dropped me altogether, to my great sorrow, for I forgave
+him his Derby desertion as quickly as Lyon did, and would have forgiven
+him anything. He was one of those for whom allowances are always being
+made, and with a good grace.
+
+He died before he was thirty, poor boy! but his fame will never die. The
+"Sun-god" (even with the bridge of that nose which had been so wofully
+put out of joint) is enough by itself to place him among the immortals.
+Lyon sold it to Lord Chiselhurst for three thousand pounds--it had cost
+him five hundred. It is now in the National Gallery.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Poetical justice was satisfied!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Nor was I more fortunate in love than in friendship.
+
+All the exclusiveness in the world cannot exclude good and beautiful
+maidens, and these were not lacking, even in Pentonville.
+
+There is always one maiden much more beautiful and good than all the
+others--like Esmeralda among the ladies of the Hotel de Gondelaurier.
+There was such a maiden in Pentonville, or rather Clerkenwell, close by.
+But her station was so humble (like Esmeralda's) that even the least
+exclusive would have drawn the line at _her!_ She was one of a large
+family, and they sold tripe and pig's feet, and food for cats and dogs,
+in a very small shop opposite the western wall of the Middlesex House of
+Detention. She was the eldest, and the busy, responsible one at this
+poor counter. She was one of Nature's ladies, one of Nature's
+goddesses--a queen! Of that I felt sure every time I passed her shop,
+and shyly met her kind, frank, uncoquettish gaze. A time was approaching
+when I should have to overcome my shyness, and tell her that she of all
+women was the woman for me, and that it was indispensable, absolutely
+indispensable, that we two should be made one--immediately! at
+once! forever!
+
+But before I could bring myself to this she married somebody else, and
+we had never exchanged a single word!
+
+If she is alive now she is an old woman--a good and beautiful old woman,
+I feel sure, wherever she is, and whatever her rank in life. If she
+should read this book, which is not very likely, may she accept this
+small tribute from an unknown admirer; for whom, so many years ago, she
+beautified and made poetical the hideous street that still bounds the
+Middlesex House of Detention on its western side; and may she try to
+think not the less of it because since then its writer has been on the
+wrong side of that long, blank wall, of that dreary portal where the
+agonized stone face looks down on the desolate slum:
+
+     "_Per me si va tra la perduta gente_ ...!"
+
+After this disappointment I got myself a big dog (like Byron, Bismarck,
+and Wagner), but not in the spirit of emulation. Indeed, I had never
+heard of either Bismarck or Wagner in those days, or their dogs, and I
+had lost my passion for Byron and any wish to emulate him in any way; it
+was simply for the want of something to be fond of, and that would be
+sure to love me back again.
+
+He was not a big dog when I bought him, but just a little ball of
+orange-tawny fluff that I could carry with one arm. He cost me all the
+money I had saved up for a holiday trip to Passy. I had seen his father,
+a champion St. Bernard, at a dog-show, and felt that life would be well
+worth living with such a companion; but _his_ price was five hundred
+guineas. When I saw the irresistible son, just six weeks old, and heard
+that he was only one-fiftieth of his sire's value, I felt Passy must
+wait, and became his possessor.
+
+[Illustration: PORTHOS AND HIS ATTENDANT SQUIRE.]
+
+I gave him of the best that money could buy--real milk at fivepence a
+quart, three quarts a day, I combed his fluff every morning, and washed
+him three times a week, and killed all his fleas one by one--a labour of
+love. I weighed him every Saturday, and found he increased at the rate
+of six to nine weekly; and his power of affection increased as the
+square of his weight. I christened him Porthos, because he was so big
+and fat and jolly; but in his noble puppy face and his beautiful
+pathetic eyes I already foresaw for his middle age that distinguished
+and melancholy grandeur which characterized the sublime Athos, Comte
+de la Fere.
+
+He was a joy. It was good to go to sleep at night and know he would be
+there in the morning. Whenever we took our walks abroad, everybody
+turned round to look at him and admire, and to ask if he was
+good-tempered, and what his particular breed was, and what I fed him on.
+He became a monster in size--a beautiful, playful, gracefully
+galumphing, and most affectionate monster, and I, his happy
+Frankenstein, congratulated myself on the possession of a treasure that
+would last twelve years at least, or even fourteen, with the care I
+meant to take of him. But he died of distemper when he was eleven
+months old.
+
+I do not know if little dogs cause as large griefs when they die as big
+ones; but I settled there should be no more dogs--big or little--for me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After this I took to writing verses and sending them to magazines, where
+they never appeared. They were generally about my being reminded, by a
+tune, of things that had happened a long time ago: my poetic, like my
+artistic vein, was limited.
+
+Here are the last I made, thirty years back. My only excuse for giving
+them is that they are so _singularly prophetic_.
+
+The reminding tune (an old French chime which my father used to sing)
+is very simple and touching; and the old French words run thus:
+
+     _"Orleans, Beaugency!
+     Notre Dame de Clery!
+       Vendome! Vendome!
+     Quel chagrin, quel ennui
+     De compter toute la nuit
+       Les heures--Les heures!"_
+
+That is all. They are supposed to be sung by a mediaeval prisoner who
+cannot sleep; and who, to beguile the tediousness of his insomnia, sets
+any words that come into his head to the tune of the chime which marks
+the hours from a neighboring belfry. I tried to fancy that his name was
+Pasquier de la Mariere, and that he was my ancestor.
+
+     THE CHIME.
+
+       _There is an old French air,
+     A little song of loneliness and grief--
+     Simple as nature, sweet beyond compare--
+       And sad--past all belief!
+
+       Nameless is he that wrote
+     The melody--but this I opine:
+     Whoever made the words was some remote
+       French ancestor of mine.
+
+       I know the dungeion deep
+     Where long he lay--and why he lay therein;
+     And all his anguish, that he could not sleep
+       For conscience of a sin._
+
+       I see his cold, hard bed;
+     I hear the chimes that jingled in his ears
+     As he pressed nightly, with that wakeful head,
+       A pillow wet with tears.
+
+       Oh, restless little chime!
+     It never changed--but rang its roundelay
+     For each dark hour of that unhappy time
+       That sighed itself away.
+
+       And ever, more and more,
+     Its burden grew of his lost self a part--
+     And mingled with his memories, and wore
+       Its way into his heart.
+
+       And there it wove the name
+     Of many a town he loved, for one dear sake,
+     Into its web of music; thus he came
+       His little song to make.
+
+       Of all that ever heard
+     And loved it for its sweetness, none but I
+     Divined the clew that, as a hidden word,
+       The notes doth underlie.
+
+       That wail from lips long dead
+     Has found its echo in this breast alone!
+     Only to me, by blood-remembrance led,
+       Is that wild story known!
+
+       And though 'tis mine, by right
+     Of treasure-trove, to rifle and lay bare--
+     A heritage of sorrow and delight
+       The world would gladly share--
+
+       Yet must I not unfold
+     For evermore, nor whisper late or soon,
+     The secret that a few slight bars thus hold
+       Imprisoned in a tune.
+
+       For when that little song
+     Goes ringing in my head, I know that he,
+     My luckless lone forefather, dust so long,
+       Relives his life in me!
+
+I sent them to ----'s Magazine, with the six French lines on at the
+which they were founded at the top. ----'s _Magazine_ published only the
+six French lines--the only lines in my handwriting that ever got into
+print. And they date from the fifteenth century!
+
+Thus was my little song lost to the world, and for a time to me. But
+long, long afterwards, I found it again, where Mr. Longfellow once found
+a song of _his_: "in the heart of a friend"--surely the sweetest bourne
+that can ever be for any song!
+
+Little did I foresee that a day was not far off when real blood
+remembrance would carry me--but that is to come.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Poetry, friendship and love having failed, I sought for consolation in
+art, and frequented the National Gallery, Marlborough House (where the
+Vernon collection was), the British Museum, the Royal Academy, and other
+exhibitions.
+
+I prostrated myself before Titian, Rembrandt, Velasquez, Veronese, Da
+Vinci, Botticelli, Signorelli--the older the better; and tried my best
+to honestly feel the greatness I knew and know to be there; but for
+want of proper training I was unable to reach those heights, and, like
+most outsiders, admired them for the wrong things, for the very beauties
+they lack--such transcendent, ineffable beauties of feature, form, and
+expression as an outsider always looks for in an old master, and often
+persuades himself he finds there--and oftener still, _pretends_ he does!
+
+I was far more sincerely moved (although I did not dare to say so) by
+some works of our own time--for instance, by the "Vale of Rest," the
+"Autumn Leaves," "The Huguenot" of young Mr. Millais--just as I found
+such poems as _Maud_ and _In Memoriam_, by Mr. Alfred Tennyson,
+infinitely more precious and dear to me than Milton's _Paradise Lost_
+and Spenser's _Faerie Queene_.
+
+Indeed, I was hopelessly modern in those days--quite an every-day young
+man; the names I held in the warmest and deepest regard were those of
+then living men and women. Darwin, Browning, and George Eliot did not,
+it is true, exist for me as yet; but Tennyson, Thackeray, Dickens,
+Millais, John Leech, George Sand, Balzac, the old Dumas, Victor Hugo,
+and Alfred de Musset!
+
+I have never beheld them in the flesh; but, like all the world, I know
+their outer aspect well, and could stand a pretty stiff examination in
+most they have ever written, drawn, or painted.
+
+Other stars of magnitude have risen since, but of the old galaxy four at
+least still shine out of the past with their ancient lustre undimmed in
+my eyes--Thackeray; dear John Leech, who still has power to make me
+laugh as I like to laugh; and for the two others it is plain that the
+Queen, the world, and I are of a like mind as to their deserts, for one
+of them is now an ornament to the British peerage, the other a baronet
+and a millionaire; only I would have made dukes of them straight off,
+with precedence over the Archbishop of Canterbury, if they would care to
+have it so.
+
+It is with a full but humble heart that I thus venture to record my long
+indebtedness, and pay this poor tribute, still fresh from the days of my
+unquestioning hero-worship. It will serve, at least, to show my reader
+(should I ever have one sufficiently interested to care) in what mental
+latitudes and longitudes I dwelt, who was destined to such singular
+experience--a kind of reference, so to speak--that he may be able to
+place me at a glance, according to the estimation in which he holds
+these famous and perhaps deathless names.
+
+It will be admitted, at least, that my tastes were normal, and shared by
+a large majority--the tastes of an every-day young man at that
+particular period of the nineteenth century--one much given to athletics
+and cold tubs, and light reading and cheap tobacco, and endowed with the
+usual discontent; the last person for whom or from whom or by whom to
+expect anything out of the common.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But the splendor of the Elgin Marbles! I understood that at
+once--perhaps because there is not so much to understand. Mere
+physically beautiful people appeal to us all, whether they be in flesh
+or marble.
+
+By some strange intuition, or natural instinct, I _knew_ that people
+ought to be built like that, before I had ever seen a single statue in
+that wondrous room. I had divined them--so completely did they realize
+an aesthetic ideal I had always felt.
+
+I had often, as I walked the London streets, peopled an imaginary world
+of my own with a few hundreds of such beings, made flesh and blood, and
+pictured them as a kind of beneficent aristocracy seven feet high, with
+minds and manners to match their physique, and set above the rest of the
+world for its good; for I found it necessary (so that my dream should
+have a point) to provide them with a foil in the shape of millions of
+such people as we meet every day. I was egotistic and self-seeking
+enough, it is true, to enroll myself among the former, and had chosen
+for my particular use and wear just such a frame as that of the Theseus,
+with, of course, the nose and hands and feet (of which time has bereft
+him) restored, and all mutilations made good.
+
+And for my mistress and companion I had duly selected no less a person
+than the Venus of Milo (no longer armless), of which Lintot possessed a
+plaster-cast, and whose beauties I had foreseen before I ever beheld
+them with the bodily eye.
+
+"Monsieur n'est pas degoute!" as Ibbetson would have remarked.
+
+But most of all did I pant for the music which is divine.
+
+Alas, that concerts and operas and oratorios should not be as free to
+the impecunious as the National Gallery and the British Museum--a
+privilege which is not abused!
+
+Impecunious as I was, I sometimes had pence enough to satisfy this
+craving, and discovered in time such realms of joy as I had never
+dreamed of; such monarchs as Mozart, Handel, and Beethoven, and others,
+of whom my father knew apparently so little; and yet they were more
+potent enchanters than Gretry, Herold, and Boieldieu, whose music he
+sang so well.
+
+I discovered, moreover, that they could do more than charm--they could
+drive my weary self out of my weary soul, and for a space fill that
+weary soul with courage, resignation, and hope. No Titian, no
+Shakespeare, no Phidias could ever accomplish that--not even Mr. William
+Makepeace Thackeray or Mr. Alfred Tennyson.
+
+My sweetest recollections of this period of my life (indeed, the only
+sweet recollections) are of the music I heard, and the places where I
+heard it; it was an enchantment! With what vividness I can recall it
+all! The eager anticipation for days; the careful selection, beforehand,
+from such an _embarras de richesses_ as was duly advertised; then the
+long waiting in the street, at the doors reserved for those whose
+portion is to be the gallery. The hard-won seat aloft is reached at
+last, after a selfish but good-humored struggle up the long stone
+staircase (one is sorry for the weak, but a famished ear has no
+conscience). The gay and splendid house is crammed; the huge chandelier
+is a golden blaze; the delight of expectation is in the air, and also
+the scent of gas, and peppermint, and orange-peel, and music-loving
+humanity, whom I have discovered to be of sweeter fragrance than the
+common herd.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+The orchestra fills, one by one; instruments tune up--a familiar
+cacophony, sweet with seductive promise. The conductor takes his
+seat--applause--a hush--three taps--the baton waves once, twice,
+thrice--the eternal fountain of magic is let loose, and at the
+very first jet
+
+     "_The cares that infest the day
+     Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,
+     And as silently steal away_."
+
+Then lo! the curtain rises, and straightway we are in Seville--Seville,
+after Pentonville! Count Alma-viva, lordly, gallant, and gay beneath his
+disguise, twangs his guitar, and what sounds issue from it! For every
+instrument that was ever invented is in that guitar--the whole
+orchestra!
+
+"_Ecco ridente il cielo_....," so sings he (with the most beautiful male
+voice of his time) under Rosina's balcony; and soon Rosina's voice (the
+most beautiful female voice of hers) is heard behind her curtains--so
+girlish, so innocent, so young and light-hearted, that the eyes fill
+with involuntary tears.
+
+Thus encouraged, he warbles that his name is Lindoro, that he would fain
+espouse her; that he is not rich in the goods of this world, but gifted
+with an inordinate, inexhaustible capacity for love (just like Peter
+Ibbetson); and vows that he will always warble to her, in this wise,
+from dawn till when daylight sinks behind the mountain. But what matter
+the words?
+
+"Go on, my love, go on, _like this_!" warbles back Rosina--and no
+wonder--till the dull, despondent, commonplace heart of Peter Ibbetson
+has room for nothing else but sunny hope and love and joy! And yet it is
+all mere sound--impossible, unnatural, unreal nonsense!
+
+Or else, in a square building, decent and well-lighted enough, but not
+otherwise remarkable--the very chapel of music--four business-like
+gentlemen, in modern attire and spectacles, take their places on an
+unpretentious platform amid refined applause; and soon the still air
+vibrates to the trembling of sixteen strings--only that and
+nothing more!
+
+But in that is all Beethoven, or Schubert, or Schumann has got to say to
+us for the moment, and what a say it is! And with what consummate
+precision and perfection it is said--with what a mathematical certainty,
+and yet with what suavity, dignity, grace, and distinction!
+
+They are the four greatest players in the world, perhaps; but they
+forget themselves, and we forget them (as it is their wish we should),
+in the master whose work they interpret so reverently, that we may yearn
+with his mighty desire and thrill with his rapture and triumph, or ache
+with his heavenly pain and submit with his divine resignation.
+
+Not all the words in all the tongues that ever were--dovetail them,
+rhyme them, alliterate them, torture them as you will--can ever pierce
+to the uttermost depths of the soul of man, and let in a glimpse of the
+Infinite, as do the inarticulate tremblings of those sixteen strings.
+
+Ah, songs without words are the best!
+
+Then a gypsy-like little individual, wiry and unkempt, who looks as if
+he had spent his life listening to the voices of the night in Heaven
+knows what Lithuanian forests, with wolves and wild-boars for his
+familiars, and the wind in the trees for his teacher, seats himself at
+the great brass-bound oaken Broadwood piano-forte. And under his
+phenomenal fingers, a haunting, tender, world-sorrow, full of
+questionings--a dark mystery of moonless, starlit nature--exhales itself
+in nocturnes, in impromptus, in preludes--in mere waltzes and mazourkas
+even! But waltzes and mazourkas such as the most frivolous would never
+dream of dancing to. A capricious, charming sorrow--not too deep for
+tears, if one be at all inclined to shed them--so delicate, so fresh,
+and yet so distinguished, so ethereally civilized and worldly and
+well-bred that it has crystallized itself into a drawing-room ecstasy,
+to last forever. It seems as though what was death (or rather
+euthanasia) to him who felt it, is play for us--surely an immortal
+sorrow whose recital will never, never pall--the sorrow of Chopin.
+
+Though why Chopin should have been so sorry we cannot even guess; for
+mere sorrow's sake, perhaps; the very luxury of woe--the real sorrow
+which has no real cause (like mine in those days); and that is the best
+and cheapest kind of sorrow to make music of, after all!
+
+And this great little gypsy pianist, who plays his Chopin so well;
+evidently he has not spent his life in Lithuanian forests, but hard at
+the key-board, night and day; and he has had a better master than the
+wind in the trees--namely, Chopin himself (for it is printed in the
+programme). It was his father and mother before him, and theirs, who
+heard the voices of the night; but he remembers it all, and puts it all
+into his master's music, and makes us remember it, too.
+
+Or else behold the chorus, rising tier upon tier, and culminating in the
+giant organ. But their thunder is just hushed.
+
+Some Liliputian figure, male or female, as the case may be, rises on its
+little legs amid the great Liliputian throng, and through the sacred
+stillness there peals forth a perfect voice (by no means Liliputian). It
+bids us "Rest in the Lord," or else it tells us that "He was despised
+and rejected of men"; but, again, what matter the words? They are almost
+a hinderance, beautiful though they be.
+
+The hardened soul melts at the tones of the singer, at the unspeakable
+pathos of the sounds that cannot lie; one almost believes--one believes
+at least in the belief of others. At last one understands, and is purged
+of intolerance and cynical contempt, and would kneel with the rest, in
+sheer human sympathy!
+
+Oh, wretched outsider that one is (if it all be true)--one whose
+heart, so hopelessly impervious to the written word, so helplessly
+callous to the spoken message, can be reached only by the organized
+vibrations of a trained larynx, a metal pipe, a reed, a
+fiddle-string--by invisible, impalpable, incomprehensible little
+air-waves in mathematical combination, that beat against a tiny drum at
+the back of one's ear. And these mathematical combinations and the laws
+that govern them have existed forever, before Moses, before Pan, long
+before either a larynx or a tympanum had been evolved. They
+are absolute!
+
+Oh, mystery of mysteries!
+
+Euterpe, Muse of Muses, what a personage hast thou become since first
+thou sattest for thy likeness (with that ridiculous lyre in thy untaught
+hands) to some Greek who could carve so much better than thou
+couldst play!
+
+Four strings; but not the fingerable strings of Stradivarius. Nay, I beg
+thy pardon--five; for thy scale was pentatonic, I believe. Orpheus
+himself had no better, it is true. It was with just such an instrument
+that he all but charmed his Eurydice out of Hades. But, alas, she went
+back; on second thoughts, she liked Hades best!
+
+Couldst thou fire and madden and wring the heart, and then melt and
+console and charm it into the peace that passeth all understanding, with
+those poor five rudimentary notes, and naught between?
+
+Couldst thou, out of those five sounds of fixed, unalterable pitch,
+make, not a sixth sound, but a star?
+
+What were they, those five sounds? "Do, re, mi, fa, sol?" What must thy
+songs without words have been, if thou didst ever make any?
+
+Thou wast in very deed a bread-and-butter miss in those days, Euterpe,
+for all that thy eight twin sisters were already grown up, and out; and
+now thou toppest them all by half a head, at least. "Tu leur mangerais
+des petits pates sur la tete--comme Madame Seraskier!"
+
+And oh, how thou beatest them all for beauty! In _my_ estimation, at
+least--like--like Madame Seraskier again!
+
+And hast thou done growing at last?
+
+Nay, indeed; thou art not even yet a bread-and-butter miss--thou art but
+a sweet baby, one year old, and seven feet high, tottering midway
+between some blessed heaven thou hast only just left and the dull home
+of us poor mortals.
+
+The sweet one-year-old baby of our kin puts its hands upon our knees and
+looks up into our eyes with eyes full of unutterable meaning. It has so
+much to say! It can only say "ga-ga" and "ba-ba"; but with oh! how
+searching a voice, how touching a look--that is, if one is fond of
+babies! We are moved to the very core; we want to understand, for it
+concerns us all; we were once like that ourselves--the individual and
+the race--but for the life of us we cannot _remember_.
+
+And what canst _thou_ say to us yet, Euterpe, but thy "ga-ga" and thy
+"ba-ba," the inarticulate sweetness whereof we feel and cannot
+comprehend? But how beautiful it is--and what a look thou hast, and
+what a voice--that is, if one is fond of music!
+
+     "Je suis las des mois--je suis d'entendre
+        Ce qui peut mentir;
+      J'aime mieux les sons, qu'au lieu de comprendre
+        je n'ai qu'a sentir."
+
+Next day I would buy or beg or borrow the music that had filled me with
+such emotion and delight, and take it home to my little square piano,
+and try to finger it all out for myself. But I had begun too late
+in life.
+
+To sit, longing and helpless, before an instrument one cannot play, with
+a lovely score one cannot read! Even Tantalus was spared such an
+ordeal as that.
+
+It seemed hard that my dear father and mother, so accomplished in music
+themselves, should not even have taught me the musical notes, at an age
+when it was so easy to learn them; and thus have made me free of that
+wonder-world of sound in which I took such an extraordinary delight, and
+might have achieved distinction--perhaps.
+
+But no, my father had dedicated me to the Goddess of Science from before
+my very birth; that I might some day be better equipped than he for the
+pursuit, capture, and utilization of Nature's sterner secrets. There
+must be no dallying with light Muses. Alas! I have fallen between
+two stools!
+
+And thus, Euterpe absent, her enchantment would pass away; her
+handwriting was before me, but I had not learned how to decipher it, and
+my weary self would creep back into its old prison--my soul.
+
+[Illustration: (no caption)]
+
+Self-sickness-_selbstschmerz, le mal do soi!_ What a disease! It is not
+to be found in any dictionary, medical or otherwise.
+
+I ought to have been whipped for it, I know; but nobody was big enough,
+or kind enough, to whip me!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At length there came a day when that weary, weak, and most ridiculous
+self of mine was driven out--and exorcised for good--by a still more
+potent enchanter than even Handel or Beethoven or Schubert!
+
+There was a certain Lord Cray, for whom Lintot had built some laborers'
+cottages in Hertfordshire, and I sometimes went there to superintend the
+workmen. When the cottages were finished, Lord Cray and his wife (a very
+charming, middle-aged lady) came to see them, and were much pleased with
+all that had been done, and also seemed to be much interested in _me_,
+of all people in the world! and a few days later I received a card of
+invitation to their house in town for a concert.
+
+At first I felt much too shy to go; but Mr. Lintot insisted that it was
+my duty to do so, as it might lead to business; so that when the night
+came, I screwed up my courage to the sticking-place, and went.
+
+That evening was all enchantment, or would have been but for the
+somewhat painful feeling that I was such an outsider.
+
+But I was always well content to be the least observed of all observers,
+and felt happy in the security that here I should at least be left
+alone; that no perfect stranger would attempt to put me at my ease by
+making me the butt of his friendly and familiar banter; that no gartered
+duke, or belted earl (I have no doubt they were as plentiful there as
+blackberries, though they did not wear their insignia) would pat me on
+the back and ask me if I would sooner look a bigger fool than I was, or
+be a bigger fool than I looked. (I have not found a repartee for that
+insidious question yet; that is why it rankles so.)
+
+I had always heard that the English were a stiff people. There seemed to
+be no stiffness at Lady Cray's; nor was there any facetiousness; it put
+one at one's ease merely to look at them. They were mostly big, and
+strong, and healthy, and quiet, and good-humored, with soft and
+pleasantly-modulated voices. The large, well-lighted rooms were neither
+hot nor cold; there were beautiful pictures on the walls, and an
+exquisite scent of flowers came from an immense conservatory. I had
+never been to such a gathering before; all was new and a surprise, and
+very much to my taste, I confess. It was my first glimpse of "Society;"
+and last--but one!
+
+There were crowds of people--but no crowd; everybody seemed to know
+everybody else quite intimately, and to resume conversations begun an
+hour ago somewhere else.
+
+Presently these conversations were hushed, and Grisi and Mario sang! It
+was as much as I could do to restrain my enthusiasm and delight. I could
+have shouted out loud--I could almost have sung myself!
+
+In the midst of the applause that followed that heavenly duet, a lady
+and gentleman came into the room, and at the sight of that lady a new
+interest came into my life; and all the old half-forgotten sensations of
+mute pain and rapture that the beauty of Madame Seraskier used to make
+me feel as a child were revived once more; but with a depth and
+intensity, in comparison, that were as a strong man's barytone to a
+small boy's treble.
+
+It was the quick, sharp, cruel blow, the _coup de poignard_, that beauty
+of the most obvious, yet subtle, consummate, and highly-organized order
+can deal to a thoroughly prepared victim.
+
+And what a thoroughly prepared victim was I! A poor, shy,
+over-susceptible, virginal savage--Uncas, the son of Chingachgook,
+astray for the first time in a fashionable London drawing-room.
+
+A chaste mediaeval knight, born out of his due time, ascetic both from
+reverence and disgust, to whom woman in the abstract was the one
+religion; in the concrete, the cause of fifty disenchantments a day!
+
+A lusty, love-famished, warm-blooded pagan, stranded in the middle of
+the nineteenth century; in whom some strange inherited instinct had
+planted a definite, complete, and elaborately-finished conception of
+what the ever-beloved shape of woman should be--from the way the hair
+should grow on her brow and her temples and the nape of her neck, down
+to the very rhythm that should regulate the length and curve and
+position of every single individual toe! and who had found, to his pride
+and delight, that his preconceived ideal was as near to that of Phidias
+as if he had lived in the time of Pericles and Aspasia.
+
+For such was this poor scribe, and such he had been from a child, until
+this beautiful lady first swam into his ken.
+
+She was so tall that her eyes seemed almost on a level with mine, but
+she moved with the alert lightness and grace of a small person. Her
+thick, heavy hair was of a dark coppery brown, her complexion clear and
+pale, her eyebrows and eyelashes black, her eyes a light bluish gray.
+Her nose was short and sharp, and rather tilted at the tip, and her red
+mouth large and very mobile; and here, deviating from my preconceived
+ideal, she showed me how tame a preconceived ideal can be. Her perfect
+head was small, and round her long, thick throat two slight creases went
+parallel, to make what French sculptors call _le collier de Venus;_ the
+skin of her neck was like a white camellia, and slender and
+square-shouldered as she was, she did not show a bone. She was that
+beautiful type the French define as _la fausse maigre_, which does not
+mean a "false, thin woman."
+
+She seemed both thoughtful and mirthful at once, and genial as I had
+never seen any one genial before--a person to confide in, to tell all
+one's troubles to, without even an introduction! When she laughed she
+showed both top and bottom teeth, which were perfect, and her eyes
+nearly closed, so that they could no longer be seen for the thick lashes
+that fringed both upper and under eyelids; at which time the expression
+of her face was so keenly, cruelly sweet that it went through one like a
+knife. And then the laugh would suddenly cease, her full lips would
+meet, and her eyes beam out again like two mild gray suns, benevolently
+humorous and kindly inquisitive, and full of interest in everything and
+everybody around her. But there--I cannot describe her any more than one
+can describe a beautiful tune.
+
+Out of those magnificent orbs kindness, kindness, kindness was shed like
+a balm; and after a while, by chance, that balm was shed for a few
+moments on me, to my sweet but terrible confusion. Then I saw that she
+asked my hostess who I was, and received the answer; on which she shed
+her balm on me for one moment more, and dismissed me from her thoughts.
+
+Madame Grisi sang again--Desdemona's song from _Othello_--and the
+beautiful lady thanked the divine singer, whom she seemed to know quite
+intimately; and I thought her thanks--Italian thanks--even diviner than
+the song--not that I could quite understand them or even hear them
+well--I was too far; but she thanked with eyes and hands and shoulders--
+slight, happy movements--as well as words; surely the sweetest and
+sincerest words ever spoken.
+
+She was much surrounded and made up to--evidently a person of great
+importance; and I ventured to ask another shy man standing in my corner
+who she was, and he answered--
+
+"The Duchess of Towers."
+
+She did not stay long, and when she departed all turned dull and
+commonplace that had seemed so bright before she came; and seeing that
+it was not necessary to bid my hostess good-night and thank her for a
+pleasant evening, as we did in Pentonville, I got myself out of the
+house and walked back to my lodgings an altered man.
+
+I should probably never meet that lovely young duchess again, and
+certainly never know her; but her shaft had gone straight and true into
+my very heart, and I felt how well barbed it was, beyond all possibility
+of its ever being torn out of that blessed wound; might this never heal;
+might it bleed on forever!
+
+She would be an ideal in my lonely life, to live up to in thought and
+word and deed. An instinct which I felt to be infallible told me she was
+as good as she was fair--
+
+    _"Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, the love of
+    love."_
+
+[Illustration: THE DUCHESS OP TOWERS.]
+
+And just as Madame Seraskier's image was fading away, this new star had
+arisen to guide me by its light, though seen but for a moment; breaking
+once, through a parted cloud, I knew in which portion of the heavens it
+dwelt and shone apart, among the fairest constellations; and ever after
+turned my face that way. Nevermore in my life would I do or say or think
+a mean thing, or an impure, or an unkind one, if I could help it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Next day, as we walked to the Foundling Hospital for divine service,
+Mrs. Lintot severely deigned--under protest, as it were--to
+cross-examine me on the adventures of the evening.
+
+I did not mention the Duchess of Towers, nor was I able to describe the
+different ladies' dresses; but I described everything else in a manner I
+thought calculated to interest her deeply--the flowers, the splendid
+pictures and curtains and cabinets, the beautiful music, the many lords
+and ladies gay.
+
+She disapproved of them all.
+
+Existence on such an opulent scale was unconducive to any qualities of
+real sterling value, either moral or intellectual. Give _her_, for one,
+plain living and high thinking!
+
+"By-the-way," she asked, "what kind of supper did they give you?
+Something extremely _recherche_, I have no doubt. Ortolans,
+nightingales' tongues, pearls dissolved in wine?"
+
+Candor obliged me to confess there had been no supper, or that if there
+had I had managed to miss it. I suggested that perhaps everybody had
+dined late; and all the pearls, I told her, were on the ladies' necks
+and in their hair; and not feeling hungry, I could not wish them
+anywhere else; and the nightingales' tongues were in their throats to
+sing heavenly Italian duets with.
+
+"And they call that hospitality!" exclaimed Lintot, who loved his
+supper; and then, as he was fond of summing up and laying down the law
+when once his wife had given him the lead, he did so to the effect that
+though the great were all very well in their superficial way, and might
+possess many external charms for each other, and for all who were so
+deplorably weak as to fall within the sphere of their attraction, there
+was a gulf between the likes of them and the likes of us, which it would
+be better not to try and bridge if one wished to preserve one's
+independence and one's self-respect; unless, of course, it led to
+business; and this, he feared, it would never do with me.
+
+"They take you up one day and they drop you like a 'ot potato the next;
+and, moreover, my dear Peter," he concluded, affectionately linking his
+arm in mine, as was often his way when we walked together (although he
+was twelve good inches shorter than myself), "inequality of social
+condition is a bar to any real intimacy. It is something like disparity
+of physical stature. One can walk arm in arm only with a man of about
+one's own size."
+
+This summing up seemed so judicious, so incontrovertible, that feeling
+quite deplorably weak enough to fall within the sphere of Lady Cray's
+attraction if I saw much of her, and thereby losing my self-respect, I
+was deplorably weak enough not to leave a card on her after the happy
+evening I had spent at her house.
+
+Snob that I was, I dropped her--"like a 'ot potato" for fear of her
+dropping me.
+
+Besides which I had on my conscience a guilty, snobby feeling that in
+merely external charms at least these fine people were more to my taste
+than the charmed circle of my kind old friends the Lintots, however
+inferior they might be to these (for all that I knew) in sterling
+qualities of the heart and head--just as I found the outer aspect of
+Park Lane and Piccadilly more attractive than that of Pentonville,
+though possibly the latter may have been the more wholesome for such as
+I to live in.
+
+But people who can get Mario and Grisi to come and sing for them (and
+the Duchess of Towers to come and listen); people whose walls are
+covered with beautiful pictures; people for whom the smooth and
+harmonious ordering of all the little external things of social life has
+become a habit and a profession--such people are not to be dropped
+without a pang.
+
+So with a pang I went back to my usual round as though nothing had
+happened; but night and day the face of the Duchess of Towers was ever
+present to me, like a fixed idea that dominates a life.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On reading and rereading these past pages, I find that I have been
+unpardonably egotistic, unconscionably prolix and diffuse; and with such
+small beer to chronicle!
+
+And yet I feel that if I strike out this, I must also strike out that;
+which would lead to my striking out all, in sheer discouragement; and I
+have a tale to tell which is more than worth the telling!
+
+Once having got into the way of it, I suppose, I must have found the
+temptation to talk about myself irresistible.
+
+It is evidently a habit easy to acquire, even in old age--perhaps
+especially in old age, for it has never been my habit through life. I
+would sooner have talked to you about yourself, reader, or about you to
+somebody else--your friend, or even your enemy; or about them to you.
+
+But, indeed, at present, and until I die, I am without a soul to talk to
+about anybody or anything worth speaking of, so that most of my talking
+is done in pen and ink--a one-sided conversation, O patient reader, with
+yourself. I am the most lonely old man in the world, although perhaps
+the happiest.
+
+Still, it is not always amusing where I live, cheerfully awaiting my
+translation to another sphere.
+
+There is the good chaplain, it is true, and the good priest; who talk to
+me about myself a little too much, methinks; and the doctor, who talks
+to me about the priest and the chaplain, which is better. He does not
+seem to like them. He is a very witty man.
+
+But, my brother maniacs!
+
+They are lamentably _comme tout le monde_, after all. They are only
+interesting when the mad fit seizes them. When free from their awful
+complaint they are for the most part very common mortals: conventional
+Philistines, dull dogs like myself, and dull dogs do not like
+each other.
+
+Two of the most sensible (one a forger, the other a kleptomaniac on an
+important scale) are friends of mine. They are fairly well educated,
+respectable city men, clean, solemn, stodgy, punctilious, and resigned,
+but they are both unhappy; not because they are cursed with the double
+brand of madness and crime, and have forfeited their freedom in
+consequence; but because they find there are so few "ladies and
+gentlemen" in a criminal lunatic asylum, and they have always been used
+to "the society of ladies and gentlemen." Were it not for this, they
+would be well content to live here. And each is in the habit of
+confiding to me that he considers the other a very high-minded,
+trustworthy fellow, and all that, but not altogether "quite a
+gentleman." I do not know what they consider me; they probably confide
+that to each other.
+
+Can anything be less odd, less eccentric or interesting?
+
+Another, when quite sane, speaks English with a French accent and
+demonstrative French gestures, and laments the lost glories of the old
+French regime, and affects to forget the simplest English words. He
+doesn't know a word of French, however. But when his madness comes on,
+and he is put into a strait-waistcoat, all his English comes back, and
+very strong, fluent, idiomatic English it is, of the cockneyest kind,
+with all its "h's" duly transposed.
+
+Another (the most unpleasant and ugliest person here) has chosen me for
+the confidant of his past amours; he gives me the names and dates and
+all. The less I listen the more he confides. He makes me sick. What can
+I do to prevent his believing that I believe him? I am tired of killing
+people for lying about women. If I call him a liar and a cad, it may
+wake in him Heaven knows what dormant frenzy--for I am quite in the dark
+as to the nature of his mental infirmity.
+
+Another, a weak but amiable and well-intentioned youth, tries to think
+that he is passionately fond of music; but he is so exclusive, if you
+please, that he can only endure Bach and Beethoven, and when he hears
+Mendelssohn or Chopin, is obliged to leave the room. If I want to please
+him I whistle "Le Bon Roi Dagobert," and tell him it is the _motif_ of
+one of Bach's fugues; and to get rid of him I whistle it again and tell
+him it is one of Chopin's impromptus. What his madness is I can never be
+quite sure, for he is very close, but have heard that he is fond of
+roasting cats alive; and that the mere sight of a cat is enough to rouse
+his terrible propensity, and drive all wholesome, innocent, harmless,
+natural affectation out of his head.
+
+There is a painter here who (like others one has met outside) believes
+himself the one living painter worthy of the name. Indeed, he has
+forgotten the names of all the others, and can only despise and abuse
+them in the lump. He triumphantly shows you his own work, which consists
+of just the kind of crude, half-clever, irresponsible, impressionist
+daubs you would expect from an amateur who talks in that way; and you
+wonder why on earth he should be in a lunatic asylum, of all places in
+the world. And (just as would happen outside, again) some of his
+fellow-sufferers take him at his own valuation and believe him a great
+genius; some of them want to kick him for an impudent impostor (but that
+he is so small); and the majority do not care.
+
+His mania is arson, poor fellow; and when the terrible wish comes over
+him to set the place on fire he forgets his artistic conceit, and his
+mean, weak, silly face becomes almost grand.
+
+And with the female inmates it is just the same. There is a lady who has
+spent twenty years of her life here. Her father was a small country
+doctor, called Snogget; her husband an obscure, hard-working curate; and
+she is absolutely normal, common-place, and even vulgar. For her hobby
+is to discourse of well-born and titled people and county families, with
+whom (and with no others) it has always been her hope and desire to mix;
+and is still, though her hair is nearly white, and she is still here.
+She thinks and talks and cares about nothing else but "smart people,"
+and has conceived a very warm regard for me, on account of
+Lieutenant-colonel Ibbetson, of Ibbetson Hall, Hopshire; not because I
+killed him and was sentenced to be hanged for it, or because he was a
+greater criminal than I (all of which is interesting enough); but
+because he was my relative, and that through him I must be distantly
+connected, she thinks, with the Ibbetsons of Lechmere--whoever they may
+be, and whom neither she nor I have ever met (indeed, I had never heard
+of them), but whose family history she knows almost by heart. What can
+be tamer, duller, more prosaic, more sordidly humdrum, more hopelessly
+sane, more characteristic of common, under-bred, provincial
+feminine cackle?
+
+And yet this woman, in a fit of conjugal jealousy, murdered her own
+children; and her father went mad in consequence, and her husband cut
+his throat.
+
+In fact, during their lucid intervals it would never enter one's mind
+that they were mad at all, they are so absolutely like the people one
+meets every day in the world--such narrow-minded idiots, such deadly
+bores! One might as well be back in Pentonville or Hopshire again, or
+live in Passionate Brompton (as I am told it is called); or even in
+Belgravia, for that matter!
+
+For we have a young lord and a middle-aged baronet--a shocking pair, who
+should not be allowed to live; but for family influence they would be
+doing their twenty years' penal servitude in jail, instead of living
+comfortably sequestered here. Like Ouida's high-born heroes, they "stick
+to their order," and do not mingle with the rest of us. They ignore us
+so completely that we cannot help looking up to them in spite of their
+vices--just as we should do outside.
+
+And we, of the middle class, we stick to our order, too, and do not
+mingle with the small shop-keepers--who do not mingle with the laborers,
+artisans, and mechanics--who (alas, for them!) have nobody to look down
+upon but each other--but they do not; and are the best-bred people in
+the place.
+
+Such are we! It is only when our madness is upon us that we cease to be
+commonplace, and wax tragical and great, or else original and grotesque
+and humorous, with that true deep humor that compels both our laughter
+and our tears, and leaves us older, sadder, and wiser than it found us.
+
+"_Sunt lacrimae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt_."
+
+(So much, if little more, can I recall of the benign Virgil.)
+
+And now to my small beer again, which will have more of a head to it
+henceforward.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thus did I pursue my solitary way, like Bryant's Water-fowl, only with a
+less definite purpose before me--till at last there dawned for me an
+ever-memorable Saturday in June.
+
+I had again saved up enough money to carry my long longed-for journey to
+Paris into execution. The _Seine's_ boiler got up its steam, the
+_Seine's_ white awning was put up for me as well as others; and on a
+beautiful cloudless English morning I stood by the man at the wheel, and
+saw St. Paul's and London Bridge and the Tower fade out of sight; with
+what hope and joy I cannot describe. I almost forgot that I was me!
+
+And next morning (a beautiful French morning) how I exulted as I went up
+the Champs Elysees and passed under the familiar Arc de Triomphe on my
+way to the Rue de la Pompe, Passy, and heard all around the familiar
+tongue that I still knew so well, and rebreathed the long-lost and
+half-forgotten, but now keenly remembered, fragrance of the _genius
+loci_; that vague, light, indescribable, almost imperceptible scent of a
+place, that is so heavenly laden with the past for those who have lived
+there long ago--the most subtly intoxicating ether that can be!
+
+When I came to the meeting of the Rue de la Tour and the Rue de la
+Pompe, and, looking in at the grocer's shop at the corner, I recognized
+the handsome mustachioed groceress, Madame Liard (whose mustache twelve
+prosperous years had turned gray), I was almost faint with emotion. Had
+any youth been ever so moved by that face before?
+
+There, behind the window (which was now of plate-glass), and among
+splendid Napoleonic wares of a later day, were the same old India-rubber
+balls in colored net-work; the same quivering lumps of fresh paste in
+brown paper, that looked so cool and tempting; the same three-sou boxes
+of water-colors (now marked seventy-five centimes), of which I had
+consumed so many in the service of Mimsey Seraskier! I went in and
+bought one, and resmelt with delight the smell of all my by-gone
+dealings there, and received her familiar sounding--
+
+"Merci, monsieur! faudrait-il autre chose?" as if it had been a
+blessing; but I was too shy to throw myself into her arms and tell her
+that I was the "lone, wandering, but not lost" Gogo Pasquier. She might
+have said--
+
+"Eh bien, et apres?"
+
+The day had begun well.
+
+Like an epicure, I deliberated whether I should walk to the old gate in
+the Rue de la Pompe, and up the avenue and back to our old garden, or
+make my way round to the gap in the park hedge that we had worn of old
+by our frequent passage in and out, to and from the Bois de Boulogne.
+
+I chose the latter as, on the whole, the more promising in exquisite
+gradations of delight.
+
+The gap in the park hedge, indeed! The park hedge had disappeared, the
+very park itself was gone, cut up, demolished, all parcelled out into
+small gardens, with trim white villas, except where a railway ran
+through a deep cutting in the chalk. A train actually roared and panted
+by, and choked me with its filthy steam as I looked round in
+stupefaction on the ruins of my long-cherished hope.
+
+If that train had run over me and I had survived it, it could not have
+given me a greater shock; it all seemed too cruel and brutal an outrage.
+
+A winding carriage-road had been pierced through the very heart of the
+wilderness; and on this, neatly-paled little brand-new gardens abutted,
+and in these I would recognize, here and there, an old friend in the
+shape of some well-remembered tree that I had often climbed as a boy,
+and which had been left standing out of so many, but so changed by the
+loss of its old surroundings that it had a tame, caged, transplanted
+look--almost apologetic, and as if ashamed of being found out at last!
+
+Nothing else remained. Little hills and cliffs and valleys and
+chalk-pits that had once seemed big had been levelled up, or away, and I
+lost my bearings altogether, and felt a strange, creeping chill of
+blankness and bereavement.
+
+But how about the avenue and my old home? I hastened back to the Rue de
+la Pompe with the quick step of aroused anxiety. The avenue was
+gone--blocked within a dozen yards of the gate by a huge brick building
+covered with newly-painted trellis-work! My old house was no more, but
+in its place a much larger and smarter edifice of sculptured stone. The
+old gate at least had not disappeared, nor the porter's lodge; and I
+feasted my sorrowful eyes on these poor remains, that looked snubbed
+and shabby and out of place in the midst of all this new splendor.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Presently a smart concierge, with a beautiful pink ribboned cap, came
+out and stared at me for a while, and inquired if monsieur
+desired anything.
+
+I could not speak.
+
+"Est-ce que monsieur est indispose? Cette chaleur! Monsieur ne parle pas
+le Francais, peut-etre?"
+
+When I found my tongue I explained to her that I had once lived there in
+a modest house overlooking the street, but which had been replaced by
+this much more palatial abode.
+
+"O, oui, monsieur--on a balaye tout ca!" she replied.
+
+"Balaye!" What an expression for _me_ to hear!
+
+And she explained how the changes had taken place, and how valuable the
+property had become. She showed me a small plot of garden, a fragment of
+my old garden, that still remained, and where the old apple-tree might
+still have been, but that it had been sawed away. I saw the stump; that
+did duty for a rustic table.
+
+Presently, looking over a new wall, I saw another small garden,
+and in it the ruins of the old shed where I had found the toy
+wheelbarrow--soon to disappear, as they were building there too.
+
+I asked after all the people I could think of, beginning with those of
+least interest--the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker.
+
+Some were dead; some had retired and had left their "commerce" to their
+children and children-in-law. Three different school-masters had kept
+the school since I had left. Thank Heaven, there was still the
+school--much altered, it is true. I had forgotten to look for it.
+
+[Illustration: THE OLD APPLE-TREE.]
+
+She had no remembrance of my name, or the Seraskiers'--I asked, with a
+beating heart. We had left no trace. Twelve short years had effaced all
+memory of us! But she told me that a gentleman, _decore, mais tombe en
+enfance_, lived at a _maison de sante_ in the Chaussee de la Muette,
+close by, and that his name was le Major Duquesnois; and thither I
+went, after rewarding and warmly thanking her.
+
+I inquired for le Major Duquesnois, and I was told he was out for a
+walk, and I soon found him, much aged and bent, and leaning on the arm
+of a Sister of Charity. I was so touched that I had to pass him two or
+three times before I could speak. He was so small--so pathetically small!
+
+[Illustration: M. LE MAJOR.]
+
+It was a long time before I could give him an idea of who I was--Gogo
+Pasquier!
+
+Then after a while he seemed to recall the past a little.
+
+"Ha, ha! Gogo--gentil petit Gogo!--oui--oui--l'exercice? Portez ...
+arrrmes! arrmes ... bras? Et Mimse? bonne petite Mimse! toujours mal
+a la tete?"
+
+He could just remember Madame Seraskier; and repeated her name several
+times and said, "Ah! elle etait bien belle, Madame Seraskier!"
+
+In the old days of fairy-tale telling, when he used to get tired and I
+still wanted him to go on, he had arranged that if, in the course of the
+story, he suddenly brought in the word "Cric," and I failed to
+immediately answer "Crac," the story would be put off till our next walk
+(to be continued in our next!) and he was so ingenious in the way he
+brought in the terrible word that I often fell into the trap, and had to
+forego my delight for that afternoon.
+
+I suddenly thought of saying "Cric!" and he immediately said "Crac!" and
+laughed in a touching, senile way--"Cric!--Crac! c'est bien ca!" and
+then he became quite serious and said--
+
+"Et la suite au prochain numero!"
+
+After this he began to cough, and the good Sister said--
+
+"Je crains que monsieur ne le fatigue un peu!"
+
+So I had to bid him good-bye; and after I had squeezed and kissed his
+hand, he made me a most courtly bow, as though I had been a
+complete stranger.
+
+I rushed away, tossing up my arms like a madman in my pity and sorrow
+for my dear old friend, and my general regret and disenchantment. I
+made for the Bois de Boulogne, there to find, instead of the old
+rabbit-and-roebuck-haunted thickets and ferneries and impenetrable
+growth, a huge artificial lake, with row-boats and skiffs, and a rockery
+that would have held its own in Rosherville gardens. And on the way
+thither, near the iron gates in the fortifications, whom should I meet
+but one of my friends the couriers, on his way from St. Cloud to the
+Tuileries! There he rode with his arms jogging up and down, and his low
+glazed hat, and his immense jack-boots, just the same as ever, never
+rising in his stirrups, as his horse trotted to the jingle of the sweet
+little chime round its neck.
+
+[Illustration: GREEN AND GOLD]
+
+Alas! his coat was no longer the innocent, unsophisticated blue and
+silver livery of the bourgeois king, but the hateful green and gold of
+another regime.
+
+Farther on the Mare d'Auteuil itself had suffered change and become
+respectable--imperially respectable. No more frogs or newts or
+water-beetles, I felt sure; but gold and silver fish in vulgar
+Napoleonic profusion.
+
+No words that I can find would give any idea of the sadness and longing
+that filled me as I trod once more that sunlit grassy brink--the goal of
+my fond ambition for twelve long years.
+
+It was Sunday, and many people were about--many children, in their best
+Sunday clothes and on their best behavior, discreetly throwing crumbs to
+the fish. A new generation, much quieter and better dressed than my
+cousins and I, who had once so filled the solitude with the splashing of
+our nets, and the excited din of our English voices.
+
+As I sat down on a bench by the old willow (where the rat lived), and
+gazed and gazed, it almost surprised me that the very intensity of my
+desire did not of itself suffice to call up the old familiar faces and
+forms, and conjure away these modern intruders. The power to do this
+seemed almost within my reach; I willed and willed and willed with all
+my might, but in vain; I could not cheat my sight or hearing for a
+moment. There they remained, unconscious and undisturbed, those happy,
+well-mannered, well-appointed little French people, and fed the gold and
+silver fish; and there, with an aching heart, I left them.
+
+Oh, surely, surely, I cried to myself, we ought to find some means of
+possessing the past more fully and completely than we do. Life is not
+worth living for many of us if a want so desperate and yet so natural
+can never be satisfied. Memory is but a poor, rudimentary thing that we
+had better be without, if it can only lead us to the verge of
+consummation like this, and madden us with a desire it cannot slake. The
+touch of a vanished hand, the sound of a voice that is still, the tender
+grace of a day that is dead, should be ours forever, at out beck and
+call, by some exquisite and quite conceivable illusion of the senses.
+
+Alas! alas! I have hardly the hope of ever meeting my beloved ones again
+in another life. Oh, to meet their too dimly remembered forms in _this_,
+just as they once were, by some trick of my own brain! To see them with
+the eye, and hear them with the ear, and tread with them the old
+obliterated ways as in a waking dream! It would be well worth going mad
+to become such a self-conjurer as that.
+
+Thus musing sadly, I reached St. Cloud, and _that_, at least, and the
+Boulogne that led me to it, had not been very perceptibly altered, and
+looked as though I had only left them a week ago. The sweet aspect from
+the bridge, on either side and beyond, filled me with the old
+enchantment. There, at least, the glory had not departed.
+
+I hastened through the gilded gates and up the broad walk to the grand
+cascade. There, among the lovely wreathed urns and jars of geranium,
+still sat or reclined or gesticulated, the old, unalterable gods; there
+squatted the grimly genial monsters in granite and marble and bronze,
+still spouting their endless gallons for the delectation of hot Parisian
+eyes. Unchanged, and to all appearance unchangeable (save that they were
+not nearly so big as I had imagined), their cold, smooth, ironical
+patience shamed and braced me into better cheer. Beautiful, hideous,
+whatever you please, they seemed to revel in the very sense of their
+insensibility of their eternal stability--their stony scorn of time and
+wind and weather, and the peevish, weak-kneed, short-lived discontent of
+man. It was good to fondly pat them on the back once more--when one
+could reach them--and cling to them for a little while, after all the
+dust and drift and ruin I had been tramping through all day.
+
+Indeed, they woke in me a healthy craving for all but forgotten earthly
+joys--even for wretched meat and drink--so I went and ordered a
+sumptuous repast at the Tete Noire--a brand-new Tete Noire, alas! quite
+white, all in stone and stucco, and without a history!
+
+It was a beautiful sunset. Waiting for my dinner, I gazed out of the
+first-floor window, and found balm for my disappointed and regretful
+spirit in all that democratic joyousness of French Sunday life. I had
+seen it over and over again just like that in the old days; _this_, at
+least, was like coming back home to something I had known and loved.
+
+The cafes on the little "Place" between the bridge and the park were
+full to overflowing. People chatting over their _consommations_ sat
+right out, almost into the middle of the square, so thickly packed that
+there was scarcely room for the busy, lively, white-aproned waiters to
+move between them. The air was full of the scent of trodden grass and
+macaroons and French tobacco, blown from the park; of gay French
+laughter and the music of _mirlitons_; of a light dusty haze, shot with
+purple and gold by the setting sun. The river, alive with boats and
+canoes, repeated the glory of the sky, and the well-remembered,
+thickly-wooded hills rose before me, culminating in the Lanterne
+de Diogene.
+
+I could have threaded all that maze of trees blindfolded.
+
+Two Roman pifferari came on to the Place and began to play an
+extraordinary and most exciting melody that almost drew me out of the
+window; it seemed to have no particular form, no beginning or middle or
+end; it went soaring higher and higher, like the song of a lark, with
+never a pause for breath, to the time of a maddening jig--a tarantella,
+perhaps--always on the strain and stress, always getting nearer and
+nearer to some shrill climax of ecstasy quite high up and away, beyond
+the scope of earthly music; while the persistent drone kept buzzing of
+the earth and the impossibility to escape. All so gay, so sad, there is
+no name for it!
+
+Two little deformed and discarded-looking dwarfs, beggars, brother and
+sister, with large toothless gaps for mouths and no upper lip, began to
+dance; and the crowd laughed and applauded. Higher and higher, nearer
+and nearer to the impossible, rose the quick, piercing notes of the
+piffero. Heaven seemed almost within reach--the nirvana of music after
+its quick madness--the region of the ultra-treble that lies beyond
+the ken of ordinary human ears!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+A carriage and four, with postilions and "guides," came clattering
+royally down the road from the palace, and dispersed the crowd as it
+bowled on its way to the bridge. In it were two ladies and two
+gentlemen. One of the ladies was the young Empress of the French; the
+other looked up at my window--for a moment, as in a soft flash of summer
+lightning, her face seemed ablaze with friendly recognition--with a
+sweet glance of kindness and interest and surprise--a glance that
+pierced me like a sudden shaft of light from heaven.
+
+It was the Duchess of Towers!
+
+I felt as though the bagpipes had been leading up to this! In a moment
+more the carriage was out of sight, the sun had quite gone down, the
+pifferari had ceased to play and were walking round with the hat, and
+all was over.
+
+I dined, and made my way back to Paris on foot through the Bois de
+Boulogne, and by the Mare d'Auteuil, and saw my old friend the water-rat
+swim across it, trailing the gleam of his wake after him like a silver
+comet's tail.
+
+"Allons-nous-en, gens de la nous!
+Allons-nous-en chacun chez nous!"
+
+So sang a festive wedding-party as it went merrily
+arm in arm through the long high street of Passy,
+with a gleeful trust that would have filled the heart
+with envy but for sad experience of the vanity of
+human wishes.
+
+_Chacun chez nous!_ How charming it sounds!
+
+Was each so sure that when he reached his home
+he would find his heart's desire? Was the bridegroom
+himself so very sure?
+
+[Illustration: THE OLD WATER-RAT.]
+
+The heart's desire--the heart's regret! I flattered
+myself that I had pretty well sounded the uttermost
+depths of both on that eventful Sunday!
+
+
+
+
+Part Four
+
+[Illustration]
+
+I got back to my hotel in the Rue de la Michodiere.
+
+Prostrate with emotion and fatigue, the tarantella still jingling in my
+ears, and that haunting, beloved face, with its ineffable smile still
+printed on the retina of my closed eyes, I fell asleep.
+
+And then I dreamed a dream, and the first phase of my real, inner life
+began!
+
+All the events of the day, distorted and exaggerated and jumbled
+together after the usual manner of dreams, wove themselves into a kind
+of nightmare and oppression. I was on my way to my old abode: everything
+that I met or saw was grotesque and impossible, yet had now the strange,
+vague charm of association and reminiscence, now the distressing sense
+of change and loss and desolation.
+
+As I got near to the avenue gate, instead of the school on my left there
+was a prison; and at the door a little thick-set jailer, three feet high
+and much deformed, and a little deformed jaileress no bigger than
+himself, were cunningly watching me out of the corners of their eyes,
+and toothlessly smiling. Presently they began to waltz together to an
+old, familiar tune, with their enormous keys dangling at their sides;
+and they looked so funny that I laughed and applauded. But soon I
+perceived that their crooked faces were not really funny; indeed, they
+were fatal and terrible in the extreme, and I was soon conscious that
+these deadly dwarfs were trying to waltz between me and the avenue gate
+for which I was bound--to cut me off, that they might run me into the
+prison, where it was their custom to hang people of a Monday morning.
+
+In an agony of terror I made a rush for the avenue gate, and there stood
+the Duchess of Towers, with mild surprise in her eyes and a kind
+smile--a heavenly vision of strength and reality.
+
+"You are not dreaming true!" she said. "Don't be afraid--those little
+people don't exist! Give me your hand and come in here."
+
+And as I did so she waved the troglodytes away, and they vanished; and
+I felt that this was no longer a dream, but something else--some strange
+thing that had happened to me, some new life that I had woke up to.
+
+For at the touch of her hand my consciousness, my sense of being I,
+myself, which hitherto in my dream (as in all previous dreams up to
+then) had been only partial, intermittent, and vague, suddenly blazed
+into full, consistent, practical activity--just as it is in life, when
+one is well awake and much interested in what is going on--only with
+perceptions far keener and more alert.
+
+I knew perfectly who I was and what I was, and remembered all the events
+of the previous day. I was conscious that my real body, undressed and in
+bed, now lay fast asleep in a small room on the fourth floor of an
+_hotel garni_ in the Rue de la Michodiere. I knew this perfectly; and
+yet here was my body, too, just as substantial, with all my clothes on;
+my boots rather dusty, my shirt-collar damp with the heat, for it was
+hot. With my disengaged hand I felt in my trousers-pocket; there were my
+London latch-keys, my purse, my penknife; my handkerchief in the
+breastpocket of my coat, and in its tail-pockets my gloves and
+pipe-case, and the little water-color box I had bought that morning. I
+looked at my watch; it was going, and marked eleven. I pinched myself, I
+coughed, I did all one usually does under the pressure of some immense
+surprise, to assure myself that I was awake; and I _was_, and yet here I
+stood, actually hand in hand with a great lady to whom I had never been
+introduced (and who seemed much tickled at my confusion); and staring
+now at her, now at my old school.
+
+The prison had tumbled down like a house of cards, and loi! in its place
+was M. Saindou's _maison d'education_, just as it had been of old. I
+even recognized on the yellow wall the stamp of a hand in dry mud, made
+fifteen years ago by a day boy called Parisot, who had fallen down in
+the gutter close by, and thus left his mark on getting up again; and it
+had remained there for months, till it had been whitewashed away in the
+holidays. Here it was anew, after fifteen years.
+
+The swallows were flying and twittering. A yellow omnibus was drawn up
+to the gates of the school; the horses stamped and neighed, and bit each
+other, as French horses always did in those days. The driver swore at
+them perfunctorily.
+
+A crowd was looking on--le Pere et la Mere Francois, Madame Liard, the
+grocer's wife, and other people, whom I remembered at once with delight.
+Just in front of us a small boy and girl were looking on, like the rest,
+and I recognized the back and the cropped head and thin legs of Mimsey
+Seraskier.
+
+A barrel-organ was playing a pretty tune I knew quite well, and had
+forgotten.
+
+The school gates opened, and M. Saindou, proud and full of
+self-importance (as he always was), and half a dozen boys whose faces
+and names were quite familiar to me, in smart white trousers and shining
+boots, and silken white bands round their left arms, got into the
+omnibus, and were driven away in a glorified manner--as it seemed--to
+heaven in a golden chariot. It was beautiful to see and hear.
+
+I was still holding the duchess's hand, and felt the warmth of it
+through her glove; it stole up my arm like a magnetic current. I was in
+Elysium; a heavenly sense had come over me that at last my periphery had
+been victoriously invaded by a spirit other than mine--a most powerful
+and beneficent spirit. There was a blessed fault in my impenetrable
+armor of self, after all, and the genius of strength and charity and
+loving-kindness had found it out.
+
+"Now you're dreaming true," she said. "Where are those boys going?"
+
+"To church, to make their _premiere communion_," I replied.
+
+"That's right. You're dreaming true because I've got you by the hand. Do
+you know that tune?"
+
+I listened, and the words belonging to it came out of the past and I
+said them to her, and she laughed again, with her eyes screwed up
+deliciously.
+
+"Quite right--quite!" she exclaimed. "How odd that you should know them!
+How well you pronounce French for an Englishman! For you are Mr.
+Ibbetson, Lady Cray's architect?"
+
+I assented, and she let go my hand.
+
+The street was full of people--familiar forms and faces and voices,
+chatting together and looking down the road after the yellow omnibus;
+old attitudes, old tricks of gait and manner, old forgotten French ways
+of speech--all as it was long ago. Nobody noticed us, and we walked up
+the now deserted avenue.
+
+The happiness, the enchantment of it all! Could it be that I was dead,
+that I had died suddenly in my sleep, at the hotel in the Rue de la
+Michodiere! Could it be that the Duchess of Towers was dead too--had
+been killed by some accident on her way from St. Cloud to Paris? and
+that, both having died so near each other, we had begun our eternal
+afterlife in this heavenly fashion?
+
+That was too good to be true, I reflected; some instinct told me that
+this was not death, but transcendent earthly life--and also, alas! that
+it would not endure forever!
+
+I was deeply conscious of every feature in her face, every movement of
+her body, every detail of her dress--more so then I could have been in
+actual life--and said to myself, "Whatever this is, it is no dream." But
+I felt there was about me the unspeakable elation which can come to us
+only in our waking moments when we are at our very best; and then only
+feebly, in comparison with this, and to many of us never, ft never had
+to me, since that morning when I had found the little wheelbarrow.
+
+I was also conscious, however, that the avenue itself had a slight touch
+of the dream in it. It was no longer quite right, and was getting out of
+drawing and perspective, so to speak. I had lost my stay--the touch
+of her hand.
+
+"Are you still dreaming true, Mr. Ibbetson?"
+
+"I am afraid not quite," I replied.
+
+"You must try by yourself a little--try hard. Look at this house; what
+is written on the portico?"
+
+I saw written in gold letters the words, "Tete Noire," and said so.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+She rippled with laughter, and said, "No; try again"; and just touched
+me with the tip of her finger for a moment.
+
+I tried again and said, "Parvis Notre Dame."
+
+"That's rather better," she said, and touched me again; and I read,
+"Parva sed Apta," as I had so often read there before in old days.
+
+"And now look at that old house over there," pointing to my old home;
+"how many windows are there in the top story?"
+
+I said seven.
+
+"No; there are five. Look again!" and there were five; and the whole
+house was exactly, down to its minutest detail, as it had been once upon
+a time. I could see Therese through one of the windows, making my bed.
+
+"That's better," said the duchess; "you will soon do it--it's very
+easy--_ce n'est que le premier pas!_ My father taught me; you must
+always sleep on your back with your arms above your head, your hands
+clasped under it and your feet crossed, the right one over the left,
+unless you are left-handed; and you must never for a moment cease
+thinking of where you want to be in your dream till you are asleep and
+get there; and you must never forget in your dream where and what you
+were when awake. You must join the dream on to reality. Don't forget.
+And now I will say good-bye; but before I go give me both hands and look
+round everywhere as far as your eyes can see."
+
+It was hard to look away from her; her face drew my eyes, and through
+them all my heart; but I did as she told me, and took in the whole
+familiar scene, even to the distant woods of Ville d'Avray, a glimpse
+of which was visible through an opening in the trees; even to the smoke
+of a train making its way to Versailles, miles off; and the old
+telegraph, working its black arms on the top of Mont Valerien.
+
+[Illustration: "It was hard to look away from her."]
+
+"Is it all right?" she asked. "That's well. Henceforward, whenever you
+come here, you will be safe as far as your sight can reach--from this
+spot--all through my introduction. See what it is to have a friend at
+court! No more little dancing jailers! And then you can gradually get
+farther by yourself.
+
+"Out there, through that park, leads to the Bois de Boulogne--there's a
+gap in the hedge you can get through; but mind and make everything plain
+in front of you--_true_, before you go a step farther, or else you'll
+have to wake and begin it all over again. You have only to will it, and
+think of yourself as awake, and it will come--on condition, of course,
+that you have been there before. And mind, also, you must take care how
+you touch things or people--you may hear, and see, and smell; but you
+mustn't touch, nor pick flowers or leaves, nor move things about. It
+blurs the dream, like breathing on a window-pane. I don't know why, but
+it does. You must remember that everything here is dead and gone by.
+With you and me it is different; we're alive and real--that is, _I_ am;
+and there would seem to be no mistake about your being real too, Mr.
+Ibbetson, by the grasp of your hands. But you're _not_; and why you are
+here, and what business you have in this, my particular dream, I cannot
+understand; no living person has ever come into it before. I can't make
+it out. I suppose it's because I saw your reality this afternoon,
+looking out of the window at the 'Tete Noire,' and you are just a stray
+figment of my overtired brain--a very agreeable figment, I admit; but
+you don't exist here just now--you can't possibly; you are somewhere
+else, Mr. Ibbetson; dancing at Mabille, perhaps, or fast asleep
+somewhere, and dreaming of French churches and palaces, and public
+fountains, like a good young British architect--otherwise I shouldn't
+talk to you like this, you may be sure!
+
+"Never mind. I am very glad to dream that I have been of use to you, and
+you are very welcome here, if it amuses you to come--especially as you
+are only a false dream of mine, for what else _can_ you be? And now I
+must leave you, so good-bye."
+
+She disengaged her hands, and laughed her angelic laugh, and then
+turned towards the park. I watched her tall, straight figure and blowing
+skirts, and saw her follow some ladies and children into a thicket that
+I remembered well, and she was soon out of sight.
+
+I felt as if all warmth had gone out of my life; as if a joy had taken
+flight; as if a precious something had withdrawn itself from my
+possession, and the gap in my periphery had closed again.
+
+Long I stood in thought, with my eyes fixed on the spot where she had
+disappeared; and I felt inclined to follow, but then considered this
+would not have been discreet. For although she was only a false dream of
+mine, a mere recollection of the exciting and eventful day, a stray
+figment of my overtired and excited brain--a _more_ than agreeable
+figment (what else _could_ she be!)--she was also a great lady, and had
+treated me, a perfect stranger and a perfect nobody, with singular
+courtesy and kindness; which I repaid, it is true, with a love so deep
+and strong that my very life was hers, to do what she liked with, and
+always had been since I first saw her, and always would be as long as
+there was breath in my body! But this did not constitute an acquaintance
+without a proper introduction, even in France--even in a dream. Even in
+dreams one must be polite, even to stray figments of one's tired,
+sleeping brain.
+
+And then what business had _she_, in _this_, _my_ particular dream--as
+she herself had asked of me?
+
+But _was_ it a dream? I remembered my lodgings at Pentonville, that I
+had left yesterday morning. I remembered what I was--why I came to
+Paris; I remembered the very bedroom at the Paris hotel where I was now
+fast asleep, its loudly-ticking clock, and all the meagre furniture. And
+here was I, broad awake and conscious, in the middle of an old avenue
+that had long ceased to exist--that had been built over by a huge brick
+edifice covered with newly-painted trellis-work. I saw it, this edifice,
+myself, only twelve hours ago. And yet here was everything as it had
+been when I was a child; and all through the agency of this solid
+phantom of a lovely young English duchess, whose warm gloved hands I had
+only this minute been holding in mine! The scent of her gloves was still
+in my palm. I looked at my watch; it marked twenty-three minutes to
+twelve. All this had happened in less than three-quarters of an hour!
+
+Pondering over all this in hopeless bewilderment, I turned my steps
+towards my old home, and, to my surprise, was just able to look over the
+garden wall, which I had once thought about ten feet high.
+
+Under the old apple-tree in full bloom sat my mother, darning small
+socks; with her flaxen side-curls (as it was her fashion to wear them)
+half-concealing her face. My emotion and astonishment were immense. My
+heart beat fast. I felt its pulse in my temples, and my breath
+was short.
+
+At a little green table that I remembered well sat a small boy, rather
+quaintly dressed in a by-gone fashion, with a frill round his wide
+shirt-collar, and his golden hair cut quite close at the top, and rather
+long at the sides and back. It was Gogo Pasquier. He seemed a very nice
+little boy. He had pen and ink and copy-book before him, and a
+gilt-edged volume bound in red morocco. I knew it at a glance; it was
+_Elegant Extracts_. The dog Medor lay asleep in the shade. The bees
+were droning among the nasturtiums and convolvulus.
+
+A little girl ran up the avenue from the porter's lodge and pushed the
+garden gate, which rang the bell as it opened, and she went into the
+garden, and I followed her; but she took no notice of me, nor did the
+others. It was Mimsey Seraskier.
+
+I went out and sat at my mother's feet, and looked long in her face.
+
+I must not speak to her, nor touch her--not even touch her busy hand
+with my lips, or I should "blur the dream."
+
+I got up and looked over the boy Gogo's shoulder. He was translating
+Gray's _Elegy_ into French; he had not got very far, and seemed to be
+stumped by the line--
+
+_"And leaves the world to darkness and to me."_
+
+Mimsey was silently looking over his other shoulder, her thumb in her
+mouth, one arm on the back of his chair. She seemed to be stumped also:
+it was an awkward line to translate.
+
+I stooped and put my hand to Medor's nose, and felt his warm breath. He
+wagged his rudiment of a tail, and whimpered in his sleep. Mimsey said--
+
+"Regarde Medor, comme il remue la queue! _C'est le Prince Charmant qui
+lui chatouille le bout du nez._"
+
+Said my mother, who had not spoken hitherto: "Do speak English, Mimsey,
+please."
+
+Oh, my God! My mother's voice, so forgotten, yet so familiar, so
+unutterably dear! I rushed to her, and threw myself on my knees at her
+feet, and seized her hand and kissed it, crying, "Mother, mother!"
+
+A strange blur came over everything; the sense of reality was lost. All
+became as a dream--a beautiful dream--but only a dream; and I woke.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I woke in my small hotel bedroom, and saw all the furniture, and my hat
+and clothes, by the light of a lamp outside, and heard the ticking of
+the clock on the mantel-piece, and the rumbling of a cart and cracking
+of a whip in the street, and yet felt I was not a bit more awake than I
+had been a minute ago in my strange vision--not so much!
+
+I heard my watch ticking its little tick on the mantel-piece by the side
+of the clock, like a pony trotting by a big horse. The clock struck
+twelve, I got up and looked at my watch by the light of the gas-lit
+streets; it marked the same. My dream had lasted an hour--I had gone to
+bed at half-past ten.
+
+I tried to recall it all, and did so to the smallest particular--all
+except the tune the organ had played, and the words belonging to it;
+they were on the tip of my tongue, and refused to come further, I got up
+again and walked about the room, and felt that it had not been like a
+dream at all; it was more "recollectable" than all my real adventures of
+the previous day. It had ceased to be like a dream, and had become an
+actuality from the moment I first touched the duchess's hand to the
+moment I kissed my mother's, and the blur came. It was an entirely new
+and utterly bewildering experience that I had gone through.
+
+In a dream there are always breaks, inconsistencies, lapses,
+incoherence, breaches of continuity, many links missing in the chain;
+only at points is the impression vivid enough to stamp itself afterwards
+on the waking mind, and even then it is never so really vivid as the
+impression of real life, although it ought to have seemed so in the
+dream: One remembers it well on awaking, but soon it fades, and then it
+is only one's remembrance of it that one remembers.
+
+[Illustration: "MOTHER, MOTHER!"]
+
+There was nothing of this in my dream.
+
+It was something like the "camera-obscura" on Ramsgate pier: one goes
+in and finds one's self in total darkness; the eye is prepared; one is
+thoroughly expectant and wide-awake.
+
+Suddenly there flashes on the sight the moving picture of the port and
+all the life therein, and the houses and cliffs beyond; and farther
+still the green hills, the white clouds, and blue sky.
+
+Little green waves chase each other in the harbor, breaking into crisp
+white foam. Sea-gulls wheel and dash and dip behind masts and ropes and
+pulleys; shiny brass fittings on gangway and compass flash in the sun
+without dazzling the eye; gay Liliputians walk and talk, their white
+teeth, no bigger than a pin's point, gleam in laughter, with never a
+sound; a steamboat laden with excursionists comes in, its paddles
+churning the water, and you cannot hear them. Not a detail is
+missed--not a button on a sailor's jacket, not a hair on his face. All
+the light and color of sea and earth and sky, that serve for many a
+mile, are here concentrated within a few square feet. And what color it
+is! A painter's despair! It is light itself, more beautiful than that
+which streams through old church windows of stained glass. And all is
+framed in utter darkness, so that the fully dilated pupils can see their
+very utmost. It seems as though all had been painted life-size and then
+shrunk, like a Japanese picture on crape, to a millionth of its natural
+size, so as to intensify and mellow the effect.
+
+It is all over: you come out into the open sunshine, and all seems
+garish and bare and bald and commonplace. All magic has faded out of
+the scene; everything is too far away from everything else; everybody
+one meets seems coarse and Brobdingnagian and too near. And one has been
+looking at the like of it all one's life!
+
+Thus with my dream, compared to common, waking, every-day experience;
+only instead of being mere flat, silent little images moving on a dozen
+square feet of Bristol-board, and appealing to the eye alone, the things
+and people in my dream had the same roundness and relief as in life, and
+were life-size; one could move among them and behind them, and feel as
+if one could touch and clasp and embrace them if one dared. And the ear,
+as well as the eye, was made free of this dark chamber of the brain: one
+heard their speech and laughter as in life. And that was not all, for
+soft breezes fanned the cheek, the sparrows twittered, the sun gave out
+its warmth, and the scent of many flowers made the illusion complete.
+
+And then the Duchess of Towers! She had been not only visible and
+audible like the rest, but tangible as well, to the fullest extent of
+the sensibility that lay in my nerves of touch; when my hands held hers
+I felt as though I were drawing all her life into mine.
+
+With the exception of that one figure, all had evidently been as it
+_had_ been in _reality_ a few years ago, to the very droning of an
+insect, to the very fall of a blossom!
+
+Had I gone mad by any chance? I had possessed the past, as I had longed
+to do a few hours before.
+
+What are sight and hearing and touch and the rest?
+
+Five senses in all.
+
+The stars, worlds upon worlds, so many billions of miles away, what are
+they for us but mere shiny specks on a net-work of nerves behind the
+eye? How does one _feel_ them there?
+
+The sound of my friend's voice, what is it? The clasp of his hand, the
+pleasant sight of his face, the scent of his pipe and mine, the taste of
+the bread and cheese and beer we eat and drink together, what are they
+but figments (stray figments, perhaps) of the brain--little thrills
+through nerves made on purpose, and without which there would be no
+stars, no pipe, no bread and cheese and beer, no voice, no friend,
+no me?
+
+And is there, perchance, some sixth sense embedded somewhere in the
+thickness of the flesh--some survival of the past, of the race, of our
+own childhood even, etiolated by disuse? or some rudiment, some effort
+to begin, some priceless hidden faculty to be developed into a future
+source of bliss and consolation for our descendants? some nerve that now
+can only be made to thrill and vibrate in a dream, too delicate as yet
+to ply its function in the light of common day?
+
+And was I, of all people in the world--I, Peter Ibbetson, architect and
+surveyor, Wharton Street, Pentonville--most futile, desultory, and
+uneducated dreamer of dreams--destined to make some great psychical
+discovery?
+
+Pondering deeply over these solemn things, I sent myself to sleep again,
+as was natural enough--but no more to dream. I slept soundly until late
+in the morning, and breakfasted at the Bains Deligny, a delightful
+swimming-bath near the Pont de la Concorde (on the other side), and
+spent most of the day there, alternately swimming, and dozing, and
+smoking cigarettes, and thinking of the wonders of the night before, and
+hoping for their repetition on the night to follow.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+I remained a week in Paris, loafing about by day among old haunts of my
+childhood--a melancholy pleasure--and at night trying to "dream true" as
+my dream duchess had called it. Only once did I succeed.
+
+I had gone to bed thinking most persistently of the "Mare d'Auteuil,"
+and it seemed to me that as soon as I was fairly asleep I woke up there,
+and knew directly that I had come into a "true dream" again, by the
+reality and the bliss. It was transcendent _life_ once more--a very
+ecstasy of remembrance made actual, and _such_ an exquisite surprise!
+
+There was M. le Major, in his green frock-coat, on his knees near a
+little hawthorn-tree by the brink, among the water-logged roots of which
+there dwelt a cunning old dytiscus as big as the bowl of a
+table-spoon--a prize we had often tried to catch in vain.
+
+M. le Major had a net in his hand, and was watching the water intently;
+the perspiration was trickling down his nose; and around him, in silent
+expectation and suspense, were grouped Gogo and Mimsey and my three
+cousins, and a good-humored freckled Irish boy I had quite forgotten,
+and I suddenly remembered that his name was Johnstone, that he was very
+combative, and that he lived in the Rue Basse (now Rue Raynouard).
+
+On the other side of the pond my mother was keeping Medor from the
+water, for fear of his spoiling the sport, and on the bench by the
+willow sat Madame Seraskier--lovely Madame Seraskier--deeply
+interested. I sat down by her side and gazed at her with a joy there is
+no telling.
+
+An old woman came by, selling conical wafer-cakes, and singing--"_V'la
+l'plaisir, mesdames--V'la l'plaisir!_" Madame Seraskier bought ten sous'
+worth--a mountain!
+
+M. le Major made a dash with his net--unsuccessfully, as usual. Medor
+was let loose, and plunged with a plunge that made big waves all round
+the mare, and dived after an imaginary stone, amid general shouts and
+shrieks of excitement. Oh, the familiar voices! I almost wept.
+
+Medor came out of the water without his stone and shook himself,
+twisting and barking and grinning and gyrating, as was his way, quite
+close to me. In my delight and sympathy I was ill-advised enough to try
+and stroke him, and straight the dream was "blurred"--changed to an
+ordinary dream, where all things were jumbled up and incomprehensible; a
+dream pleasant enough, but different in kind and degree--an ordinary
+dream; and in my distress thereat I woke, and failed to dream again (as
+I wished to dream) that night.
+
+Next morning (after an early swim) I went to the Louvre, and stood
+spellbound before Leonardo da Vinci's "Lisa Gioconda," trying hard to
+find where the wondrous beauty lay that I had heard so extravagantly
+extolled; and not trying very successfully, for I had seen Madame
+Seraskier once more, and felt that "Gioconda" was a fraud.
+
+Presently I was conscious of a group just behind me, and heard a
+pleasant male English voice exclaim--
+
+[Illustration: "Lisa Giaconda"]
+
+"And now, duchess, let me present to you my first and last and only
+love, Mona Lisa." I turned round, and there stood a soldier-like old
+gentleman and two ladies (one of whom was the Duchess of Towers),
+staring at the picture.
+
+As I made way for them I caught her eye, and in it again, as I felt
+sure, a kindly look of recognition--just for half a second. She
+evidently recollected having seen me at Lady Cray's, where I had stood
+all the evening alone in a rather conspicuous corner. I was so
+exceptionally tall (in those days of not such tall people as now) that
+it was easy to notice and remember me, especially as I wore my beard,
+which it was unusual to do then among Englishmen.
+
+She little guessed how _I_ remembered _her_; she little knew all she was
+and had been to me--in life and in a dream!
+
+My emotion was so great that I felt it in my very knees; I could
+scarcely walk; I was as weak as water. My worship for the beautiful
+stranger was becoming almost a madness. She was even more lovely than
+Madame Seraskier. It was cruel to be like that.
+
+It seems that I was fated to fall down and prostrate myself before very
+tall, slender women, with dark hair and lily skins and light angelic
+eyes. The fair damsel who sold tripe and pigs' feet in Clerkenwell was
+also of that type, I remembered; and so was Mrs. Deane. Fortunately for
+me it is not a common one!
+
+All that day I spent on quays and bridges, leaning over parapets, and
+looking at the Seine, and nursing my sweet despair, and calling myself
+the biggest fool in Paris, and recalling over and over again that
+gray-blue kindly glance--my only light, the Light of the World for ME!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My brief holiday over, I went back to London--to Pentonville--and
+resumed my old occupations; but the whole tenor of my existence
+was changed.
+
+The day, the working-day (and I worked harder than ever, to Lintot's
+great satisfaction), passed as in an unimportant dream of mild content
+and cheerful acquiescence in everything, work or play.
+
+There was no more quarrelling with my destiny, nor wish to escape from
+myself for a moment. My whole being, as I went about on business or
+recreation bent, was suffused with the memory of the Duchess of Towers
+as with a warm inner glow that kept me at peace with all mankind and
+myself, and thrilled by the hope, the enchanting hope, of once more
+meeting her image at night in a dream, in or about my old home at Passy,
+and perhaps even feeling once more that ineffable bliss of touching her
+hand. Though why should she be there?
+
+When the blessed hour came round for sleep, the real business of my life
+began. I practised "dreaming true" as one practises a fine art, and
+after many failures I became a professed expert--a master.
+
+I lay straight on my back, with my feet crossed, and my hands clasped
+above my head in a symmetrical position; I would fix my will intently
+and persistently on a certain point in space and time that was within my
+memory--for instance, the avenue gate on a certain Christmas afternoon,
+when I remembered waiting for M. le Major to go for a walk--at the same
+time never losing touch of my own present identity as Peter Ibbetson,
+architect, Wharton Street, Pentonville; all of which is not so easy to
+manage as one might think, although the dream duchess had said, "Ce
+n'est que le premier pas qui coute;" and finally one night, instead of
+dreaming the ordinary dreams I had dreamed all my life (but twice), I
+had the rapture of _waking up_, the minute I was fairly asleep, by
+the avenue gate, and of seeing Gogo Pasquier sitting on one of the stone
+posts and looking up the snowy street for the major. Presently he jumped
+up to meet his old friend, whose bottle-green-clad figure had just
+appeared in the distance. I saw and heard their warm and friendly
+greeting, and walked unperceived by their side through Auteuil to the
+_mare_, and back by the fortifications, and listened to the thrilling
+adventures of one Fier-a-bras, which, I confess, I had completely
+forgotten.
+
+[Illustration: THE STORY OF THE GIANT FIER-A-BRAS.]
+
+As we passed all three together through the "Porte de la Muette," M. le
+Major's powers of memory (or invention) began to flag a little--for he
+suddenly said, "_Cric!_" But Gogo pitilessly answered, "_Crac!_" and
+the story had to go on, till we reached at dusk the gate of the
+Pasquiers' house, where these two most affectionately parted, after
+making an appointment for the morrow; and I went in with Gogo, and sat
+in the school-room while Therese gave him his tea, and heard her tell
+him all that had happened in Passy that afternoon. Then he read and
+summed and translated with his mother till it was time to go up to bed,
+and I sat by his bedside as he was lulled asleep by his mother's
+harp... how I listened with all my ears and heart, till the sweet strain
+ceased for the night! Then out of the hushed house I stole, thinking
+unutterable things--through the snow-clad garden, where Medor was baying
+the moon--through the silent avenue and park--through the deserted
+streets of Passy--and on by desolate quays and bridges to dark quarters
+of Paris; till I fell awake in my tracks and found that another dreary
+and commonplace day had dawned over London--but no longer dreary and
+commonplace for me, with such experiences to look back and forward
+to--such a strange inheritance of wonder and delight!
+
+I had a few more occasional failures, such as, for instance, when the
+thread between my waking and sleeping life was snapped by a moment's
+carelessness, or possibly by some movement of my body in bed, in which
+case the vision would suddenly get blurred, the reality of it destroyed,
+and an ordinary dream rise in its place. My immediate consciousness of
+this was enough to wake me on the spot, and I would begin again, _da
+capo_ till all went as I wished.
+
+Evidently our brain contains something akin both to a photographic
+plate and a phonographic cylinder, and many other things of the same
+kind not yet discovered; not a sight or a sound or a smell is lost; not
+a taste or a feeling or an emotion. Unconscious memory records them all,
+without our even heeding what goes on around us beyond the things that
+attract our immediate interest or attention.
+
+Thus night after night I saw reacted before me scenes not only fairly
+remembered, but scenes utterly forgotten, and yet as unmistakably true
+as the remembered ones, and all bathed in that ineffable light, the
+light of other days--the light that never was on sea or land, and yet
+the light of absolute truth.
+
+How it transcends in value as well as in beauty the garish light of
+common day, by which poor humanity has hitherto been content to live and
+die, disdaining through lack of knowledge the shadow for the substance,
+the spirit for the matter! I verified the truth of these sleeping
+experiences in every detail: old family letters I had preserved, and
+which I studied on awaking, confirmed what I had seen and heard in my
+dream; old stories explained themselves. It was all by-gone truth,
+garnered in some remote corner of the brain, and brought out of the dim
+past as I willed, and made actual once more.
+
+And strange to say, and most inexplicable, I saw it all as an
+independent spectator, an outsider, not as an actor going again through
+scenes in which he has played a part before!
+
+Yet many things perplexed and puzzled me.
+
+For instance, Gogo's back, and the back of his head, when I stood
+behind him, were as visible and apparently as true to life as his face,
+and I had never seen his back or the back of his head; it was much later
+in life that I learned the secret of two mirrors. And then, when Gogo
+went out of the room, sometimes apparently passing through me as he did
+so and coming out at the other side (with a momentary blurring of the
+dream), the rest would go on talking just as reasonably, as naturally,
+as before. Could the trees and walls and furniture have had ears and
+eyes, those long-vanished trees and walls and furniture that existed now
+only in my sleeping brain, and have retained the sound and shape and
+meaning of all that passed when Gogo, my only conceivable
+remembrancer, was away?
+
+Francoise, the cook, would come into the drawing-room to discuss the
+dinner with my mother when Gogo was at school; and I would hear the
+orders given, and later I would assist at the eating of the meal (to
+which Gogo would invariably do ample justice), and it was just as my
+mother had ordered. Mystery of mysteries!
+
+What a pleasant life it was they led together, these ghosts of a by-gone
+time! Such a genial, smooth, easygoing, happy-go-lucky state of
+things--half bourgeois, half Bohemian, and yet with a well-marked
+simplicity, refinement, and distinction of bearing and speech that were
+quite aristocratic.
+
+The servants (only three--Therese the house-maid, Francoise the cook,
+and English Sarah, who had been my nurse and was now my mother's maid)
+were on the kindliest and most familiar terms with us, and talked to us
+like friends, and interested themselves in our concerns, and we in
+theirs; I noticed that they always wished us each good-morning and
+good-night--a pretty French fashion of the Passy bourgeoisie in Louis
+Philippe's time (he was a bourgeois king).
+
+Our cuisine was bourgeoise also. Peter Ibbetson's mouth watered (after
+his tenpenny London dinner) to see and smell the steam of "soupe a la
+bonne femme," "soupe aux choux," "pot au feu," "blanquette de veau,"
+"boeuf a la mode," "cotelettes de porc a la sauce piquante,"
+"vinaigrette de boeuf bouilli"--that endless variety of good things on
+which French people grow fat so young--and most excellent claret (at one
+franc a bottle in those happy days): its bouquet seemed to fill the room
+as soon as the cork was drawn!
+
+Sometimes, such a repast ended, "le beau Pasquier," in the fulness of
+his heart, would suddenly let off impossible fireworks of vocalization,
+ascending rockets of chromatic notes which would explode softly very
+high up and come down in full cadences, trills, roulades, like beautiful
+colored stars; and Therese would exclaim, "Ah, q'c'est beau!" as if she
+had been present at a real pyrotechnic display; and Therese was quite
+right. I have never heard the like from any human throat, and should not
+have believed it possible. Only Joachim's violin can do such beautiful
+things so beautifully.
+
+Or else he would tell us of wolves he had shot in Brittany, or
+wild-boars in Burgundy--for he was a great sportsman--or of his
+adventures as a _garde du corps_ of Charles Dix, or of the wonderful
+inventions that were so soon to bring us fame and fortune; and he would
+loyally drink to Henri Cinq; and he was so droll and buoyant and witty
+that it was as good to hear him speak as to hear him sing.
+
+But there was another and a sad side to all this strange comedy of
+vanished lives.
+
+They built castles in the air, and made plans, and talked of all the
+wealth and happiness that would be theirs when my father's ship came
+home, and of all the good they would do, pathetically unconscious of the
+near future; which, of course, was all past history to their loving
+audience of one.
+
+And then my tears would flow with the unbearable ache of love and pity
+combined; they would fall and dry on the waxed floors of my old home in
+Passy, and I would find them still wet on my pillow in Pentonville
+when I woke.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Soon I discovered by practice that I was able for a second or two to be
+more than a mere spectator--to be an actor once more; to turn myself
+(Ibbetson) into my old self (Gogo), and thus be touched and caressed by
+those I had so loved. My mother kissed me and I felt it; just as long as
+I could hold my breath I could walk hand in hand with Madame Seraskier,
+or feel Mimsey's small weight on my back and her arms round my neck for
+four or five yards as I walked, before blurring the dream; and the blur
+would soon pass away, if it did not wake me, and I was Peter Ibbetson
+once more, walking and sitting among them, hearing them talk and laugh,
+watching them at their meals, in their walks; listening to my father's
+songs, my mother's sweet playing, and always unseen and unheeded by
+them. Moreover, I soon learned to touch things without sensibly blurring
+the dream. I would cull a rose, and stick it in my buttonhole, and
+there it remained--but lo! the very rose I had just culled was still on
+the rose-bush also! I would pick up a stone and throw it at the wall,
+where it disappeared without a sound--and the very same stone still lay
+at my feet, however often I might pick it up and throw it!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+No waking joy in the world can give, can equal in intensity, these
+complex joys I had when asleep; waking joys seem so slight, so vague in
+comparison--so much escapes the senses through lack of concentration and
+undivided attention--the waking perceptions are so blunt.
+
+It was a life within a life--an intenser life--in which the fresh
+perceptions of childhood combined with the magic of dream-land, and in
+which there was but one unsatisfied longing; but its name was Lion.
+
+It was the passionate longing to meet the Duchess of Towers once more in
+that land of dreams.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thus for a time I went on, more solitary than ever, but well compensated
+for all my loneliness by this strange new life that had opened itself to
+me, and never ceasing to marvel and rejoice--when one morning I received
+a note from Lady Cray, who wanted some stables built at Cray, their
+country-seat in Hertfordshire, and begged I would go there for the day
+and night.
+
+I was bound to accept this invitation, as a mere matter of business, of
+course; as a friend, Lady Cray seemed to have dropped me long ago, "like
+a 'ot potato," blissfully unconscious that it was I who had dropped her.
+
+But she received me as a friend--an old friend. All my shyness and
+snobbery fell from me at the mere touch of her hand.
+
+I had arrived at Cray early in the afternoon, and had immediately set
+about my work, which took several hours, so that I got to the house only
+just in time to dress for dinner.
+
+When I came into the drawing-room there were several people there, and
+Lady Cray presented me to a young lady, the vicar's daughter, whom I was
+to take in to dinner.
+
+I was very much impressed on being told by her that the company
+assembled in the drawing-room included no less a person than Sir Edwin
+Landseer. Many years ago I had copied an engraving of one of his
+pictures for Mimsey Seraskier. It was called "The Challenge," or "Coming
+Events cast their Shadows before Them." I feasted my eyes on the
+wondrous little man, who seemed extremely chatty and genial, and quite
+unembarrassed by his fame.
+
+A guest was late, and Lord Cray, who seemed somewhat peevishly impatient
+for his food, exclaimed--
+
+"Mary wouldn't be Mary if she were punctual!"
+
+Just then Mary came in--and Mary was no less a person than the Duchess
+of Towers!
+
+My knees trembled under me; but there was no time to give way to any
+such tender weakness. Lord Cray walked away with her; the procession
+filed into the dining room, and somewhere at the end of it my young
+vicaress and myself.
+
+The duchess sat a long way from me, but I met her glance for a moment,
+and fancied I saw again in it that glimmer of kindly recognition.
+
+My neighbor, who was charming, asked me if I did not think the Duchess
+of Towers the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.
+
+I assented with right good-will, and was told that she was as good as
+she was beautiful, and as clever as she was good (as if I did not know
+it); that she would give away the very clothes off her back; that there
+was no trouble she would not take for others; that she did not get on
+well with her husband, who drank, and was altogether bad and vile; that
+she had a great sorrow--an only child, an idiot, to whom she was
+devoted, and who would some day be the Duke of Towers; that she was
+highly accomplished, a great linguist, a great musician, and about the
+most popular woman in all English society.
+
+Ah! Who loved the Duchess of Towers better than this poor scribe, in
+whose soul she lived and shone like a bright particular star--like the
+sun; and who, without his knowing, was being rapidly drawn into the
+sphere of her attraction, as Lintot called it; one day to be finally
+absorbed, I trust, forever!
+
+"And who was this wonderful Duchess of Towers before she married?" I
+asked.
+
+"She was a Miss Seraskier. Her father was a Hungarian, a physician, and
+a political reformer--a most charming person; that's where she gets her
+manners. Her mother, whom she lost when she was quite a child, was a
+very beautiful Irish girl of good family, a first cousin of Lord
+Cray's--a Miss Desmond, who ran away with the interesting patriot. They
+lived somewhere near Paris. It was there that Madame Seraskier died of
+cholera--... What is the matter--are you ill?"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+I made out that I was faint from the heat, and concealed as well as I
+could the flood of emotion and bewilderment that overwhelmed me.
+
+I dared not look again at the Duchess of Towers.
+
+"Oh! little Mimsey dear, with your poor thin arms round my neck, and
+your cold, pale cheek against mine. I felt them there only last night!
+To have grown into such a splendid vision of female health and strength
+and beauty as this--with that enchanting, ever-ready laugh and smile!
+Why, of course, those eyes, so lashless then, so thickly fringed
+to-day!--how could I have mistaken them? Ah, Mimsey, you never smiled or
+laughed in those days, or I should have known your eyes again! Is it
+possible--is it possible?"
+
+Thus I went on to myself till the ladies left, my fair young companion
+expressing her kind anxiety and polite hope that I would soon be
+myself again.
+
+I sat silent till it was time to join the ladies (I could not even
+follow the witty and brilliant anecdotes of the great painter, who held
+the table); and then I went up to my room. I could not face _her_ again
+so soon after what I had heard.
+
+The good Lord Cray came to make kind inquiries, but I soon satisfied him
+that my indisposition was nothing. He stayed on, however, and talked;
+his dinner seemed to have done him a great deal of good, and he wanted
+to smoke (and somebody to smoke with), which he had not been able to do
+in the dining-room on account of some reverend old bishop who was
+present. So he rolled himself a little cigarette, like a Frenchman, and
+puffed away to his heart's content.
+
+He little guessed how his humble architect wished him away, until he
+began to talk of the Duchess of Towers--"Mary Towers," as he called
+her--and to tell me how "Towers" deserved to be kicked, and whipped at
+the cart's tail. "Why, she's the best and most beautiful woman in
+England, and as sharp as a needle! If it hadn't been for her, he'd have
+been in the bankruptcy court long ago," etc. "There's not a duchess in
+England that's fit to hold the candle to her, either for looks or
+brains, or breedin' either. Her mother (the loveliest woman that ever
+lived, except Mary) was a connection of mine; that's where she gets her
+manners!" etc.
+
+Thus did this noble earl make music for me--sweet and bitter music.
+
+Mary! It is a heavenly name, especially on English lips, and spelled in
+the English mode with the adorable _y_! Great men have had a passion for
+it--Byron, Shelley, Burns. But none, methinks, a greater passion than I,
+nor with such good cause.
+
+And yet there must be a bad Mary now and then, here or there, and even
+an ugly one. Indeed, there was once a Bloody Mary who was both! It seems
+incredible!
+
+Mary, indeed! Why not Hecuba? For what was I to the Duchess of Towers?
+
+When I was alone again I went to bed, and tried to sleep on my back,
+with my arms up, in the hope of a true dream; but sleep would not come,
+and I passed a white night, as the French say. I rose early and walked
+about the park, and tried to interest my self in the stables till it was
+breakfast-time. Nobody was up, and I breakfasted alone with Lady Cray,
+who was as kind as she could be. I do not think she could have found me
+a very witty companion. And then I went back to the stables to think,
+and fell into a doze.
+
+At about twelve I heard the sound of wooden balls, and found a lawn
+where some people were playing "croquet." It was quite a new game, and a
+few years later became the fashion.
+
+[Illustration: SWEET AND BITTER MUSIC.]
+
+I sat down under a large weeping-ash close to the lawn; it was like a
+tent, with chairs and tables underneath.
+
+Presently Lady Cray came there with the Duchess of Towers. I wanted to
+fly, but was rooted to the spot.
+
+[Illustration: The Introduction.]
+
+Lady Cray presented me, and almost immediately a servant came with a
+message for her, and I was left with the One Woman in the World! My
+heart was in my mouth, my throat was dry, my pulse was beating in
+my temples.
+
+She asked me, in the most natural manner, if I played "croquet."
+
+"Yes--no--at least, sometimes--that is, I never of it--oh--I forget!" I
+groaned at my idiocy and hid my face in my hands. She asked if I were
+still unwell, and I said no; and then she began to talk quite easily
+about anything, everything, till I felt more at my ease.
+
+Her voice! I had never heard it well but in a dream, and it was the
+same--a very rich and modulated voice--low--contralto, with many varied
+and delightful inflexions; and she used more action in speaking than the
+generality of Englishwomen, thereby reminding me of Madame Seraskier. I
+noticed that her hands were long and very narrow, and also her feet, and
+remembered that Mimsey's were like that--they were considered poor
+Mimsey's only beauty. I also noticed an almost imperceptible scar on her
+left temple, and remembered with a thrill that I had noticed it in my
+dream as we walked up the avenue together. In waking life I had never
+been near enough to her to notice a small scar, and Mimsey had no scar
+of the kind in the old days--of that I felt sure, for I had seen much of
+Mimsey lately.
+
+I grew more accustomed to the situation, and ventured to say that I had
+once met her at Lady Cray's in London.
+
+"Oh yes; I remember. Giulia Grisi sand the 'Willow Song.'" And then she
+crinkled up her eyes, and laughed, and blushed, and went on: "I noticed
+you standing in a corner, under the famous Gainsborough. You reminded me
+of a dear little French boy I once knew who was very kind to me when I
+was a little girl in France, and whose father you happen to be like. But
+I found that you were Mr. Ibbetson, an English architect, and, Lady Cray
+tells me, a very rising one"
+
+"I _was_ a little French boy once. I had to change my name to please a
+relative, and become English--that is, I was always _really_ English,
+you know."
+
+"Good Heavens, what an extraordinary thing! What _was_ your name, then?"
+
+"Pasquier-Gogo Pasquier!" I groaned, and the tears came into my eyes,
+and I looked away. The duchess made no answer, and when I turned and
+looked at her she was looking at me, very pale, her lips quite white,
+her hands tightly clasped in her lap, and trembling all over.
+
+I said, "You used to be little Mimsey Seraskier, and I used to carry you
+pickaback!"
+
+"Oh don't! oh don't!" she said, and began to cry.
+
+I got up and walked about under the ash-tree till she had dried her
+eyes. The croquet-players were intent upon their game.
+
+I again sat down beside her; she had dried her eyes, and at length she
+said--
+
+"What a dreadful thing it was about your poor father and mother, and
+_my_ dear mother! Do you remember her? She died a week after you left. I
+went to Russia with papa--Dr. Seraskier. What a terrible break-up it
+all was!"
+
+And then we gradually fell to talking quite naturally about old times,
+and dear dead people. She never took her eyes off mine. After a while
+I said--
+
+"I went to Passy, and found everything changed and built over. It
+nearly drove me mad to see. I went to St. Cloud, and saw you driving
+with the Empress of the French. That night I had such an extraordinary
+dream! I dreamed I was floundering about the Rue de la Pompe, and had
+just got to the avenue gate, and you were there."
+
+"Good heavens!" she whispered, and turned white again, and trembled all
+over, "what do you mean?"
+
+"Yes," I said, "you came to my rescue. I was pursued by gnomes and
+horrors."
+
+_She._ "Good heavens! by--by two little jailers, a man and his wife, who
+danced and were trying to hem you in?"
+
+It was now my turn to ejaculate "Good heavens!" We both shook and
+trembled together.
+
+I said: "You gave me your hand, and all came straight at once. My old
+school rose in place of the jail."
+
+_She._ "With a yellow omnibus? And boys going off to their _premiere
+communion?_"
+
+_I._ "Yes; and there was a crowd--le Pere et la Mere
+Francois, and Madame Liard, the grocer's wife, and--and
+Mimsey Seraskier, with her cropped head. And
+an organ was playing a tune I knew quite well, but
+cannot now recall." ...
+
+_She._ "Wasn't it 'Maman, les p'tits bateaux?'"
+
+_I._ Oh, of _course!_
+
+     _"'Maman, les p'tits bateaux
+     Qui vont sur l'eau,
+     Ont-ils des jambes?'"_
+
+_She_. "That's it!"
+
+     _"'Eh oui, petit beta!
+     S'ils n'avaient pas
+     Ils n'march'raient pas!'"_
+
+She sank back in her chair, pale and prostrate. After a while--
+
+_She_. "And then I gave you good advice about how to dream true, and we
+got to my old house, and I tried to make you read the letters on the
+portico, and you read them wrong, and I laughed."
+
+_I_. "Yes; I read 'Tete Noire.' Wasn't it idiotic?"
+
+_She_. "And then I touched you again and you read 'Parvis Notre Dame.'"
+
+_I_. "Yes! and you touched me _again_, and I read 'Parva sed
+Apta'--small but fit."
+
+_She_. "Is _that_ what it means? Why, when you were a boy, you told me
+_sed apta_ was all one word, and was the Latin for 'Pavilion.' I
+believed it ever since, and thought 'Parva sed Apta' meant _petit
+pavillon_!"
+
+_I_. "I blush for my bad Latin! After this you gave me good advice
+again, about not touching anything or picking flowers. I never have. And
+then you went away into the park--the light went out of my life,
+sleeping or waking. I have never been able to dream of you since. I
+don't suppose I shall ever meet you again after to-day!"
+
+After this we were silent for a long time, though I hummed and hawed now
+and then, and tried to speak. I was sick with the conflict of my
+feelings. At length she said--
+
+"Dear Mr. Ibbetson, this is all so extraordinary that I must go away
+and think it all over. I cannot tell you what it has been to me to meet
+you once more. And that double dream, common to us both! Oh, I am dazed
+beyond expression, and feel as if I were dreaming now--except that this
+all seems so unreal and impossible--so untrue! We had better part now. I
+don't know if I shall ever meet you again. You will be often in my
+thoughts, but never in my dreams again--that, at least, I can
+command--nor I in yours; it must not be. My poor father taught me how to
+dream before he died, that I might find innocent consolation in dreams
+for my waking troubles, which are many and great, as his were. If I can
+see that any good may come of it, I will write--but no--you must not
+expect a letter. I will now say good-bye and leave you. You go to-day,
+do you not? That is best. I think this had better be a final adieu. I
+cannot tell you of what interest you are to me and always have been. I
+thought you had died long ago. We shall often think of each other--that
+is inevitable--_but never, never dream. That will not do._
+
+"Dear Mr. Ibbetson, I wish you all the good that one human being can
+wish another. And now goodbye, and may God in heaven bless you!"
+
+She rose, trembling and white, and her eyes wet with tears, and wrung
+both my hands, and left me as she had left me in the dream.
+
+The light went out of my life, and I was once more alone--more
+wretchedly and miserably alone than if I had never met her.
+
+I went back to Pentonville, and outwardly took up the thread of my
+monotonous existence, and ate, drank, and worked, and went about as
+usual, but as one in an ordinary dream. For now dreams--true dreams--had
+become the only reality for me.
+
+[Illustration: A FAREWELL.]
+
+So great, so inconceivable and unexampled a wonder had been wrought in a
+dream that all the conditions of life had been altered and reversed.
+
+I and another human being had met--actually and really met--in a double
+dream, a dream common to us both, and clasped each other's hands! And
+each had spoken words to the other which neither ever would or ever
+could forget.
+
+And this other human being and I had been enshrined in each other's
+memory for years--since childhood--and were now linked together by a tie
+so marvellous, an experience so unprecedented, that neither could ever
+well be out of the other's thoughts as long as life and sense and
+memory lasted.
+
+Her very self, as we talked to each other under the ash-tree at Cray,
+was less vividly present to me than that other and still dearer self of
+hers with whom I had walked up the avenue in that balmy dream
+atmosphere, where we had lived and moved and had our being together for
+a few short moments, yet each believing the other at the time to be a
+mere figment of his own (and her) sleeping imagination; such stuff as
+dreams are made of!
+
+And lo! it was all true--as true as the common experience of every-day
+life--more (ten times more), because through our keener and more exalted
+sense perceptions, and less divided attention, we were more conscious of
+each other's real inner being--linked closer together for a space--than
+two mortals had probably ever been since the world began.
+
+That clasp of the hands in the dream--how infinitely more it had
+conveyed of one to the other than even that sad farewell clasp at Cray!
+
+In my poor outer life I waited in vain for a letter; in vain I haunted
+the parks and streets--the street where she lived--in the hope of seeing
+her once more. The house was shut; she was away--in America, as I
+afterwards learned--with her husband and child.
+
+At night, in the familiar scenes I had learned so well to conjure up, I
+explored every nook and corner with the same yearning desire to find a
+trace of her. I was hardly ever away from "Parva sed Apta." There were
+Madame Seraskier and Mimsey and the major, and my mother and Gogo, at
+all times, in and out, and of course as unconscious of my solid presence
+as though I had never existed. And as I looked at Mimsey and her mother
+I wondered at my obtuseness in not recognizing at the very first glance
+who the Duchess of Towers had been, and whose daughter. The height, the
+voice, the eyes, certain tricks of gait and gesture--how could I have
+failed to know her again after such recent dream opportunities?
+
+And Seraskier, towering among them all, as his daughter now towered
+among women. I saw that he lived again in his daughter; _his_ was the
+smile that closed up the eyes, as hers did; had Mimsey ever smiled in
+those days, I should have known her again by this very characteristic
+trait.
+
+Of this daughter of his (the Mimsey of the past years, not the duchess
+of to-day) I never now could have enough, and made her go through again
+and again all the scenes with Gogo, so dear to my remembrance, and to
+hers. I was, in fact, the Prince Charmant, of whose unseen attendance
+she had been conscious in some inconceivable way. What a strange
+foresight! But where was the fee Tarapatapoum? Never there during this
+year of unutterable longing; she had said it; never, never again should
+I be in her dream, or she in mine, however constantly we might dwell in
+each other's thoughts.
+
+So sped a twelvemonth after that last meeting in the flesh at Gray.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now with an unwilling heart and most reluctant pen, I must come to
+the great calamity of my life which I will endeavor to tell in as few
+words as possible.
+
+The reader, if he has been good enough to read without skipping, will
+remember the handsome Mrs. Deane, to whom I fancied I lost my heart, in
+Hopshire, a few years back.
+
+I had not seen her since--had, indeed, almost forgotten her--but had
+heard vaguely that she had left Hopshire, and come to London, and
+married a wealthy man much older than herself.
+
+Well, one day I was in Hyde Park, gazing at the people in the drive,
+when a spick-and-span and very brand-new open carriage went by, and in
+it sad Mrs. Deane (that was), all alone in her glory, and looking very
+sulky indeed. She recognized me and bowed, and I bowed back again, with
+just a moment's little flutter of the heart--an involuntary tribute to
+auld lang syne--and went on my way, wondering that I could ever had
+admired her so.
+
+Presently, to my surprise, I was touched on the elbow. It was Mrs. Deane
+again--I will call her Mrs. Deane still. She had got out and followed
+me on foot. It was her wish that I should drive round the park with her
+and talk of old times. I obeyed, and for the first and last time found
+myself forming part of that proud and gay procession I had so often
+watched with curious eyes.
+
+She seemed anxious to know whether I had ever made it up with Colonel
+Ibbetson, and pleased to hear that I had not, and that I probably never
+should, and that my feeling against him was strong and bitter and
+likely to last.
+
+She appeared to hate him very much.
+
+She inquired kindly after myself and my prospects in life, but did not
+seem deeply interested in my answers--until later, when I talked of my
+French life, and my dear father and mother, when she listened with eager
+sympathy, and I was much touched. She asked if I had portraits of them;
+I had--most excellent miniatures; and when we parted I had promised to
+call upon her next afternoon, and bring these miniatures with me.
+
+She seemed a languid woman, much ennuyee, and evidently without a large
+circle of acquaintance. She told me I was the only person in the whole
+park whom she had bowed to that day. Her husband was in Hamburg, and she
+was going to meet him in Paris in a day or two.
+
+I had not so many friends but what I felt rather glad than otherwise to
+have met her, and willingly called, as I had promised, with the
+portraits.
+
+She lived in a large, new house, magnificently up near the Marble Arch.
+She was quite alone when I called, and asked me immediately if I had
+brought the miniatures; and looked at them quite eagerly, and then at
+me, and exclaimed--
+
+"Good heavens, you are your father's very image!"
+
+Indeed, I had always been considered so.
+
+Both his eyebrows and mine, especially, met in a singular and
+characteristic fashion at the bridge of the nose, and she seemed much
+struck by this. He was represented in the uniform of Charles X's _gardes
+du corps_, in which he had served for two years, and had acquired the
+nickname of "le beau Pasquier." Mrs. Deane seemed never to tire of
+gazing at it, and remarked that my father "must have been the very ideal
+of a young girl's dream" (an indirect compliment which made me blush
+after what she had just said of the likeness between us. I almost began
+to wonder whether she was going to try and make a fool of me again, as
+she had so successfully done a few years ago).
+
+Then she became interested again in my early life and recollections, and
+wanted to know whether my parents were fond of each other. They were a
+most devoted and lover-like pair, and had loved each other at first
+sight and until death, and I told her so; and so on until I became quite
+excited, and imagined she must know of some good fortune to which I was
+entitled, and had been kept out of by the machinations of a
+wicked uncle.
+
+For I had long discovered in my dreams that he had been my father's
+bitterest enemy and the main cause of his financial ruin, by selfish,
+heartless, and dishonest deeds too complicated to explain here--a
+regular Shylock.
+
+I had found this out by listening (in my dreams) to long conversations
+between my father and mother in the old drawing-room at Passy, while
+Gogo was absorbed in his book; and every word that had passed through
+Gogo's inattentive ears into his otherwise preoccupied little brain had
+been recorded there as in a phonograph, and was now repeated over and
+over again for Peter Ibbetson, as he sat unnoticed among them.
+
+I asked her, jokingly, if she had discovered that I was the rightful
+heir to Ibbetson Hall by any chance.
+
+She replied that nothing would give her greater pleasure, but there was
+no such good fortune in store for either her or me; that she had
+discovered long ago that Colonel Ibbetson was the greatest blackguard
+unhung, and nothing new she might discover could make him worse.
+
+I then remembered how he would often speak of her, even to me, and hint
+and insinuate things which were no doubt untrue, and which I
+disbelieved. Not that the question of their truth or untruth made him
+any the less despicable and vile for telling.
+
+She asked me if he had ever spoken of her to me, and after much
+persuasion and cunning cross-examination I told her as much of the truth
+as I dared, and she became a tigress. She assured me that he had managed
+so to injure and compromise her in Hopshire that she and her mother had
+to leave, and she swore to me most solemnly (and I thoroughly believe
+she spoke the truth) that there had never been any relation between
+them that she could not have owned to before the whole world.
+
+She had wished to marry him, it is true, for his wealth and position;
+for both she and her mother were very poor, and often hard put to it to
+make both ends meet and keep up a decent appearance before the world;
+and he had singled her out and paid her marked attention from the first,
+and given her every reason to believe that his attentions were serious
+and honorable.
+
+At this juncture her mother came in, Mrs. Glyn, and we renewed our old
+acquaintance. She had quite forgiven me my school-boy admiration for her
+daughter; all her power of hating, like her daughter's, had concentrated
+itself on Ibbetson; and as I listened to the long story of their wrongs
+and his infamy, I grew to hate him worse than ever, and was ready to be
+their champion on the spot, and to take up their quarrel there and then.
+
+But this would not do, it appeared, for their name must nevermore be in
+any way mixed up with his.
+
+Then suddenly Mrs. Glyn asked me if I knew when he went to India.
+
+I could satisfy her, for I knew that it was just after my parents'
+marriage, nearly a year before my birth; upon which she gave the exact
+date of his departure with his regiment, and the name of the transport,
+and everything; and also, to my surprise, the date of my parents'
+marriage at Marylebone Church, and of my baptism there fifteen months
+later--just fourteen weeks after my birth in Passy. I was growing quite
+bewildered with all this knowledge of my affairs, and wondered more
+and more.
+
+We sat silent for a while, the two women looking at each other and at me
+and at the miniatures. It was getting grewsome. What could it all mean?
+
+Presently Mrs. Glyn, at a nod from her daughter, addressed me thus:
+
+"Mr. Ibbetson, your uncle, as you call him, though he is not your uncle,
+is a very terrible villain, and has done you and your parents a very
+foul wrong. Before I tell you what it is (and I think you ought to know)
+you must give me your word of honor that you will do or say nothing that
+will get our name publicly mixed up in any way with Colonel Ibbetson's.
+The injury to my daughter, now she is happily married to an excellent
+man, would be irreparable."
+
+With a beating heart I solemnly gave the required assurance.
+
+"Then, Mr. Ibbetson, it is right that you should know that Colonel
+Ibbetson, when he was paying his infamous addresses to my daughter, gave
+her unmistakably to understand that you were his natural son, by his
+cousin, Miss Catherine Biddulph, afterwards Madame Pasquier de
+la Mariere!"
+
+"Oh, oh, oh!" I cried, "surely you must be mistaken--he knew it was
+impossible--he had been refused by my mother three times--he went to
+India nearly a year before I was born--he--"
+
+Then Mrs. Deane said, producing an old letter from her pocket:
+
+"Do you know his handwriting and his crest? Do you happen to recollect
+once bringing me a note from at Ibbetson Hall? Here it is," and she
+handed it to me. It was unmistakably his, and I remembered it at once,
+and this is what it said:
+
+"For Heaven's sake, dear friend, don't breathe a word to any living soul
+of what you were clever enough to guess last night! There is a likeness,
+of course.
+
+"Poor Antinoues! He is quite ignorant of the true relationship, which has
+caused me many a pang of shame and remorse....
+
+"'Que voulez-vous? Elle etait ravissaure!' ... We were cousins, much
+thrown together; 'both were so young, and one so beautiful!' ... I was
+but a penniless cornet in those days--hardly more than a boy. Happily an
+unsuspecting Frenchman of good family was there who had loved her long,
+and she married him. 'Il etait temps!' ...
+
+"Can you forgive me this 'entrainement de jeunesse?' I have repented in
+sackcloth and ashes, and made what reparation I could by adopting and
+giving my name to one who is a perpetual reminder to me of a moment's
+infatuation. He little knows, poor boy, and never will, I hope. 'Il n'a
+plus que moi au monde!'
+
+"Burn this as soon as you have read it, and never let the subject be
+mentioned between us again.
+
+"R. ('Qui sait aimer')."
+
+Here was a thunderbolt out of the blue!
+
+I sat stunned and saw scarlet, and felt as if I should see scarlet
+forever.
+
+[Illustration: THE FATAL LETTER.]
+
+After a long silence, during which I could feel my pulse beat to
+bursting-point in my temples, Mrs. Glyn said:
+
+"Now, Mr. Ibbetson, I hope you will do nothing rash--nothing that can
+bring my daughter's name into any quarrel between yourself and your
+uncle. For the sake of your mother's good name, you will be prudent, I
+know. If he could speak like this of his cousin, with whom he had been
+in love when he was young, what lies would he not tell of my poor
+daughter? He _has_--terrible lies! Oh, what we have suffered! When he
+wrote that letter I believe he really meant to marry her. He had the
+greatest trust in her, or he would never have committed himself so
+foolishly."
+
+"Does he know of this letter's existing?" I asked.
+
+"No. When he and my daughter quarrelled she sent him back his
+letters--all but this one, which she told him she had burned immediately
+after reading it, as he had told her to do."
+
+"May I keep it?"
+
+"Yes. I know you may be trusted, and my daughter's name has been removed
+from the outside, as you see. No one but ourselves has ever seen it, nor
+have we mentioned to a soul what it contains, as we never believed it
+for a moment. Two or three years ago we had the curiosity to find out
+when and where your parents had married, and when you were born, and
+when _he_ went to India, it was no surprise to us at all. We then tried
+to find you, but soon gave it up, and thought it better to leave matters
+alone. Then we heard he was in mischief again--just the same sort of
+mischief; and then my daughter saw you in the park, and we concluded you
+ought to know."
+
+Such was the gist of that memorable conversation, which I have condensed
+as much as I could.
+
+When I left these two ladies I walked twice rapidly round the park. I
+saw scarlet often during that walk. Perhaps I looked scarlet. I remember
+people staring at me.
+
+Then I went straight to Lintot's, with the impulse to tell him my
+trouble and ask his advice.
+
+He was away from home, and I waited in his smoking-room for a while,
+reading the letter over and over again.
+
+Then I decided not to tell him, and left the house, taking with me as I
+did so (but without any definite purpose) a heavy loaded stick, a most
+formidable weapon, even in the hands of a boy, and which I myself had
+given to Lintot on his last birthday. [Greek: Anagkae]!
+
+Then I went to my usual eating-house near the circus and dined. To the
+surprise of the waiting-maid, I drank a quart of bitter ale and two
+glasses of sherry. It was my custom to drink water. She plied me with
+questions as to whether I was ill or in trouble. I answered her no, and
+at last begged she would leave me alone.
+
+Ibbetson lived in St. James's Street. I went there. He was out. It was
+nine o'clock, and his servant seemed uncertain when he would return. I
+came back at ten. He was not yet home, and the servant, after thinking a
+while, and looking up and down the street, and finding my appearance
+decent and by no means dangerous, asked me to go upstairs and wait, as I
+told him it was a matter of great importance.
+
+So I went and sat in my uncle's drawing-room and waited.
+
+The servant came with me and lit the candles, and remarked on the
+weather, and handed me the _Saturday Review_ and _Punch_. I must have
+looked quite natural--as I tried to look--and he left me.
+
+I saw a Malay creese on the mantel-piece and hid it behind a
+picture-frame. I locked a door leading to another drawing-room where
+there was a grand piano, and above it a trophy of swords, daggers,
+battle-axes, etc., and put the key in my pocket.
+
+The key of the room where I waited was inside the door.
+
+All this time I had a vague idea of possible violence on his part, but
+no idea of killing him. I felt far too strong for that. Indeed, I had a
+feeling of quiet, irresistible strength--the result of suppressed
+excitement.
+
+I sat down and meditated all I would say. I had settled it over and over
+again, and read and reread the fatal letter.
+
+The servant came up with glasses and soda-water. I trembled lest he
+should observe that the door to the other room was locked, but he did
+not. He opened the window and looked up and down the street. Presently
+he said, "Here's the colonel at last, sir," and went down to open
+the door.
+
+I heard him come in and speak to his servant. Then he came straight up,
+humming _"la donna e mobile,"_ and walked in with just the jaunty, airy
+manner I remembered. He was in evening dress, and very little changed.
+He seemed much surprised to see me, and turned very white.
+
+"Well, my Apollo of the T square, _pourquoi cet honneur?_ Have you come,
+like a dutiful nephew, to humble yourself and beg for forgiveness?"
+
+I forgot all I meant to say (indeed, nothing happened as I had meant),
+but rose and said, "I have come to have a talk with you," as quietly as
+I could, though with a thick voice.
+
+He seemed uneasy, and went towards the door.
+
+I got there before him, and closed it, and locked it, and put the key
+in my pocket.
+
+He darted to the other door and found it locked.
+
+Then he went to the mantel-piece and looked for the creese, and not
+finding it, he turned round with his back to the fireplace and his arms
+akimbo, and tried to look very contemptuous and determined. His chin was
+quite white under his dyed mustache--like wax--and his eyes blinked
+nervously.
+
+I walked up to him and said: "You told Mrs. Deane that I was your
+natural son."
+
+"It's a lie! Who told you so?"
+
+"She did--this afternoon."
+
+"It's a lie--a spiteful invention of a cast-off mistress!"
+
+"She never was your mistress!"
+
+"You fool! I suppose she told you that too. Leave the room, you pitiful
+green jackass, or I'll have you turned out," and he rang the bell.
+
+"Do you know your own handwriting?" I said, and handed him the letter.
+
+He read a line or two and gasped out that it was a forgery, and rang the
+bell again, and looked again behind the clock for his creese. Then he
+lit the letter at a candle and threw it in the fireplace, where it
+blazed out.
+
+I made no attempt to prevent him.
+
+The servant tried to open the door, and Ibbetson went to the window and
+called out for the police. I rushed to the picture where I had hidden
+the creese, and threw it on the table. Then I swung him away from the
+window by his coat-tails, and told him to defend himself, pointing to
+the creese.
+
+He seized it, and stood on the defensive; the servant had apparently run
+down-stairs for assistance.
+
+"Now, then," I said, "down on your knees, you infamous cur, and confess;
+it's your only chance."
+
+"Confess what, you fool?"
+
+"That you're a coward and a liar; that you wrote that letter; that Mrs.
+Deane was no more your mistress than my mother was!"
+
+There was a sound of people running up-stairs. He listened a moment and
+hissed out:
+
+"They _both_ were, you idiot! How can I tell for certain whether you are
+my son or not? It all comes to the same. Of course I wrote the letter.
+Come on, you cowardly assassin, you bastard parricide!" ... and he
+advanced on me with his creese low down in his right hand, the point
+upward, and made a thrust, shrieking out, "Break open the door! quick!"
+They did; but too late!
+
+[Illustration: "BASTARD! PARRICIDE!"]
+
+I saw crimson!
+
+He missed me, and I brought down my stick on his left arm, which he held
+over his head, and then on his head, and he fell, crying:
+
+"O my God! O Christ!"
+
+I struck him again on his head as he was falling, and once again when he
+was on the ground. It seemed to crash right in.
+
+That is why and how I killed Uncle Ibbetson.
+
+
+
+
+Part Five
+
+[Illustration]
+
+     "_Grouille, greve, greve, grouille,
+     File, file, ma quenouille!
+     File sa corde au bourreau
+     Qui siffle dans le preau..._"
+
+
+So sang the old hag in _Notre Dame de Paris!_
+
+So sang to me night and day, for many nights and days, the thin small
+voice that always went piping inside me, now to one tune, now to
+another, but always the same words--that terrible refrain that used to
+haunt me so when I was a school-boy at Bluefriars!
+
+Oh, to be a school-boy again in a long gray coat and ridiculous pink
+stockings--innocent and free--with Esmeralda for my only love, and Athos
+and Porthos and D'Artagnan for my bosom friends, and no worse
+tribulation than to be told on a Saturday afternoon that the third
+volume was in hand--_volume trois en lecture_'.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Sometimes, I remember, I could hardly sleep on a Sunday night, for pity
+of the poor wretch who was to be hanged close by on Monday morning, and
+it has come to that with _me_!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Oh, Mary, Mary, Duchess of Towers, sweet friend of my childhood, and
+love of my life, what must you think of me now?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+How blessed are the faithful! How good it must be to trust in God and
+heaven, and the forgiveness of sin, and be as a little child in all but
+innocence! A whole career of crime wiped out in a moment by just one
+cheap little mental act of faith at the eleventh hour, in the extreme
+terror of well-merited dissolution; and all the evil one has worked
+through life (that goes on breeding evil for ages to come) taken off
+one's shoulders like a filthy garment, and just cast aside, anywhere,
+anyhow, for the infecting of others--who do not count.
+
+What matter if it be a fool's paradise? Paradise is paradise, for
+whoever owns it!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They say a Sicilian drum-major, during the French occupation of Palermo,
+was sentenced to be shot. He was a well-known coward, and it was feared
+he would disgrace his country at the last moment in the presence of the
+French soldiers, who had a way of being shot with a good grace and a
+light heart: they had grown accustomed to it.
+
+For the honor of Sicily his confessor told him, in the strictest
+confidence, that his sentence was a mock one, and that he would be fired
+at with blank cartridges.
+
+It was a pious fraud. All but two of the twelve cartridges had bullets,
+and he fell, riddled through and through. No Frenchman ever died with a
+lighter heart, a better grace. He was superb, and the national honor
+was saved.
+
+Thrice happy Sicilian drum-major, if the story be true! That trust in
+blank cartridges was his paradise.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Oh, it is uphill work to be a stoic when the moment comes and the tug!
+But when the tug lasts for more than a moment--days and nights, days and
+nights! Oh, happy Sicilian drum-major!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Pray? Yes, I will pray night and morning, and all day long, to whatever
+there is left of inherited strength and courage in that luckless,
+misbegotten waif, Peter Ibbetson; that it may bear him up a little while
+yet; that he may not disgrace himself in the dock or on the gallows.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Repent? Yes, of many things. But of the thing for which I am here?
+Never!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is a ghastly thing to be judge and jury and executioner all in one,
+and for a private and personal wrong--to condemn and strike and kill.
+
+Pity comes after--when it is too late, fortunately--the wretched
+weakness of pity! Pooh! no Calcraft will ever pity _me_, and I do not
+want him to.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He had his long, snaky knife against my stick; he, too, was a big strong
+man, well skilled in self-defence! Down he went, and I struck him again
+and again. "O my God! O Christ!" he shrieked....
+
+"It will ring in my heart and my ears till I die--till I die!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was no time to lose--no time to think for the best. It is all for
+the best as it is. What might he not have said if he had lived!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thank Heaven, pity is not remorse or shame; and what crime could well
+be worse than his? To rob one's dearly beloved dead of their fair shame!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He might have been mad, perhaps, and have grown in time to believe the
+lies he told himself. Such things have been. But such a madman should no
+more be suffered to live than a mad dog. The only way to kill the lie
+was to kill the liar--that is, if one _can_ ever kill a lie!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Poor worm! after all, he could not help it, I suppose! he was _built_
+like that! and _I_ was built to kill him for it, and be hanged.'
+[Greek: Anagkae]!
+
+What an exit for "Gogo--gentil petit Gogo!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Just opposite that wall, on the other side, was once a small tripe and
+trotter shop, kept by a most lovely daughter of the people, so fair and
+good in my eyes that I would have asked her to be my wife. What would
+she think of me now? That I should have dared to aspire! What a
+King Cophetua!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What does everybody think? I can never breathe the real cause to a soul.
+Only two women know the truth, and they will take good care not to tell.
+Thank Heaven for that!
+
+What matters what anybody thinks? "It will be all the same as a hundred
+years hence." That is the most sensible proverb ever invented.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But meanwhile!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The judge puts on the black cap, and it is all for you! Every eye is
+fixed on you, so big and young and strong and full of life! Ugh!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They pinion you, and you have to walk and be a man, and the chaplain
+exhorts and prays and tries to comfort. Then a sea of faces; people
+opposite, who have been eating and drinking and making merry, waiting for
+_you!_ A cap is pulled over your eyes--oh, horror! horror! horror!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Heureux tambour-major de Sicile!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Il faut laver son ligne sale en famille, et c'est ce que j'ai fait.
+Mais ca va ma couter cher!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Would I do it all over again? Oh, let me hope, yes!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Ah, he died too quick; I dealt him those four blows in less than as
+many seconds. It was five minutes, perhaps--or, at the most, ten--from
+the moment he came into the room to that when I finished him and was
+caught red-handed. And I--what a long agony!
+
+Oh, that I might once more dream a "true dream," and see my dear people
+once more! But it seems that I have lost the power of dreaming true
+since that fatal night. I try and try, but it will not come. My dreams
+are dreadful; and, oh, the _waking_!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After all, my life hitherto, but for a few happy years of childhood, has
+not been worth living; it is most unlikely that it ever would have been,
+had I lived to a hundred! Oh, Mary! Mary!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And penal servitude! Better any death than that. It is good that my
+secret must die with me--that there will be no extenuating
+circumstances, no recommendation to mercy, no commutation of the swift
+penalty of death.
+
+"File, file... File sa corde au bourreau!"
+
+By such monotonous thoughts, and others as dreary and hopeless,
+recurring again and again in the same dull round, I beguiled the
+terrible time that intervened between Ibbetson's death and my trial at
+the Old Bailey.
+
+It all seems very trivial and unimportant now--not worth
+recording--even hard to remember.
+
+But at the time my misery was so great, my terror of the gallows so
+poignant, that each day I thought I must die of sheer grief before
+another twenty-four hours could possibly pass over me.
+
+The intolerable strain would grow more and more severe till a climax of
+tension was reached, and a hysterical burst of tears would relieve me
+for a while, and I would feel reconciled to my fate, and able to face
+death like a man.... Then the anguish would gradually steal over me
+again, and the uncontrollable weakness of the flesh....
+
+And each of these two opposite moods, while it lasted, made the other
+seem impossible, and as if it never could come back again; yet back it
+came with the regularity of a tide--the most harrowing seesaw that
+ever was.
+
+I had always been unstable like that; but whereas I had hitherto
+oscillated between high elation and despondency, it was now from a dumb,
+resigned despair to the wildest agony and terror.
+
+I sought in vain for the only comfort it was in me to seek; but when,
+overdone with suffering, I fell asleep at last, I could no longer dream
+true; I could dream only as other wretches dream.
+
+I always dreamed those two little dancing, deformed jailers, man and
+wife, had got me at last; and that I shrieked aloud for my beloved
+duchess to succor me, as they ran me in, each butting at me sideways,
+and showing their toothless gums in a black smile, and poisoning me
+with their hot sour breath! The gate was there, and the avenue, all
+distorted and quite unlike; and, opposite, a jail; but no powerful
+Duchess of Towers to wave the horror away.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It will be remembered by some, perhaps, how short was my trial.
+
+The plea of "not guilty" was entered for me. The defence set up was
+insanity, based on the absence of any adequate motive. This defence was
+soon disposed of by the prosecution; witnesses to my sanity were not
+wanting, and motives enough were found in my past relations with Colonel
+Ibbetson to "make me--a violent, morose, and vindictive-natured
+man--imbrue my hands in the gore of my relative and benefactor--a man
+old enough to be my father--who, indeed, might have been my father, for
+the love he had bestowed upon me, with his honored name, when I was left
+a penniless, foreign orphan on his hands."
+
+Here I laughed loud and long, and made a most painful impression, as is
+duly recorded in the reports of the trial.
+
+The jury found me guilty quite early in the afternoon of the second day,
+without leaving the box; and I, "preserving to the last the callous and
+unmoved demeanor I had borne all through the trial," was duly sentenced
+to death without any hope of mercy, but with an expression of regret on
+the part of the judge--a famous hanging judge--that a man of my
+education and promise should be brought by his own evil nature and
+uncontrollable passions to so deplorable an end.
+
+Now whether the worst of certainties is better than suspense--whether my
+nerves of pain had been so exercised during the period preceding my
+trial that I had really become callous, as they say a man's back does
+after a certain number of strokes from the "cat"--certain it was that I
+knew the worst, and acquiesced in it with a surprised sense of actual
+relief, and found it in me to feel it not unbearable.
+
+Such, at least, was my mood that night. I made the most of it. It was
+almost happiness by comparison with what I had gone through. I remember
+eating with a heartiness that surprised me. I could have gone straight
+from my dinner to the gallows, and died with a light heart and a good
+grace--like a Sicilian drum-major.
+
+I resolved to write the whole true story to the Duchess of Towers, with
+an avowal of my long and hopeless adoration for her, and the expression
+of a hope that she would try to think of me only as her old playfellow,
+and as she had known me before this terrible disaster. And thinking of
+the letter I would write till very late, I fell asleep in my cell, with
+two warders to watch over me; and then--Another phase of my inner
+life began.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Without effort, without let or hindrance of any kind, I was at the
+avenue gate.
+
+The pink and white may, the lilacs and laburnums were in full bloom, the
+sun made golden paths everywhere. The warm air was full of fragrance,
+and alive with all the buzz and chirp of early summer.
+
+I was half crying with joy to reach the land of my true dreams again, to
+feel at home once more--_chez moi! chez moi!_
+
+La Mere Francois sat peeling potatoes at the door of her _loge_; she was
+singing a little song about _cinq sous, sinq sous, pour monter notre
+menage._ I had forgotten it, but it all came back now.
+
+[Illustration: "CINQ SOUS, CINQ SOUS, POUR MONTER NOTRE MENAGE."]
+
+The facetious postman, Yverdon, went in at the gate of my old garden;
+the bell rang as he pushed it, and I followed him.
+
+Under the apple-tree, which was putting forth shoots of blossom in
+profusion, sat my mother and Monsieur le Major. My mother took the
+letter from the postman's hand as he said, "Pour Vous? Oh yes, Madame
+Pasquier, God sev ze Kveen!" and paid the postage. It was from Colonel
+Ibbetson, then in Ireland, and not yet a colonel.
+
+Medor lay snoring on the grass, and Gogo and Mimsey were looking at the
+pictures in the _musee des familles._
+
+In a garden chair lolled Dr. Seraskier, apparently asleep, with his long
+porcelain pipe across his knees.
+
+Madame Seraskier, in a yellow nankeen gown with gigot sleeves, was
+cutting curl-papers out of the _Constitutionnel_.
+
+I gazed on them all with unutterable tenderness. I was gazing on them
+perhaps for the last time.
+
+I called out to them by name.
+
+"Oh, speak to me, beloved shades! Oh, my father! oh, mother, I want you
+so desperately! Come out of the past for a few seconds, and give me some
+words of comfort! I'm in such woful plight! If you could only
+_know_ ..."
+
+But they could neither hear nor see me.
+
+Then suddenly another figure stepped forth from behind the
+apple-tree--no old-fashioned, unsubstantial shadow of by-gone days that
+one can only see and hear, and that cannot hear and see one back again;
+but one in all the splendid fulness of life, a pillar of help and
+strength--Mary, Duchess of Towers!
+
+I fell on my knees as she came to me with both hands extended.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Ibbetson, I have been seeking and waiting for you here night
+after night! I have been frantic! If you hadn't come at last, I must
+have thrown everything to the winds, and gone to see you in Newgate,
+waking and before the world, to have a talk with you--an _abboccamento_.
+I suppose you couldn't sleep, or were unable to dream."
+
+I could not answer at first. I could only cover her hands with kisses,
+as I felt her warm life-current mixing with mine--a rapture!
+
+And then I said--
+
+"I swear to you by all I hold most sacred--by _my_ mother's memory and
+_yours_--by yourself--that I never meant to take Ibbetson's life, or
+even strike him; the miserable blow was dealt...."
+
+"As if you need tell me that! As if I didn't know you of old, my poor
+friend, kindest and gentlest of men! Why, I am holding your hands, and
+see into the very depths of your heart!"
+
+(I put down all she said as she said it. Of course I am not, and never
+have been, what her old affectionate regard made me seem in her eyes,
+any more than I am the bloodthirsty monster I passed for. Woman-like,
+she was the slave of her predilections.)
+
+"And now, Mr. Ibbetson," she went on, "let me first of all tell you, for
+a certainty, that the sentence will be commuted. I saw the Home
+Secretary three or four hours ago. The real cause of your deplorable
+quarrel with your uncle is an open secret. His character is well known.
+A Mrs. Gregory (whom you knew in Hopshire as Mrs. Deane) has been with
+the Home Secretary this afternoon. Your chivalrous reticence at the
+trial...."
+
+"Oh," I interrupted, "I don't care to live any longer! Now that I have
+met you once more, and that you have forgiven me and think well of me in
+spite of everything, I am ready to die. There has never been anybody but
+you in the world for _me_--never a ghost of a woman, never even a friend
+since my mother died and yours. Between that time and the night I first
+saw you at Lady Cray's concert, I can scarcely be said to have lived at
+all. I fed on scraps of remembrance. You see I have no talent for making
+new friends, but oh, such a genius for fidelity to old ones! I was
+waiting for Mimsey to come back again, I suppose, the one survivor to me
+of that sweet time, and when she came at last I was too stupid to
+recognize her. She suddenly blazed and dazzled into my poor life like a
+meteor, and filled it with a maddening love and pain. I don't know which
+of the two has been the sweetest; both have been my life. You cannot
+realize what it has been. Trust me, I have lived my fill. I am ready and
+willing to die. It is the only perfect consummation I can think of.
+Nothing can ever equal this moment--nothing on earth or in heaven. And
+if I were free to-morrow, life would not be worth having without _you_.
+I would not take it as a gift."
+
+She sat down by me on the grass with her hands clasped across her knees,
+close to the unconscious shadows of our kith and kin, within hearing of
+their happy talk and laughter.
+
+Suddenly we both heard Mimsey say to Gogo--
+
+"O, ils sont joliment bien ensemble, le Prince Charmant et la fee
+Tarapatapoum!"
+
+We looked at each other and actually laughed aloud. The duchess said--
+
+"Was there ever, since the world began, such a _muse en scene_, and for
+such a meeting, Mr. Ibbetson? Think of it! Conceive it! _I_ arranged it
+all. I chose a day when they were all together. As they would say in
+America, _I_ am the boss of this particular dream."
+
+And she laughed again, through her tears, that enchanting ripple of a
+laugh that closed her eyes and made her so irresistible.
+
+"Was there ever," said I--"ever since the world began, such ecstasy as I
+feel now? After this what can there be for me but death--well earned and
+well paid for? Welcome and lovely death!"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"You have not yet thought, Mr. Ibbetson--you have not realized what life
+may have in store for you if--if all you have said about your affection
+for me is true. Oh, it is too terrible for me to think of, I know, that
+you, scarcely more than a boy, should have to spend the rest of your
+life in miserable confinement and unprofitable monotonous toil. But
+there is _another_ side to that picture.
+
+"Now listen to your old friend's story--poor little Mimsey's confession.
+I will make it as short as I can.
+
+"Do you remember when you first saw me, a sickly, plain, sad little
+girl, at the avenue gate, twenty years ago?
+
+"Le Pere Francois was killing a fowl--cutting its throat with a
+clasp-knife--and the poor thing struggled frantically in his grasp as
+its blood flowed into the gutter. A group of boys were looking on in
+great glee, and all the while Pere Francois was gossiping with M. le
+Cure, who didn't seem to mind in the least. I was fainting with pity and
+horror. Suddenly you came out of the school opposite with Alfred and
+Charlie Plunket, and saw it all, and in a fit of noble rage you called
+Pere Francois a 'sacred pig of assassin'--which, as you know, is very
+rude in French--and struck him as near his face as you could reach.
+
+"Have you forgotten that? Ah, _I_ haven't! It was not an effectual deed,
+perhaps, and certainly came too late to save the fowl. Besides, Pere
+Francois struck you back again, and left some of the fowl's blood on
+your cheek. It was a baptism! You became on the spot my hero--my angel
+of light. Look at Gogo over there. Is he beautiful enough? That was
+_you_, Mr. Ibbetson.
+
+"M. le Cure said something about 'ces _Anglais_' who go mad if a man
+whips his horse, and yet pay people to box each other to death. Don't
+you really remember? Oh, the recollection to _me!_
+
+"And that little language we invented and used to talk so fluently!
+Don't you _rappel_ it to yourself? 'Ne le _recollectes_ tu pas?' as we
+would have said in those days, for it used to be _thee_ and _thou_
+with us then.
+
+"Well, at all events, you must remember how for five happy years we were
+so often together; how you drew for me, read to me, played with me; took
+my part in everything, right or wrong; carried me pickaback when I was
+tired. Your drawings--I have them all. And oh! you were so funny
+sometimes! How you used to make mamma laugh, and M. le Major! Just look
+at Gogo again. Have you forgotten what he is doing now? I haven't.... He
+has just changed the _musee des familles_ for the _Penny Magazine_, and
+is explaining Hogarth's pictures of the 'Idle and Industrious
+Apprentices' to Mimsey, and they are both agreed that the idle one is
+much the less objectionable of the two!
+
+"Mimsey looks passive enough, with her thumb in her mouth, doesn't she?
+Her little heart is so full of gratitude and love for Gogo that she
+can't speak. She can only suck her thumb. Poor, sick, ungainly child!
+She would like to be Gogo's slave--she would die for Gogo. And her
+mother adores Gogo too; she is almost jealous of dear Madame Pasquier
+for having so sweet a son. In just one minute from now, when she has
+cut that last curl-paper, poor long-dead mamma will call Gogo to her and
+give him a good 'Irish hug,' and make him happy for a week. Wait a
+minute and see. _There!_ What did I tell you?
+
+"Well, all that came to an end. Madame Pasquier went away and never came
+back, and so did Gogo. Monsieur and Madame Pasquier were dead, and dear
+mamma died in a week from the cholera. Poor heartbroken Mimsey was taken
+away to St. Petersburg, Warsaw, Leipsic, Venice, all over Europe, by her
+father, as heart-broken as herself.
+
+"It was her wish and her father's that she should become a pianist by
+profession, and she studied hard for many years in almost every capital,
+and under almost every master in Europe, and she gave promise
+of success.
+
+"And so, wandering from one place to another, she became a young
+woman--a greatly petted and spoiled and made-much-of young woman, Mr.
+Ibbetson, although she says it who shouldn't; and had many suitors of
+all kinds and countries.
+
+"But the heroic and angelic Gogo, with his lovely straight nose, and his
+hair _aux enfants d'Edouard_, and his dear little white silk chimney-pot
+hat and Eton jacket, was always enshrined in her memory, in her inmost
+heart, as the incarnation of all that was beautiful and brave and good.
+But alas! what had become of this Gogo in the mean time? Ah, he was
+never even heard of--he was dead!
+
+"Well, this long-legged, tender-hearted, grown-up young Mimsey of
+nineteen was attracted by a very witty and accomplished English attache
+at Vienna--a Mr. Harcourt, who seemed deeply in love with her, and
+wished her to be his wife.
+
+"He was not rich, but Dr. Seraskier liked and trusted him so much that
+he dispossessed himself of almost everything he had to enable this young
+couple to marry--and they did. And truth compels me to admit that for a
+year they were very happy and contented with fate and each other.
+
+"Then a great misfortune befell them both. In a most unexpected manner,
+through four or five consecutive deaths in Mr. Harcourt's family, he
+became, first, Lord Harcourt, and then the Duke of Towers. And since
+then, Mr. Ibbetson, I have not had an hour's peace or happiness.
+
+"In the first place a son was born to me--a cripple, poor dear! and
+deformed from his birth; and as he grew older it soon became evident
+that he was also born without a mind.
+
+"Then my unfortunate husband changed completely; he drank and gambled
+and worse, till we came to live together as strangers, and only spoke to
+each other in public and before the world...."
+
+"Ah," I said, "you were still a great lady--an English duchess!"
+
+I could not endure the thought of that happy twelvemonth with that
+bestial duke! I, sober, chaste, and clean--of all but blood, alas!--and
+a condemned convict!
+
+Oh, Mr. Ibbetson, you must make no mistake about _me_! I was never
+intended by nature for a duchess--especially an English one. Not but
+what, if dukes and duchesses are necessary, the English are the
+best--and, of course, by dukes and duchesses I mean all that
+upper-ten-thousand in England which calls itself 'society'--as if there
+were no other worth speaking of. Some of them are almost angelic, but
+they are not for outsiders like me. Perpetual hunting and shooting and
+fishing and horseracing--eating, drinking, and killing, and making
+love--eternal court gossip and tittle-tattle--the Prince--the
+Queen--whom and what the Queen likes, whom and what she doesn't!--tame
+English party politics--the Church--a Church that doesn't know its own
+mind, in spite of its deans, bishops, archbishops, and their wives and
+daughters--and all their silly, solemn sense of social rank and dignity!
+Endless small-talk, dinners, and drums, and no society from year's end
+to year's end but each other! Ah, one must be caught young, and put in
+harness early, to lead such an existence as that and be content! And I
+had met and known _such_ men and women with my father! They _were_
+something to know!
+
+There is another society in London and elsewhere--a freemasonry of
+intellect and culture and hard work--_la haute boheme du talent_--men
+and women whose names are or ought to be household words all over the
+world; many of them are good friends of mine, both here and abroad; and
+that society, which was good enough for my father and mother, is quite
+good enough for me.
+
+I am a republican, Mr. Ibbetson--a cosmopolite--a born Bohemian!
+
+_"'Mon grand pere etait rossignol; Ma grand mere etait hirondelle!"_
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Look at my dear people there--look at your dear people! What waifs and
+strays, until their ship comes home, which we know it never will! Our
+fathers forever racking their five wits in the pursuit of an idea! Our
+mothers forever racking theirs to save money and make both ends
+meet!... Why, Mr. Ibbetson, you are nearer to the _rossignol_ than I am.
+Do you remember your father's voice? Shall I ever forget it! He sang to
+me only last night, and in the midst of my harrowing anxiety about you I
+was beguiled into listening outside the window. He sang Rossini's
+_'Cujus Animam.'_ He _was_ the nightingale; that was his vocation, if he
+could but have known it. And you are my brother Bohemian; that is
+_yours!_ ... Ah, _my_ vocation! It was to be the wife of some busy
+brain-worker--man of science--conspirator--writer--artist--architect,
+if you like; to fence him round and shield him from all the little
+worries and troubles and petty vexations of life. I am a woman of
+business _par excellence_--a manager, and all that. He would have had a
+warm, well-ordered little nest to come home to after hunting his idea!
+
+"Well, I thought myself the most unhappy woman alive, and wrapped myself
+up in my affection for my much-afflicted little son; and as I held him
+to my breast, and vainly tried to warm and mesmerize him into feeling
+and intelligence, Gogo came back into my heart, and I was forever
+thinking, 'Oh, if I had a son like Gogo what a happy woman I should be!'
+and pitied Madame Pasquier for dying and leaving him so soon, for I had
+just begun to dream true, and had seen Gogo and his sweet mother
+once again.
+
+"And then one night--one never-to-be-forgotten night--I went to Lady
+Gray's concert, and saw you standing in a corner by yourself; and I
+thought, with a leap of my heart, 'Why, that must be Gogo, grown dark,
+and with a beard and mustache like a Frenchman!' But alas, I found that
+you were only a Mr. Ibbetson, Lady Cray's architect, whom she had asked
+to her house because he was 'quite the handsomest young man she had
+ever seen!'
+
+"You needn't laugh. You looked very nice, I assure you!
+
+"Well, Mr. Ibbetson, although you were not Gogo, you became suddenly so
+interesting to me that I never forgot you--you were never quite out of
+my mind. I wanted to counsel and advise you, and take you by the hand,
+and be an elder sister to you, for I felt myself already older than you
+in the world and its ways. I wanted to be twenty years older still, and
+to have you for my son. I don't know _what_ I wanted! You seemed so
+lonely, and fresh, and unspotted from the world, among all those smart
+worldlings, and yet so big and strong and square and invincible--oh, so
+strong! And then you looked at me with such sincere and sweet and
+chivalrous admiration and sympathy--there, I cannot speak of it--and
+then you were _so_ like what Gogo might have become! Oh, you made as
+warm and devoted a friend of me at first sight as any one might desire!
+
+"And at the same time you made me feel so self-conscious and shy that I
+dared not ask to be introduced to you--I, who scarcely know what
+shyness is.
+
+"Dear Giulia Grisi sang '_Sedut' al Pie d' un' Salice,' and that tune
+has always been associated in my mind with your tongue ever since, and
+always will be. Your dear mother used to play it on the harp. Do
+you remember?
+
+"Then came that extraordinary dream, which you remember as well as I do:
+_wasn't_ it a wonder? You see, my dear father had learned a strange
+secret of the brain--how in sleep to recall past things and people and
+places as they had once been seen or known by him--even unremembered
+things. He called it 'dreaming true,' and by long practice, he told me,
+he had brought the art of doing this to perfection. It was the one
+consolation of his troubled life to go over and over again in sleep all
+his happy youth and childhood, and the few short years he had spent with
+his beloved young wife. And before he died, when he saw I had become so
+unhappy that life seemed to have no longer any possible hope of pleasure
+for me, he taught me his very simple secret.
+
+"Thus have I revisited in sleep every place I have ever lived in, and
+especially this, the beloved spot where I first as a little girl
+knew _you_!"
+
+That night when we met again in our common dream I was looking at the
+boys from Saindou's school going to their _premiere communion_, and
+thinking very much of you, as I had seen you, when awake, a few hours
+before, looking out of the window at the 'Tete Noire;' when you suddenly
+appeared in great seeming trouble and walking like a tipsy man; and my
+vision was disturbed by the shadow of a prison--alas! alas!--and two
+little jailers jingling their keys and trying to hem you in.
+
+My emotion at seeing you again so soon was so great that I nearly woke.
+But I rescued you from your imaginary terrors and held you by the hand.
+You remember all the rest.
+
+I could not understand why you should be in my dream, as I had almost
+always dreamed true--that is, about things that _had_ been in my
+life--not about things that _might_ be; nor could I account for the
+solidity of your hand, nor understand why you didn't fade away when I
+took it, and blur the dream. It was a most perplexing mystery that
+troubled many hours of both my waking and sleeping life. Then came that
+meeting with you at Cray, and part of the mystery was accounted for, for
+you were my old friend Gogo, after all. But it is still a mystery, an
+awful mystery, that two people should meet as we are meeting now in one
+and the same dream--should dovetail so accurately into each other's
+brains. What a link between us two, Mr. Ibbetson, already linked by
+such memories!
+
+After meeting you at Cray I felt that I must never meet you again,
+either waking or dreaming. The discovery that you were Gogo, after all,
+combined with the preoccupation which as a mere stranger you had already
+caused me for so long, created such a disturbance in my spirit
+that--that--there, you must try and imagine it for yourself.
+
+Even before that revelation at Cray I had often known you were here in
+my dream, and I had carefully avoided you ... though little dreaming
+you were here in your own dream too! Often from that little
+dormer-window up there I have seen you wandering about the park and
+avenue in seeming search of _me_, and wondered why and how you came. You
+drove me into attics and servants' bedrooms to conceal myself from you.
+It was quite a game of hide-and-seek--_cache-cache_, as we used to
+call it.
+
+But after our meeting at Cray I felt there must be no more
+_cache-cache_; I avoided coming here at all; you drove me away
+altogether.
+
+Now try to imagine what I felt when the news of your terrible quarrel
+with Mr. Ibbetson burst upon the world. I was beside myself! I came here
+night after night; I looked for you everywhere--in the park, in the Bois
+de Boulogne, at the Mare d'Auteuil, at St. Cloud--in every place I could
+think of! And now here you are at last--at last!
+
+Hush! Don't speak yet! I have soon done!
+
+Six months ago I lost my poor little son, and, much as I loved him, I
+cannot wish him back again. In a fortnight I shall be legally separated
+from my wretched husband--I shall be quite alone in the world! And then,
+Mr. Ibbetson--oh, _then_, dearest friend that child or woman ever
+had--every hour that I can steal from my waking existence shall
+henceforward be devoted to you as long as both of us live, and sleep the
+same hours out of the twenty-four. My one object and endeavor shall be
+to make up for the wreck of your sweet and valuable young life. 'Stone
+walls shall not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage!' [And here she
+laughed and cried together, so that her eyes, closing up, squeezed out
+her tears, and I thought, "Oh, that I might drink them!"]
+
+And now I will leave you. I am a weak and loving woman, and must not
+stay by your side till I can do so without too much self-reproach.
+
+And indeed I feel I shall soon fall awake from sheer exhaustion of joy.
+Oh, selfish and jealous wretch that I am, to talk of joy!
+
+"I cannot help rejoicing that no other woman can be to you what I hope
+to be. No other woman can ever come _near_ you! I am your tyrant and
+your slave--your calamity has made you mine forever; but all my
+life--all--all--shall be spent in trying to make you forget yours, and I
+think I shall succeed."
+
+"Oh, don't make such dreadful haste!" I exclaimed. "Am _I_ dreaming
+true? What is to prove all this to me when I wake? Either I am the most
+abject and wretched of men, or life will never have another unhappy
+moment. How am I to _know_?'
+
+"Listen. Do you remember 'Parva sed Apta, le petit pavilion,' as you
+used to call it? That is still my home when I am here. It shall be
+yours, if you like, when the time comes. You will find much to interest
+you there. Well, to-morrow early, in your cell, you will receive from me
+an envelope with a slip of paper in it, containing some violets, and the
+words 'Parva sed Apta--a bientot' written in violet ink. Will that
+convince you?"
+
+"Oh yes, yes!"
+
+"Well, then, give me your hands, dearest and best--both hands! I shall
+soon be here again, by this apple-tree; I shall count the hours.
+Good-bye!" and she was gone, and I woke.
+
+I woke to the gaslit darkness of my cell. It was just before dawn. One
+of the warders asked me civilly if I wanted anything, and gave me a
+drink of water.
+
+I thanked him quietly, and recalled what had just happened to me, with a
+wonder, an ecstasy, for which I can find no words.
+
+No, it had _not_ been a _dream_--of that I felt quite sure--not in any
+one single respect; there had been nothing of the dream about it except
+its transcendent, ineffable enchantment.
+
+Every inflexion of that beloved voice, with its scarcely perceptible
+foreign accent that I had never noticed before; every animated gesture,
+with its subtle reminiscence of both her father and her mother; her
+black dress trimmed with gray; her black and gray hat; the scent of
+sandal-wood about her--all were more distinctly and vividly impressed
+upon me than if she had just been actually, and in the flesh, at my
+bedside. Her tones still rang in my ears. My eyes were full of her: now
+her profile, so pure and chiselled; now her full face, with her gray
+eyes (sometimes tender and grave and wet with tears, sometimes half
+closed in laughter) fixed on mine; her lithe sweet body curved forward,
+as she sat and clasped her knees; her arched and slender smooth straight
+feet so delicately shod, that seemed now and then to beat time to
+her story....
+
+And then that strange sense of the transfusion of life at the touching
+of the hands! Oh, it was _no dream_! Though what it was I
+cannot tell....
+
+I turned on my side, happy beyond expression, and fell asleep again--a
+dreamless sleep that lasted till I was woke and told to dress.
+
+[Illustration: "MY EYES WERE FULL OF HER."]
+
+Some breakfast was brought to me, and _with it an envelope, open, which
+contained some violets, and a slip of paper, scented with sandal-wood,
+on which were written, in violet ink, the words--
+
+"Parva sed Apla--a bientot!
+Tarapatapoum."_
+
+I will pass over the time that elapsed between my sentence and its
+commutation; the ministrations and exhortations of the good chaplain;
+the kind and touching farewells of Mr. and Mrs. Lintot, who had also
+believed that I was Ibbetson's son (I undeceived them); the visit of my
+old friend Mrs. Deane ... and her strange passion of gratitude and
+admiration.
+
+I have no doubt it would all be interesting enough, if properly
+remembered and ably told. But it was all too much like a
+dream--anybody's dream--not one of _mine_--all too slight and flimsy to
+have left an abiding remembrance, or to matter much.
+
+In due time I was removed to the jail at----, and bade farewell to the
+world, and adapted myself to the conditions of my new outer life with a
+good grace and with a very light heart.
+
+The prison routine, leaving the brain so free and unoccupied; the
+healthy labor, the pure air, the plain, wholesome food were delightful
+to me--a much-needed daily mental rest after the tumultuous emotions of
+each night.
+
+For I was soon back again in Passy, where I spent every hour of my
+sleep, you may be sure, never very far from the old apple-tree, which
+went through all its changes, from bare bough to tender shoots and
+blossoms, from blossom to ripe fruit, from fruit to yellow falling leaf,
+and then to bare boughs again, and all in a few peaceful nights, which
+were my days. I flatter myself by this time that I know the habits of a
+French apple-tree, and its caterpillars!
+
+And all the dear people I loved, and of whom I could never tire, were
+about--all but one. _The_ One!
+
+At last she arrived. The garden door was pushed, the bell rang, and she
+came across the lawn, radiant and tall and swift, and opened wide her
+arms. And there, with our little world around us--all that we had ever
+loved and cared for, but quite unseen and unheard by them--for the first
+time in my life since my mother and Madame Seraskier had died I held a
+woman in my arms, and she pressed her lips to mine.
+
+[Illustration: "AT LAST SHE ARRIVED."]
+
+Round and round the lawn we walked and talked, as we had often done
+fifteen, sixteen, twenty years ago. There were many things to say. "The
+Charming Prince" and the "Fairy Tarapatapoum" were "prettily well
+together"--at last!
+
+The time sped quickly--far too quickly. I said--
+
+"You told me I should see your house--'Parva sed Apta'--that I should
+find much to interest me there." ...
+
+She blushed a little and smiled, and said--
+
+"You mustn't expect _too_ much," and we soon found ourselves walking
+thither up the avenue. Thus we had often walked as children, and once--a
+memorable once--besides.
+
+There stood the little white house with its golden legend, as I had seen
+it a thousand times when a boy--a hundred since.
+
+How sweet and small it looked in the mellow sunshine! We mounted the
+stone _perron_, and opened the door and entered. My heart beat
+violently.
+
+Everything was as it had always been, as far as I could see. Dr.
+Seraskier sat in a chair by the window reading Schiller, and took no
+notice of us. His hair moved in the gentle breeze. Overhead we heard the
+rooms being swept and the beds made.
+
+I followed her into a little lumber-room, where I did not remember to
+have been before; it was full of odds and ends.
+
+"Why have you brought me here?" I asked.
+
+She laughed and said--
+
+"Open the door in the wall opposite."
+
+There was no door, and I said so.
+
+Then she took my hand, and lo! there _was_ a door! And she pushed, and
+we entered another suite of apartments that never could have been there
+before; there had never been room for them--nor ever could have been--in
+all Passy!
+
+[Illustration: "'AND NEUHA LED HER TORQUIL BY THE HAND.'"]
+
+"Come," she said, laughing and blushing at once; for she seemed nervous
+and excited and shy--do you remember--
+
+      'And Neuha led her Torquil by the hand,
+       And waved along the vault her flaming brand!'
+
+--do you remember your little drawing out of _The Island_, in the green
+morocco Byron? Here it is, in the top drawer of this beautiful cabinet.
+Here are all the drawings you ever did for me--plain and colored--with
+dates, explanations, etc., all written by myself--_l'album de la fee
+Tarapatapoum_. They are only duplicates. I have the real ones at my
+house in Hampshire.
+
+The cabinet also is a duplicate;--isn't it a beauty?--it's from the
+Czar's Winter Palace. Everything here is a duplicate, more or less. See,
+this is a little dining-room;--did you ever see anything so perfect?--it
+is the famous _salle a manger_ of Princesse de Chevagne. I never use it,
+except now and then to eat a slice of English household bread with
+French butter and 'cassonade.' Little Mimsey, out there, does so
+sometimes, when Gogo brings her one, and it makes big Mimsey's mouth
+water to see her, so she has to go and do likewise. Would you like
+a slice?
+
+You see the cloth is spread, _deux couverts_. There is a bottle of
+famous champagne from Mr. De Rothschild's; there's plenty more where
+that came from. The flowers are from Chatsworth, and this is a lobster
+salad for _you_. Papa was great at lobster salads and taught me. I mixed
+it myself a fortnight ago, and, as you see, it is as fresh and sweet as
+if I had only just made it, and the flowers haven't faded a bit.
+
+Here are cigarettes and pipes and cigars. I hope they are good. I don't
+smoke myself.
+
+Isn't all the furniture rare and beautiful? I have robbed every palace
+in Europe of its very best, and yet the owners are not a penny the
+worse. You should see up-stairs.
+
+Look at those pictures--the very pick of Raphael and Titian and
+Velasquez. Look at that piano--I have heard Liszt play upon it over and
+over again, in Leipsic!
+
+Here is my library. Every book I ever read is there, and every binding
+I ever admired. I don't often read them, but I dust them carefully. I've
+arranged that dust shall fall on them in the usual way to make it real,
+and remind one of the outer life one is so glad to leave. All has to be
+taken very seriously here, and one must put one's self to a little
+trouble. See, here is my father's microscope, and under it a small
+spider caught on the premises by myself. It is still alive. It seems
+cruel, doesn't it? but it only exists in our brains.
+
+Look at the dress I've got on--feel it; how every detail is worked out.
+And you have unconsciously done the same: that's the suit you wore that
+morning at Cray under the ash-tree--the nicest suit I ever saw. Here is
+a spot of ink on your sleeve as real as can be (bravo!). And this button
+is coming off--quite right; I will sew it on with a dream needle, and
+dream thread, and a dream thimble!
+
+This little door leads to every picture-gallery in Europe. It took me a
+long time to build and arrange them all by myself--quite a week of
+nights. It is very pleasant to walk there with a good catalogue, and
+make it rain cats and dogs outside.
+
+Through this curtain is an opera box--the most comfortable one I've
+ever been in; it does for theatres as well, and oratorios and concerts
+and scientific lectures. You shall see from it every performance I've
+ever been at, in half a dozen languages; you shall hold my hand and
+understand them all. Every singer that I ever heard, you shall hear.
+Dear Giulia Grisi shall sing the 'Willow Song' again and again, and you
+shall hear the applause. Ah, what applause!
+
+Come into this little room--my favorite; out of _this_ window and down
+these steps we can walk or drive to any place you or I have ever been
+to, and other places besides. Nothing is far, and we have only to go
+hand in hand. I don't know yet where my stables and coach-houses are;
+you must help me to find out. But so far I have never lacked a carriage
+at the bottom of those steps when I wanted to drive, nor a steam-launch,
+nor a gondola, nor a lovely place to go to.
+
+Out of _this_ window, from this divan, we can sit and gaze on whatever
+we like. What shall it be? Just now, you perceive, there is a wild and
+turbulent sea, with not a ship in sight. Do you hear the waves tumbling
+and splashing, and see the albatross? I had been reading Keats's 'Ode to
+the Nightingale,' and was so fascinated by the idea of a lattice opening
+on the foam
+
+     '_Of perilous seas by faery lands forlorn_'
+
+that I thought it would be nice to have a lattice like that myself. I
+tried to evolve that sea from my inner consciousness, you know, or
+rather from seas that I have sailed over. Do you like it? It was done a
+fortnight ago, and the waves have been tumbling about ever since. How
+they roar! and hark at the wind! I couldn't manage the 'faery lands.' It
+wants one lattice for the sea, and one for the land, I'm afraid. You
+must help me. Mean while, what would you like there tonight--the
+Yosemite Valley? the Nevski Prospect in the winter, with the sledges?
+the Rialto? the Bay of Naples after sunset, with Vesuvius in eruption?...
+
+--"Oh Mary--Mimsey--what do I care for Vesuvius, and sunsets, and the
+Bay of Naples ... _just now_? ... Vesuvius is in my heart!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thus began for us both a period of twenty-five years, during which we
+passed eight or nine hours out of the twenty-four in each other's
+company--except on a few rare occasions, when illness or some other
+cause prevented one of us from sleeping at the proper time.
+
+Mary! Mary!
+
+I idolized her while she lived; I idolize her memory.
+
+For her sake all women are sacred to me, even the lowest and most
+depraved and God-forsaken. They always found a helping friend in _her_.
+
+How can I pay a fitting tribute to one so near to me--nearer than any
+woman can ever have been to any man?
+
+I know her mind as I know my own! No two human souls can ever have
+interpenetrated each other as ours have done, or we should have heard of
+it. Every thought she ever had from her childhood to her death has been
+revealed--every thought of mine! Living as we did, it was inevitable.
+The touch of a finger was enough to establish the strange circuit, and
+wake a common consciousness of past and present, either hers or mine.
+
+And oh, how thankful am I that some lucky chance has preserved me,
+murderer and convict as I am, from anything she would have found it
+impossible to condone!
+
+I try not to think that shyness and poverty, ungainliness and social
+imbecility combined, have had as much to do as self-restraint and
+self-respect in keeping me out of so many pitfalls that have been fatal
+to so many men better and more gifted than myself.
+
+I try to think that her extraordinary affection, the chance result of a
+persistent impression received in childhood, has followed me through
+life without my knowing it, and in some occult, mysterious way has kept
+me from thoughts and deeds that would have rendered me unworthy, even in
+her too indulgent eyes.
+
+Who knows but that her sweet mother's farewell kiss and blessing, and
+the tender tears she shed over me when I bade her good-bye at the avenue
+gate so many years ago, may have had an antiseptic charm? Mary! I have
+followed her from her sickly, suffering childhood to her girlhood--from
+her half-ripe, gracefully lanky girlhood to the day of her retirement
+from the world of which she was so great an ornament. From girl to woman
+it seems like a triumphal procession through all the courts of
+Europe--scenes the like of which I have never even dreamed--flattery and
+strife to have turned the head of any princess! And she was the simple
+daughter of a working scientist and physician--the granddaughter of
+a fiddler.
+
+Yet even Austrian court etiquette was waived in favor of the child of
+plain Dr. Seraskier.
+
+What men have I seen at her feet--how splendid, handsome, gallant,
+brilliant, chivalrous, lordly, and gay! And to all, from her, the same
+happy geniality--the same kindly, laughing, frolicsome, innocent gayety,
+with never a thought of self.
+
+M. le Major was right--"elle avait toutes les intelligences de la tete
+et du coeur." And old and young, the best and the worst, seemed to love
+and respect her alike--and women as well as men--for her perfect
+sincerity, her sweet reasonableness.
+
+And all this time I was plodding at my dull drawing-board in
+Pentonville, carrying out another's designs for a stable or a pauper's
+cottage, and not even achieving that poor task particularly well!
+
+It would have driven me mad with humiliation and jealousy to see this
+past life of hers, but we saw it all hand in hand together--the magical
+circuit was established! And I knew, as I saw, how it all affected her,
+and marvelled at her simplicity in thinking all this pomp and splendor
+of so little consequence.
+
+And I trembled to find that what space in her heart was not filled by
+the remembrance of her ever-beloved mother and the image of her father
+(one of the noblest and best of men) enshrined the ridiculous figure of
+a small boy in a white silk hat and an Eton jacket. And that small
+boy was I!
+
+Then came a dreadful twelvemonth that I was fain to leave a blank--the
+twelvemonth during which her girlish fancy for her husband lasted--and
+then her life was mine again forever!
+
+And _my_ life!
+
+The life of a convict is not, as a rule, a happy one; his bed is not
+generally thought a bed of roses.
+
+Mine was!
+
+If I had been the most miserable leper that ever crawled to his wattled
+hut in Molokai, I should also have been the happiest of men, could sleep
+but have found me there, and could I but sleeping have been the friend
+of sleeping Mary Seraskier. She would have loved me all the more!
+
+She has filled my long life of bondage with such felicity as no monarch
+has ever dreamed, and has found her own felicity in doing so. That poor,
+plodding existence I led before my great misadventure, and have tried to
+describe--she has witnessed almost every hour of it with passionate
+interest and sympathy, as we went hand in hand together through each
+other's past. She would at any time have been only too glad to share it,
+leaving her own.
+
+I dreaded the effect of such a sordid revelation upon one who had lived
+so brilliantly and at such an altitude. I need have had no fear! Just as
+she thought me an "angelic hero" at eight years old, she remained
+persuaded all through her life that I was an Apollo--a misunderstood
+genius--a martyr!
+
+I am sick with shame when I think of it. But I am not the first unworthy
+mortal on whom blind, undiscriminating love has chosen to lavish its
+most priceless treasures. Tarapatapoum is not the only fairy who has
+idealized a hulking clown with an ass's head into a Prince Charming;
+the spectacle, alas! is not infrequent. But at least I have been humbly
+thankful for the undeserved blessing, and known its value. And,
+moreover, I think I may lay claim to one talent: that of also knowing by
+intuition when and where and how to love--in a moment--in a
+flash--and forever!
+
+Twenty-five years!
+
+It seems like a thousand, so much have we seen and felt and done in that
+busy enchanted quarter of a century. And yet how quickly the time
+has sped!
+
+And now I must endeavor to give some account of our wonderful inner
+life--_a deux_--a delicate and difficult task.
+
+There is both an impertinence and a lack of taste in any man's laying
+bare to the public eye--to any eye--the bliss that has come to him
+through the love of a devoted woman, with whose life his own has
+been bound up.
+
+The most sympathetic reader is apt to be repelled by such a
+revelation--to be sceptical of the beauties and virtues and mental gifts
+of one he has never seen; at all events, to feel that they are no
+concern of his, and ought to be the subject of a sacred reticence on the
+part of her too fortunate lover or husband.
+
+The lack of such reticence has marred the interest of many an
+autobiography--of many a novel, even; and in private life, who does not
+know by painful experience how embarrassing to the listener such tender
+confidences can sometimes be? I will try my best not to transgress in
+this particular. If I fail (I may have failed already), I can only plead
+that the circumstances are quite exceptional and not to be matched; and
+that allowances must be made for the deep gratitude I owe and feel over
+and above even my passionate admiration and love.
+
+For the next three years of my life has nothing to show but the
+alternation of such honeymooning as never was before with a dull but
+contented prison life, not one hour of which is worth recording, or even
+remembering, except as a foil to its alternative.
+
+It had but one hour for me, the bed hour, and fortunately that was an
+early one.
+
+Healthily tired in body, blissfully expectant in mind, I would lie on my
+back, with my hands duly crossed under my head, and sleep would soon
+steal over me like balm; and before I had forgotten who and what and
+where I really was, I would reach the goal on which my will was intent,
+and waking up, find my body in another place, in another garb, on a
+couch by an enchanted window, still with my arms crossed behind my
+head--in the sacramental attitude.
+
+Then would I stretch my limbs and slip myself free of my outer life, as
+a new-born butterfly from the durance of its self-spun cocoon, with an
+unutterable sense of youth and strength and freshness and felicity; and
+opening my eyes I would see on the adjacent couch the form of Mary, also
+supine, but motionless and inanimate as a statue. Nothing could wake her
+to life till the time came: her hours were somewhat later, and she was
+still in the toils of the outer life I had just left behind me.
+
+And these toils, in her case, were more complicated than in mine.
+Although she had given up the world, she had many friends and an immense
+correspondence. And then, being a woman endowed with boundless health
+and energy, splendid buoyancy of animal spirits, and a great capacity
+for business, she had made for herself many cares and occupations.
+
+She was the virtual mistress of a home for fallen women, a reformatory
+for juvenile thieves, and a children's convalescent hospital--to all of
+which she gave her immediate personal superintendence, and almost every
+penny she had. She had let her house in Hampshire, and lived with a
+couple of female servants in a small furnished house on Campden Hill.
+She did without a carriage, and went about in cabs and omnibuses,
+dressed like a daily governess, though nobody could appear more regally
+magnificent than she did when we were together.
+
+She still kept her name and title, as a potent weapon of influence on
+behalf of her charities, and wielded it mercilessly in her constant raid
+on the purse of the benevolent Philistine, who is fond of great people.
+
+All of which gave rise to much comment that did not affect her
+equanimity in the least.
+
+She also attended lectures, committees, boards, and councils; opened
+bazaars and soup kitchens and coffee taverns, etc. The list of her
+self-imposed tasks was endless. Thus her outer life was filled to
+overflowing, and, unlike mine, every hour of it was worth record--as I
+well know, who have witnessed it all. But this is not the place in which
+to write the outer life of the Duchess of Towers; another hand has done
+that, as everybody knows.
+
+Every page henceforward must be sacred to Mary Seraskier, the "fee
+Tarapatapoum" of "Magna sed Apta" (for so we had called the new home
+and palace of art she had added on to "Parva sed Apta," the home of her
+childhood).
+
+To return thither, where we left her lying unconscious. Soon the color
+would come back to her cheeks, the breath to her nostrils, the pulse to
+her heart, and she would wake to her Eden, as she called it--our common
+inner life--that we might spend it in each other's company for the next
+eight hours.
+
+Pending this happy moment, I would make coffee (such coffee!), and smoke
+a cigarette or two; and to fully appreciate the bliss of _that_ one must
+be an habitual smoker who lives his real life in an English jail.
+
+When she awoke from her sixteen hours' busy trance in the outer world,
+such a choice of pleasures lay before us as no other mortal has ever
+known. She had been all her life a great traveller, and had dwelt in
+many lands and cities, and seen more of life and the world and nature
+than most people. I had but to take her hand, and one of us had but to
+wish, and, lo! wherever either of us had been, whatever either of us had
+seen or heard or felt, or even eaten or drunk, there it was all over
+again to choose from, with the other to share in it--such a hypnotism of
+ourselves and each other as was never dreamed of before.
+
+Everything was as life-like, as real to us both, as it had been to
+either at the actual time of its occurrence, with an added freshness and
+charm that never belonged to mortal existence. It was no dream; it was a
+second life, a better land.
+
+We had, however, to stay within certain bounds, and beware of
+transgressing certain laws that we discovered for ourselves, but could
+not quite account for. For instance, it was fatal to attempt exploits
+that were outside of our real experience; to fly, or to jump from a
+height, or do any of these non-natural things that make the charm and
+wonder of ordinary dreams. If we did so our true dream was blurred, and
+became as an ordinary dream--vague, futile, unreal, and untrue--the
+baseless fabric of a vision. Nor must we alter ourselves in any way;
+even to the shape of a finger-nail, we must remain ourselves; although
+we kept ourselves at our very best, and could choose what age we should
+be. We chose from twenty-six to twenty-eight, and stuck to it.
+
+Yet there were many things, quite as impossible in real life, that we
+could do with impunity--most delightful things!
+
+For instance, after the waking cup of coffee, it was certainly
+delightful to spend a couple of hours in the Yosemite Valley, leisurely
+strolling about and gazing at the giant pines--a never-palling source of
+delight to both of us--breathing the fragrant fresh air, looking at our
+fellow-tourists and listening to their talk, with the agreeable
+consciousness that, solid and substantial as we were to each other, we
+were quite inaudible, invisible, and intangible to them. Often we would
+dispense with the tourists, and have the Yosemite Valley all to
+ourselves. (Always there, and in whatever place she had visited with her
+husband, we would dispense with the figure of her former self and him, a
+sight I could not have borne.)
+
+When we had strolled and gazed our fill, it was delightful again, just
+by a slight effort of her will and a few moments' closing of our eyes,
+to find ourselves driving along the Via Cornice to an exquisite garden
+concert in Dresden, or being rowed in a gondola to a Saturday Pop at St.
+James's Hall. And thence, jumping into a hansom, we would be whisked
+through Piccadilly and the park to the Arc de Triomphe home to "Magna
+sed Apta," Rue de la Pompe, Passy (a charming drive, and not a bit too
+long), just in time for dinner.
+
+A very delicious little dinner, judiciously ordered out of _her_
+remembrance, not _mine_ (and served in the most exquisite little
+dining-room in all Paris--the Princesse de Chevagne's): "huitres
+d'Ostende," let us say, and "soupe a la bonne femme," with a "perdrix
+aux choux" to follow, and pancakes, and "fromage de Brie;" and to drink,
+a bottle of "Romane Conti;" without even the bother of waiters to change
+the dishes; a wish, a moment's shutting of the eyes--_augenblick_! and
+it was done--and then we could wait on each other.
+
+After my prison fare, and with nothing but tenpenny London dinners to
+recollect in the immediate past, I trust I shall not be thought a gross
+materialist for appreciating these small banquets, and in such company.
+(The only dinner I could recall which was not a tenpenny one, except the
+old dinners of my childhood, was that famous dinner at Cray, where I had
+discovered that the Duchess of Towers was Mimsey Seraskier, and I did
+not eat much of _that_.)
+
+Then a cigarette and a cup of coffee, and a glass of curacoa; and after,
+to reach our private box we had but to cross the room and lift
+a curtain.
+
+And there before us was the theatre or opera-house brilliantly lighted,
+and the instruments tuning up, and the splendid company pouring in:
+crowned heads, famous beauties, world-renowned warriors and statesmen,
+Garibaldi, Gortschakoff, Cavour, Bismarck, and Moltke, now so famous,
+and who not? Mary would point them out to me. And in the next box Dr.
+Seraskier and his tall daughter, who seemed friends with all that
+brilliant crowd.
+
+Now it was St. Petersburg, now Berlin, now Vienna, Paris, Naples, Milan,
+London--every great city in turn. But our box was always the same, and
+always the best in the house, and I the one person privileged to smoke
+my cigar in the face of all that royalty, fashion, and splendor.
+
+Then, after the overture, up went the curtain. If it was a play, and the
+play was in German or Russian or Italian, I had but to touch Mary's
+little finger to understand it all--a true but incomprehensible thing.
+For well as I might understand, I could not have spoken a word of
+either, and the moment that slight contact was discontinued, they might
+as well have been acting in Greek or Hebrew, for _me_.
+
+But it was for music we cared the most, and I think I may say that of
+music during those three years (and ever after) we have had our glut.
+For all through her busy waking life Mary found time to hear whatever
+good music was going on in London, that she might bring it back to me at
+night; and we would rehear it together, again and again, and _da capo_.
+
+It is a rare privilege for two private individuals, and one of them a
+convict, to assist at a performance honored by the patronage and
+presence of crowned heads, and yet be able to encore any particular
+thing that pleases them. How often have we done that!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Oh, Joachim! oh, Clara Schumann! oh, Piattil--all of whom I know so
+well, but have never heard with the fleshly ear! Oh, others, whom it
+would be invidious to mention without mentioning all--a glorious list!
+How we have made you, all unconscious, repeat the same movements over
+and over again, without ever from you a sign of impatience or fatigue!
+How often have we summoned Liszt to play to us on his own favorite
+piano, which adorned our own favorite sitting-room! How little he knew
+(or will ever know now, alas!) what exquisite delight he gave us!
+
+Oh, Pattit, Angelina! Oh, Santley and Sims Reeves! Oh, De Soria,
+nightingale of the drawing-room, I wonder you have a note left!
+
+And you, Ristori, and you, Salvini, et vous, divine Sarah, qui debutiez
+alors! On me dit que votre adorable voix a perdu un peu de sa premiere
+fraicheur. Cela ne m'etonne pas! Bien sur, nous y sommes pour
+quelque chose!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And then the picture-galleries, the museums, the botanical and
+zoological gardens of all countries--"Magna sed Apta" had space for them
+all, even to the Elgin Marbles room of the British Museum, which I
+added myself.
+
+What enchanted hours have we spent among the pictures and statues of the
+world, weeding them here and there, perhaps, or hanging them
+differently, or placing them in what we thought a better light! The
+"Venus of Milo" showed to far greater advantage in "Magna sed Apta" than
+at the Louvre.
+
+And when busied thus delightfully at home, and to enhance the delight,
+we made it shocking bad weather outside; it rained cats and dogs, or
+else the north wind piped, and snow fell on the desolate gardens of
+"Magna sed Apta," and whitened the landscape as far as eye could see.
+
+Nearest to our hearts, however, were many pictures of our own time, for
+we were moderns of the moderns, after all, in spite of our efforts of
+self-culture.
+
+There was scarcely a living or recently living master in Europe whose
+best works were not in our possession, so lighted and hung that even the
+masters themselves would have been content; for we had plenty of space
+at our command, and each picture had a wall to itself, so toned as to do
+full justice to its beauty, and a comfortable sofa for two
+just opposite.
+
+But in the little room we most lived in, the room with the magic window,
+we had crowded a few special favorites of the English school, for we had
+so much foreign blood in us that we were more British than John Bull
+himself--_plus royalistes que le Roi_.
+
+There was Millais's "Autumn Leaves," his "Youth of Sir Walter Raleigh,"
+his "Chill October"; Watts's "Endymion," and "Orpheus and Eurydice";
+Burne-Jones's "Chant d'Amour," and his "Laus Veneris"; Alma-Tadema's
+"Audience of Agrippa," and the "Women of Amphissa"; J. Whistler's
+portrait of his mother; the "Venus and Aesculapius," by E. J. Poynter;
+F. Leighton's "Daphnephoria"; George Mason's "Harvest Moon"; and
+Frederic Walker's "Harbor of Refuge," and, of course, Merridew's
+"Sun-God."
+
+While on a screen, designed by H. S. Marks, and exquisitely decorated
+round the margin with golden plovers and their eggs (which I adore),
+were smaller gems in oil and water-color that Mary had fallen in love
+with at one time or another. The immortal "Moonlight Sonata," by
+Whistler; E, J. Poynter's exquisite "Our Lady of the Fields" (dated
+Paris, 1857); a pair of adorable "Bimbi" by V. Prinsep, who seems very
+fond of children; T. R. Lamont's touching "L'Apres Diner de l'Abbe
+Constantin," with the sweet girl playing the old spinet; and that
+admirable work of T. Armstrong, in his earlier and more realistic
+manner, "Le Zouave et la Nounou," not to mention splendid rough sketches
+by John Leech, Charles Keene, Tenniel, Sambourne, Furniss, Caldecott,
+etc.; not to mention, also, endless little sketches in silver point of a
+most impossibly colossal, blackavised, shaggy-coated St. Bernard--signed
+with the familiar French name of some gay troubadour of the pencil, some
+stray half-breed like myself, and who seems to have loved his dog as
+much as I loved mine.
+
+Then suddenly, in the midst of all this unparalleled artistic splendor,
+we felt that a something was wanting. There was a certain hollowness
+about it; and we discovered that in our case the principal motives for
+collecting all these beautiful things were absent.
+
+  1. We were not the sole possessors.
+  2. We had nobody to show them to.
+  3. Therefore we could take no pride in them.
+
+[Illustration: THE NURSERY SCHOOL-ROOM.]
+
+And found that when we wanted bad weather for a change, and the joys of
+home, we could be quite as happy in my old school-room, where the
+squirrels and the monkey and the hedgehog were, with each of us on a
+cane-bottomed arm-chair by the wood-fire, each roasting chestnuts for
+the other, and one book between us, for one of us to read out loud; or,
+better still, the morning and evening papers she had read a few hours
+earlier; and marvellous to relate, she had not even _read_ them when
+awake! she had merely glanced through them carefully, taking in the
+aspect of each column one after another, from top to bottom--and yet she
+was able to read out every word from the dream-paper she held in her
+hands--thus truly chewing the very cud of journalism!
+
+This always seemed to us, in a small but practical way, the most
+complete and signal triumph of mind over matter we had yet achieved.
+
+Not, indeed, that we could read much, we had so much to talk about.
+
+Unfortunately, the weak part of "Magna sed Apta" was its library.
+Naturally it could only consist of books that one or the other of us had
+read when awake. She had led such an active life that but little leisure
+had been left her for books, and I had read only as an every-day young
+man reads who is fond of reading.
+
+However, such books as we _had_ read were made the most of, and so
+magnificently bound that even their authors would have blushed with
+pride and pleasure had they been there to see. And though we had little
+time for reading them over again, we could enjoy the true bibliophilous
+delight of gazing at their backs, and taking them down and fingering
+them and putting them carefully back again.
+
+In most of these treats, excursions, festivities, and pleasures of the
+fireside, Mary was naturally leader and hostess; it could scarcely have
+been otherwise.
+
+There was once a famous Mary, of whom it was said that to know her was a
+liberal education. I think I may say that to have known Mary Seraskier
+has been all that to me!
+
+But now and then I would make some small attempt at returning her
+hospitality.
+
+We have slummed together in Clerkenwell, Smithfield, Cow Cross,
+Petticoat Lane, Ratcliffe Highway, and the East India and West
+India docks.
+
+She has been with me to penny gaffs and music-halls; to Greenwich Fair,
+and Cremorne and Rosherville gardens--and liked them all. She knew
+Pentonville as well as I do; and my old lodgings there, where we have
+both leaned over my former shoulder as I read or drew. It was she who
+rescued from oblivion my little prophetic song about "The Chime," which
+I had quite forgotten. She has been to Mr. Lintot's parties, and found
+them most amusing--especially Mr. Lintot.
+
+And going further back into the past, she has roamed with me all over
+Paris, and climbed with me the towers of Notre Dame, and looked in vain
+for the mystic word [Greek: Anagkae]!
+
+But I had also better things to show, untravelled as I was.
+
+She had never seen Hampstead Heath, which I knew by heart; and Hampstead
+Heath at any time, but especially on a sunny morning in late October, is
+not to be disdained by any one.
+
+Half the leaves have fallen, so that one can see the fading glory of
+those that remain; yellow and brown and pale and hectic red, shining
+like golden guineas and bright copper coins against the rich, dark,
+business-like green of the trees that mean to flourish all the winter
+through, like the tall slanting pines near the Spaniards, and the old
+cedar-trees, and hedges of yew and holly, for which the Hampstead
+gardens are famous.
+
+Before us lies a sea of fern, gone a russet-brown from decay, in which
+are isles of dark green gorse, and little trees with little scarlet and
+orange and lemon-colored leaflets fluttering down, and running after
+each other on the bright grass, under the brisk west wind which makes
+the willows rustle, and turn up the whites of their leaves in pious
+resignation to the coming change.
+
+Harrow-on-the-Hill, with its pointed spire, rises blue in the distance;
+and distant ridges, like receding waves, rise into blueness, one after
+the other, out of the low-lying mist; the last ridge bluely melting into
+space. In the midst of it all gleams the Welsh Harp Lake, like a piece
+of sky that has become unstuck and tumbled into the landscape with its
+shiny side up.
+
+On the other side, all London, with nothing but the gilded cross of St.
+Paul's on a level with the eye; it lies at our feet, as Paris used to do
+from the heights of Passy, a sight to make true dreamers gaze and think
+and dream the more; and there we sit thinking and dreaming and gazing
+our fill, hand in hand, our spirits rushing together.
+
+Once as we sat we heard the clatter of hoofs behind us, and there was a
+troop of my old regiment out exercising. Invisible to all but ourselves,
+and each other, we watched the wanton troopers riding by on their meek
+black chargers.
+
+First came the cornet--a sunny-haired Apollo, a gilded youth, graceful
+and magnificent to the eye--careless, fearless, but stupid, harsh, and
+proud--an English Phebus de Chateaupers--the son of a great contractor;
+I remembered him well, and that he loved me not. Then the rank and file
+in stable jackets, most of them (but for a stalwart corporal here and
+there) raw, lanky youths, giving promise of much future strength, and
+each leading a second horse; and among them, longest and lankiest of
+them all, but ruddy as a ploughboy, and stolidly whistling _"On revient
+toujours a ses premiers amours,"_ rode my former self--a sight (or
+sound) that seemed to touch some tender chord in Mary's nature, where
+there were so many, since it filled her eyes with tears.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+To describe in full a honey-moon filled with such adventures, and that
+lasted for three years, is unnecessary. It would be but another
+superficial record of travel, by another unskilled pen. And what a pen
+is wanted for such a theme! It was not mere life, it was the very cream
+and essence of life, that we shared with each other--all the toil and
+trouble, the friction and fatigue, left out. The necessary earthly
+journey through time and space from one joy to another was omitted,
+unless such a journey were a joy in itself.
+
+For instance, a pleasant hour can be spent on the deck of a splendid
+steamer, as it cleaves its way through a sapphire tropical sea, bound
+for some lovely West Indian islet; with a good cigar and the dearest
+companion in the world, watching the dolphins and the flying-fish, and
+mildly interesting one's self in one's fellow-passengers, the captain,
+the crew. And then, the hour spent and the cigar smoked out, it is well
+to shut one's eyes and have one's self quietly lowered down the side of
+the vessel into a beautiful sledge, and then, half smothered in costly
+furs, to be whirled along the frozen Neva to a ball at the Winter
+Palace, there to valse with one's Mary among all the beauty and chivalry
+of St. Petersburg, and never a soul to find fault with one's valsing,
+which at first was far from perfect, or one's attire, which was not that
+of the fashionable world of the day, nor was Mary's either. We were
+aesthetic people, and very Greek, who made for ourselves fashions of our
+own, which I will not describe.
+
+[Illustration:]
+
+Where have we not waltzed together, from Buckingham Palace downward? I
+confess I grew to take a delight in valsing, or waltzing, or whatever it
+is properly called; and although it is not much to boast of, I may say
+that after a year or two no better dancer than I was to be found in
+all Vienna.
+
+And here, by the way, I may mention what pleasure it gave me (hand in
+hand with Mary, of course, as usual) to renew and improve my
+acquaintance with our British aristocracy, begun so agreeably many years
+ago at Lady Cray's concert.
+
+Our British aristocracy does not waltz well by any means, and lacks
+lightness generally; but it may gratify and encourage some of its
+members to hear that Peter Ibbetson (ex-private soldier, architect and
+surveyor, convict and criminal lunatic), who has had unrivalled
+opportunities for mixing with the cream of European society, considers
+our British aristocracy quite the best-looking, best-dressed, and
+best-behaved aristocracy of them all, and the most sensible and the
+least exclusive--perhaps the most sensible _because_ the least
+exclusive.
+
+It often snubs, but does not altogether repulse, those gifted and
+privileged outsiders who (just for the honor and glory of the thing) are
+ever so ready to flatter and instruct and amuse it, and run its
+errands, and fetch and carry, and tumble for its pleasure, and even to
+marry such of its "ugly ducklings" (or shall we say such of its
+"unprepossessing cygnets?") as cannot hope to mate with birds of their
+own feather.
+
+For it has the true English eye for physical beauty.
+
+Indeed, it is much given to throw the handkerchief--successfully, of
+course--and, most fortunately for itself, beyond the pale of its own
+narrow precincts--nay, beyond the broad Atlantic, even, to the land
+where beauty and dollars are to be found in such happy combination.
+
+Nor does it disdain the comeliness of the daughters of Israel, nor their
+shekels, nor their brains, nor their ancient and most valuable blood. It
+knows the secret virtue of that mechanical transfusion of fluids
+familiar to science under the name of "endosmoses" and "exosmoses" (I
+hope I have spelled them rightly), and practises the same. Whereby it
+shows itself wise in its generation, and will endure the longer, which
+cannot be very long.
+
+Peter Ibbetson (etc., etc.), for one, wishes it no manner of harm.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But to return. With all these temptations of travel and amusement and
+society and the great world, such was our insatiable fondness for "the
+pretty place of our childhood" and all its associations, that our
+greatest pleasure of all was to live our old life over again and again,
+and make Gogo and Mimsey and our parents and cousins and M. le Major go
+through their old paces once more; and to recall _new_ old paces for
+them, which we were sometimes able to do, out of stray forgotten bits of
+the past; to hunt for which was the most exciting sport in the world.
+
+Our tenderness for these beloved shades increased with familiarity. We
+could see all the charm and goodness and kindness of these dear fathers
+and mothers of ours with the eyes of matured experience, for we were
+pretty much of an age with them now; no other children could ever say as
+much since the world began, and how few young parents could bear such a
+scrutiny as ours.
+
+Ah! what would we not have given to extort just a spark of recognition,
+but that was impossible; or to have been able to whisper just a word of
+warning, which would have averted the impending strokes of inexorable
+fate! They might have been alive now, perhaps--old indeed, but honored
+and loved as no parents ever were before. How different everything would
+have been! Alas! alas!
+
+And of all things in the world, we never tired of that walk through the
+avenue and park and Bois de Boulogne to the Mare d'Auteuil; strolling
+there leisurely on an early spring afternoon, just in time to spend a
+midsummer hour or two on its bank, and watch the old water-rat and the
+dytiscus and the tadpoles and newts, and see the frogs jump; and then
+walking home at dusk in the school-room of my old home; and then back to
+war, well-lighted "Magna sed Apta" by moonlight through the avenue on
+New Year's Eve, ankle-deep in snow; all in a few short hours.
+
+Dream winds and dream weathers--what an enchantment! And all real!
+
+Soft caressing rains that do not wet us if we do not wish them to; sharp
+frosts that brace but never chill; blazing suns that neither scorch
+nor dazzle.
+
+Blustering winds of early spring, that seem to sweep right through these
+solid frames of ours, and thrill us to the very marrow with the old
+heroic excitement and ecstasy we knew so well in happy childhood, but
+can no longer feel now when awake!
+
+Bland summer breezes, heavy with the scent of long lost French woods and
+fields and gardens in full flower; swift, soft, moist equinoctial gales,
+blowing from the far-off orchards of Meudon, or the old market gardens
+of Suresnes in their autumnal decay, and laden, we do not know why, with
+strange, mysterious, troubling reminiscence too subtle and elusive to be
+expressed in any tongue--too sweet for any words! And then the dark
+December wind that comes down from the north, and brings the short,
+early twilights and the snow, and drives us home, pleasantly shivering,
+to the chimney-corner and the hissing logs--_chez nous!_
+
+It is the last night of an old year--_la veille du jour de l'an_.
+
+Ankle-deep in snow, we walk to warm, well-lighted "Magna sed Apta," up
+the moonlit avenue. It is dream snow, and yet we feel it crunch beneath
+our feet; but if we turn to look, the tracks of our footsteps have
+disappeared--and we cast no shadows, though the moon is full!
+
+M. le Major goes by, and Yverdon the postman, and Pere Francois, with
+his big sabots, and others, and their footprints remain--and their
+shadows are strong and sharp!
+
+They wish each other the compliments of the season as they meet and
+pass; they wish us nothing! We give them _la bonne annee_ at the tops of
+our voices; they do not heed us in the least, though our voices are as
+resonant as theirs. We are wishing them a "Happy New Year," that dawned
+for good or evil nearly twenty years ago.
+
+Out comes Gogo from the Seraskiers', with Mimsey. He makes a snowball
+and throws it. It flies straight through me, and splashes itself on Pere
+Francois's broad back. "Ah, ce polisson de Monsieur Gogo ... attendez un
+peu!" and Pere Francois returns the compliment--straight through me
+again, as it seems; and I do not even feel it! Mary and I are as solid
+to each other as flesh and blood can make us. We cannot even touch these
+dream people without their melting away into thin air; we can only hear
+and see them, but that in perfection!
+
+There goes that little Andre Corbin, the poulterer's son, running along
+the slippery top of Madame Pele's garden wall, which is nearly ten
+feet high.
+
+"Good heavens," cries Mary, "stop him! Don't you remember? When he gets
+to the corner he'll fall down and break both his legs!"
+
+I rush and bellow out to him--
+
+"Descends donc, malheureux; tu vas te casser les deux jambes! Saute!
+saute!" ... I cry, holding out my arms. He does not pay the slightest
+attention: he reaches the corner, followed low down by Gogo and Mimsey,
+who are beside themselves with generous envy and admiration. Stimulated
+by their applause, he becomes more foolhardy than ever, and even tries
+to be droll, and standing on one leg, sings a little song that begins--
+
+_"Maman m'a donne quat' sous Pour m'en aller a la foire, Non pas pour
+manger ni boire, Alais pour m'regaler d'joujoux!"_
+
+Then suddenly down he slips, poor boy, and breaks both his legs below
+the knee on an iron rail, whereby he becomes a cripple for life.
+
+All this sad little tragedy of a New-year's Eve plays itself anew. The
+sympathetic crowd collects; Mimsey and Gogo weep; the heart-broken
+parents arrive, and the good little doctor Larcher; and Mary and I look
+on like criminals, so impossible it seems not to feel that we might have
+prevented it all!
+
+We two alone are alive and substantial in all this strange world of
+shadows, who seem, as far as we can hear and see, no less substantial
+and alive than ourselves. They exist for us; we do not exist for them.
+We exist for each other only, waking or sleeping; for even the people
+among whom our waking life is spent know hardly more of us, and what our
+real existence is, than poor little Andre Corbin, who has just broken
+his legs for us over again!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+And so, back to "Magna sed Apta," both saddened by this deplorable
+misadventure, to muse and talk and marvel over these wonders; penetrated
+to the very heart's core by a dim sense of some vast, mysterious power,
+latent in the sub-consciousness of man--unheard of, undreamed of as yet,
+but linking him with the Infinite and the Eternal.
+
+And how many things we always had to talk about besides!
+
+Heaven knows, I am not a brilliant conversationalist, but she was the
+most easily amusable person in the world--interested in everything that
+interested me, and I disdamaged myself (to use one of her
+Anglo-Gallicisms) of the sulky silence of years.
+
+Of her as a companion it is not for me to speak. It would be
+impertinent, and even ludicrous, for a person in my position to dilate
+on the social gifts of the famous Duchess of Towers.
+
+Incredible as it may appear, however, most of our conversation was about
+very common and earthly topics--her homes and refuges, the difficulties
+of their management, her eternal want of money, her many schemes and
+plans and experiments and failures and disenchantments--in all of which
+I naturally took a very warm interest. And then my jail, and all that
+occurred there--in all of which I became interested myself because it
+interested her so passionately; she knew every corner of it that I knew,
+every detail of the life there--the name, appearance, and history of
+almost every inmate, and criticised its internal economy with a
+practical knowledge of affairs; a business-like sagacity at which I
+never ceased to marvel.
+
+One of my drollest recollections is of a visit she
+paid there _in the flesh_, by some famous philanthropists of both sexes.
+I was interviewed by them all as the model prisoner, who, for his
+unorthodoxy, was a credit to the institution. She listened demurely to
+my intelligent answers when I was questioned as to my bodily health,
+etc., and asked whether I had any complaints to make. Complaints! Never
+was jail-bird so thoroughly satisfied with his nest--so healthy, so
+happy, so well-behaved. She took notes all the time.
+
+[Illustration: MARY, DUCHESS OF TOWERS. From a photograph by
+Strlkzchuski, Warsaw.]
+
+Eight hours before we had been strolling hand in hand through the Uffizi
+Gallery in Florence; eight hours later we should be in each
+other's arms.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Strange to relate, this happiness of ours--so deep, so acute, so
+transcendent, so unmatched in all the history of human affection--was
+not always free of unreasonable longings and regrets. Man is never so
+blessed but what he would have his blessedness still greater.
+
+The reality of our close companionship, of our true possession of each
+other (during our allotted time), was absolute, complete, and thorough.
+No Darby that ever lived can ever have had sweeter, warmer, more tender
+memories of any Joan than I have now of Mary Seraskier! Although each
+was, in a way, but a seeming illusion of the other's brain, the illusion
+was no illusion for us. It was an illusion that showed the truth, as
+does the illusion of sight. Like twin kernels in one shell
+("Philipschen," as Mary called it), we touched at more points and were
+closer than the rest of mankind (with each of them a separate shell of
+his own). We tried and tested this in every way we could devise, and
+never found ourselves at fault, and never ceased to marvel at so great a
+wonder. For instance, I received letters from her in jail (and answered
+them) in an intricate cipher we had invented and perfected together
+entirely during sleep, and referring to things that had happened to us
+both when together.[A]
+
+[Footnote A: _Note_.--Several of these letters are in my possession.
+MADGE PLUNKET.]
+
+Our privileges were such as probably no human beings could have ever
+enjoyed before. Time and space were annihilated for us at the mere wish
+of either--we lived in a palace of delight; all conceivable luxuries
+were ours--and, better than all, and perennially, such freshness and
+elation as belong only to the morning of life--and such a love for each
+other (the result of circumstances not to be paralleled) as time could
+never slake or quench till death should come and part us. All this, and
+more, was our portion for eight hours out of twenty-four.
+
+So what must we do sometimes, but fret that the sixteen hours which
+remained did not belong to us well; that we must live two-thirds of our
+lives apart; that we could not share the toils and troubles of our
+work-a-day, waking existence, as we shared the blissful guerdon of our
+seeming sleep--the glories of our common dream.
+
+And then we would lament the lost years we had spent in mutual ignorance
+and separation--a deplorable waste of life; when life, sleeping or
+waking, was so short.
+
+How different things might have been with us had we but known!
+
+We need never have lost sight and touch of each other; we might have
+grown up, and learned and worked and struggled together from the
+first--boy and girl, brother and sister, lovers, man and wife--and yet
+have found our blessed dream-land and dwelt in it just the same.
+
+Children might have been born to us! Sweet children, _beaux comme le
+jour_, as in Madame Perrault's fairy tales; even beautiful and good as
+their mother.
+
+And as we talked of these imaginary little beings and tried to picture
+them, we felt in ourselves such a stupendous capacity for loving the
+same that we would fall to weeping on each other's shoulders. Full well
+I knew, even as if they had formed a part of my own personal experience,
+all the passion and tenderness, all the wasted anguish of her brief,
+ill-starred motherhood: the very ache of my jealousy that she should
+have borne a child to another man was forgotten in that keen and
+thorough comprehension! Ah, yes ... that hungry love, that woful pity,
+which not to know is hardly quite to have lived! Childless as I am
+(though old enough to be a grandfather) I have it all by heart!
+
+Never could we hope for son or daughter of our own. For us the blessed
+flower of love in rich, profuse, unfading bloom; but its blessed fruit
+of life, never, never, never!
+
+Our only children were Mimsey and Gogo, between whom and ourselves was
+an impassable gulf, and who were unconscious of our very existence,
+except for Mimsey's strange consciousness that a Fairy Tarapatapoum and
+a Prince Charming were watching over them.
+
+All this would always end, as it could not but end, in our realizing the
+more fully our utter dependence on each other for all that made life not
+only worth living, ingrates that we were, but a heaven on earth for us
+both; and, indeed, we could not but recognize that merely thus to love
+and be loved was in itself a thing so immense (without all the other
+blessings we had) that we were fain to tremble at our audacity in daring
+to wish for more.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thus sped three years, and would have sped all the rest, perhaps, but
+for an incident that made an epoch in our joint lives, and turned all
+our thoughts and energies in a new direction.
+
+
+
+
+Part Six
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Some petty annoyance to which I had been subjected by one of the prison
+authorities had kept me awake for a little while after I had gone to
+bed, so that when at last I awoke in "Magna sed Apta," and lay on my
+couch there (with that ever-fresh feeling of coming to life in heaven
+after my daily round of work in an earthly jail), I was conscious that
+Mary was there already, making coffee, the fragrance of which filled
+the room, and softly humming a tune as she did so--a quaint, original,
+but most beautiful tune, that thrilled me with indescribable emotion,
+for I had never heard it with the bodily ear before, and yet it was as
+familiar to me as "God save the Queen."
+
+As I listened with rapt ears and closed eyes, wonderful scenes passed
+before my mental vision: the beautiful white-haired lady of my childish
+dreams, leading a small _female_ child by the hand, and that child was
+myself; the pigeons and their tower, the stream and the water-mill; the
+white-haired young man with red heels to his shoes; a very fine lady,
+very tall, stout, and middle-aged, magnificently dressed in brocaded
+silk; a park with lawns and alleys and trees cut into trim formal
+shapes; a turreted castle--all kinds of charming scenes and people of
+another age and country.
+
+"What on earth is that wonderful tune, Mary?" I exclaimed, when she had
+finished it.
+
+"It's my favorite tune," she answered; "I seldom hum it for fear of
+wearing away its charm. I suppose that is why you have never heard it
+before. Isn't it lovely? I've been trying to lull you awake with it.
+
+"My grandfather, the violinist, used to play it with variations of his
+own, and made it famous in his time; but it was never published, and
+it's now forgotten.
+
+"It is called 'Le Chant du Triste Commensal,' and was composed by his
+grandmother, a beautiful French woman, who played the fiddle too; but
+not as a profession. He remembered her playing it when he was a child
+and she was quite an old lady, just as I remember _his_ playing it when
+I was a girl in Vienna, and he was a white-haired old man. She used to
+play holding her fiddle downward, on her knee, it seems; and always
+played in perfect tune, quite in the middle of the note, and with
+excellent taste and expression; it was her playing that decided his
+career. But she was like 'Single-speech Hamilton,' for this was the only
+thing she ever composed. She composed it under great grief and
+excitement, just after her husband had died from the bite of a wolf, and
+just before the birth of her twin-daughters--her only children--one of
+whom was my great-grandmother."
+
+"And what was this wonderful old lady's name?"
+
+"Gatienne Aubery; she married a Breton squire called Budes, who was a
+_gentilhomme verrier_ near St. Prest, in Anjou--that is, he made
+glass--decanters, water-bottles, tumblers, and all that, I suppose--in
+spite of his nobility. It was not considered derogatory to do so;
+indeed, it was the only trade permitted to the _noblesse_, and one had
+to be at least a squire to engage in it.
+
+"She was a very notable woman, _la belle Verriere_, as she was called;
+and she managed the glass factory for many years after her husband's
+death, and made lots of money for her two daughters."
+
+"How strange!" I exclaimed; "Gatienne Aubery! Dame du Brail--Budes--the
+names are quite familiar to me. Mathurin Budes, Seigneur de Monhoudeard
+et de Verny le Moustier."
+
+"Yes, that's it. How wonderful that you should know! One daughter,
+Jeanne, married my greatgrandfather, an officer in the Hungarian army;
+and Seraskier, the fiddler, was their only child. The other (so like her
+sister that only her mother could distinguish them) was called Anne, and
+married a Comte de Bois something."
+
+"Boismorinel. Why, all those names are in my family too. My father used
+to make me paint their arms and quarterings when I was a child, on
+Sunday mornings, to keep me quiet. Perhaps we are related by blood,
+you and I."
+
+"Oh, that would be too delightful!" said Mary. "I wonder how we could
+find out? Have you no family papers?"
+
+_I_. "There were lots of them, in a horse-hair trunk, but I don't know
+where they are now. What good would family papers have been to me?
+Ibbetson took charge of them when I changed my name. I suppose his
+lawyers have got them."
+
+_She_. "Happy thought; we will do without lawyers. Let us go round to
+your old house, and make Gogo paint the quarterings over again for us,
+and look over his shoulder."
+
+Happy thought, indeed! We drank our coffee and went straight to my old
+house, with the wish (immediate father to the deed) that Gogo should be
+there, once more engaged in his long forgotten accomplishment of
+painting coats of arms.
+
+It was a beautiful Sunday morning, and we found Gogo hard at work at a
+small table by an open window. The floor was covered with old deeds and
+parchments and family papers; and le beau Pasquier, at another table,
+was deep in his own pedigree, making notes on the margin--an occupation
+in which he delighted--and unconsciously humming as he did so. The sunny
+room was filled with the penetrating soft sound of his voice, as a
+conservatory is filled with the scent of its flowers.
+
+By the strangest inconsistency my dear father, a genuine republican at
+heart (for all his fancied loyalty to the white lily of the Bourbons), a
+would-be scientist, who in reality was far more impressed by a clever
+and industrious French mechanic than by a prince (and would, I think,
+have preferred the former's friendship and society), yet took both a
+pleasure and a pride in his quaint old parchments and obscure
+quarterings. So would I, perhaps, if things had gone differently with
+me--for what true democrat, however intolerant of such weakness in
+others, ever thinks lightly of his own personal claims to aristocratic
+descent, shadowy as these may be!
+
+He was fond of such proverbs and aphorisms as "noblesse oblige," "bon
+sang ne sait mentir," "bon chien chasse de race," etc., and had even
+invented a little aphorism of his own, to comfort him when he was extra
+hard up, "bon gentilhomme n'a jamais honte de la misere." All of which
+sayings, to do him justice, he reserved for home consumption
+exclusively, and he would have been the first to laugh on hearing them
+in the mouth of any one else.
+
+Of his one great gift, the treasure in his throat, he thought absolutely
+nothing at all.
+
+"Ce que c'est que de nous!"
+
+Gogo was coloring the quarterings of the Pasquier family--_la maison
+de Pasquier_, as it was called--in a printed book (_Armorial General du
+Maine et de l'Anjou_), according to the instructions that were given
+underneath. He used one of Madame Liard's three-sou boxes, and the tints
+left much to be desired.
+
+We looked over his shoulder and read the picturesque old jargon, which
+sounds even prettier and more comforting and more idiotic in French than
+in English. It ran thus--
+
+"Pasquier (branche des Seigneurs de la Mariere et du Hirel), party de 4
+pieces et coupe de 2.
+
+"Au premier, de Herault, qui est de ecartele de gueules et d'argent.
+
+"Au deux, de Budes, qui est d'or au pin de sinople.
+
+"Au trois, d'Aubery--qui est d'azur a trois croissants d'argent.
+
+"Au quatre, de Busson qui est d'argent au lyon de sable arme couronne et
+lampasse d'or," And so on, through the other quarterings: Bigot, Epinay,
+Malestroit, Mathefelon. And finally, "Sur le tout, de Pasquier qui est
+d'or a trois lyons d'azur, au franc quartier ecartele des royames de
+Castille et de Leon."
+
+Presently my mother came home from the English chapel in the Rue
+Marboeuf, where she had been with Sarah, the English maid. Lunch was
+announced, and we were left alone with the family papers. With infinite
+precautions, for fear of blurring the dream, we were able to find what
+we wanted to find--namely, that we were the great-great-grandchildren
+and only possible living descendants of Gatienne, the fair glassmaker
+and composer of "Le Chant du Triste Commensal."
+
+Thus runs the descent--
+
+Jean Aubery, Seigneur du Brail, married Anne Busson. His daughter,
+Gatienne Aubery, Dame du Brail, married Mathurin Budes, Seigneur de
+Verny le Moustier et de Monhoudeard.
+
+ --------------------------^--------------------------
+/                                                     \
+
+
+Anne Budes, Dame de            Jeanne Budes, Dame du
+  Verny le Moustier, married     Brail et de Monhoudeard,
+  Guy Herault, Comte             married Ulric
+  de Boismorinel.                Seraskier.
+
+Jeanne Francois Herault de     Otto Seraskier, violinist,
+  Boismorinel married            married Teresa Pulci.
+  Francois Pasquier de la
+  Mariere.
+
+
+Jean Pasquier de la Mariere    Johann Seraskier, M.D.,
+  married Catherine              married Laura Desmond.
+  Ibbetson-Biddulph.
+
+Pierre Pasquier de la Mariere  Mary Seraskier, Duchess of
+  (_alias_ Peter Ibbetson,  Towers.
+  convict).
+
+We walked back to "Magna sed Apta" in great joy, and there we celebrated
+our newly-discovered kinship by a simple repast, out of _my_ repertoire
+this time. It consisted of oysters from Rules's in Maiden Lane, when
+they were sixpence a dozen, and bottled stout (_l'eau m'en vient a la
+bouche_); and we spent the rest of the hours allotted to us that night
+in evolving such visions as we could from the old tune "Le Chant du
+Triste Commensal," with varying success; she humming it, accompanying
+herself on the piano in her masterly, musician-like way, with one hand,
+and seeing all that I saw by holding my hand with the other.
+
+By slow degrees the scenes and people evoked grew less dim, and whenever
+the splendid and important lady, whom we soon identified for certain as
+Gatienne, our common great-great-grandmother, appeared--"la belle
+verriere de Verny le Moustier"--she was more distinct than the others;
+no doubt, because we both had part and parcel in her individuality, and
+also because her individuality was so strongly marked.
+
+And before I was called away at the inexorable hour, we had the supreme
+satisfaction of seeing her play the fiddle to a shadowy company of
+patched and powdered and bewigged ladies and gentlemen, who seemed to
+take much sympathetic delight in her performance, and actually, even, of
+just hearing the thin, unearthly tones of that most original and
+exquisite melody, "Le Chant du Triste Commensal," to a quite inaudible
+accompaniment on the spinet by her daughter, evidently Anne Herault,
+Comtesse de Boismorinel (_nee_ Budes), while the small child Jeanne de
+Boismorinel (afterwards Dame Pasquier de la Mariere) listened with
+dreamy rapture.
+
+And, just as Mary had said, she played her fiddle with its body
+downward, and resting on her knees, as though it had been an undersized
+'cello. I then vaguely remembered having dreamed of such a figure when a
+small child.
+
+Within twenty-four hours of this strange adventure the practical and
+business-like Mary had started, in the flesh and with her maid, for that
+part of France where these, my ancestors, had lived, and within a
+fortnight she had made herself mistress of all my French family history,
+and had visited such of the different houses of my kin as were still in
+existence.
+
+The turreted castle of my childish dreams, which, with the adjacent
+glass-factory, was still called Verny le Moustier, was one of these. She
+found it in the possession of a certain Count Hector du Chamorin, whose
+grandfather had purchased it at the beginning of the century.
+
+He had built an entirely new plant, and made it one of the first
+glass-factories in Western France. But the old turreted _corps de logis_
+still remained, and his foreman lived there with his wife and family.
+The _pigeonnier_ had been pulled down to make room for a shed with a
+steam-engine, and the whole aspect of the place was revolutionized; but
+the stream and water-mill (the latter a mere picturesque ruin) were
+still there; the stream was, however, little more than a ditch, some ten
+feet deep and twenty broad, with a fringe of gnarled and twisted willows
+and alders, many of them dead.
+
+It was called "Le Brail," and had given its name to my
+great-great-grandmother's property, whence it had issued thirty miles
+away (and many hundred years ago); but the old Chateau du Brail, the
+manor of the Auberys, had become a farm-house.
+
+The Chateau de la Mariere, in its walled park, and with its beautiful,
+tall, hexagonal tower, dated 1550, and visible for miles around, was now
+a prosperous cider brewery; it is still, and lies on the high-road from
+Angers to Le Mans.
+
+The old forest of Boismorinel, that had once belonged to the family of
+Herault, was still in existence; charcoal-burners were to be found in
+its depths, and a stray roebuck or two; but no more wolves and
+wild-boars, as in the olden time. And where the old castle had been now
+stood the new railway station of Boismorinel et Saint Maixent.
+
+[Illustration: LA BELLE VERRIERE]
+
+Most of such Budes, Bussons, Heraults, Auberys, and Pasquiers as were
+still to be found in the country, probably distant kinsmen of Mary's
+and mine, were lawyers, doctors, or priests, or had gone into trade and
+become respectably uninteresting; such as they were, they would scarcely
+have cared to claim kinship with such as I.
+
+But a hundred years ago and more these were names of importance in Maine
+and Anjou; their bearers were descended for the most part from younger
+branches of houses which in the Middle Ages had intermarried with all
+there was of the best in France; and although they were looked down upon
+by the _noblesse_ of the court and Versailles, as were all the
+provincial nobility, they held their own well in their own country;
+feasting, hunting, and shooting with each other; dancing and fiddling
+and making love and intermarrying; and blowing glass, and growing richer
+and richer, till the Revolution came and blew them and their glass into
+space, and with them many greater than themselves, but few better. And
+all record of them and of their doings, pleasant and genial people as
+they were, is lost, and can only be recalled by a dream.
+
+Verny le Moustier was not the least interesting of these old manors.
+
+It had been built three hundred years ago, on the site of a still older
+monastery (whence its name); the ruined walls of the old abbey were (and
+are) still extant in the house-garden, covered with apricot and pear and
+peach trees, which had been sown or planted by our common ancestress
+when she was a bride.
+
+Count Hector, who took a great pleasure in explaining all the past
+history of the place to Mary, had built himself a fine new house in
+what remained of the old park, and a quarter of a mile away from the
+old manor-house. Every room of the latter was shown to her; old wood
+panels still remained, prettily painted in a by-gone fashion; old
+documents, and parchment deeds, and leases concerning fish-ponds,
+farms, and the like, were brought out for her inspection, signed by
+my grandfather Pasquier, my great-grandfather Boismorinel, and our
+great-great-grandmother and her husband, Mathurin Budes, the lord of
+Verny le Moustier; and the tradition of Gatienne, _la belle Verriere_
+(also nicknamed _la reine de Hongrie_, it seems) still lingered in the
+county; and many old people still remembered, more or less correctly,
+"Le Chant du Triste Commensal," which a hundred years ago had been in
+everybody's mouth.
+
+She was said to have been the tallest and handsomest woman in Anjou, of
+an imperious will and very masculine character, but immensely popular
+among rich and poor alike; of indomitable energy, and with a finger in
+every pie; but always more for the good of others than her own--a
+typical, managing, business-like French woman, and an exquisite
+musician to boot.
+
+Such was our common ancestress, from whom, no doubt, we drew our love of
+music and our strange, almost hysterical susceptibility to the power of
+sound; from whom had issued those two born nightingales of our
+race--Seraskier, the violinist, and my father, the singer. And, strange
+to say, her eyebrows met at the bridge of her nose just like mine, and
+from under them beamed the luminous, black-fringed, gray-blue eyes of
+Mary, that suffered eclipse whenever their owners laughed or smiled!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+During this interesting journey of Mary's in the flesh, we met every
+night at "Magna sed Apta" in the spirit, as usual; and I was made to
+participate in every incident of it.
+
+We sat by the magic window, and had for our entertainment, now the
+Verrerie de Verny le Moustier in its present state, all full of modern
+life, color, and sound, steam and gas, as she had seen it a few hours
+before; now the old chateau as it was a hundred years ago; dim and
+indistinct, as though seen by nearsighted eyes at the close of a gray,
+misty afternoon in late autumn through a blurred window-pane, with busy
+but silent shadows moving about--silent, because at first we could not
+hear their speech; it was too thin for our mortal ears, even in this
+dream within our dream! Only Gatienne, the authoritative and commanding
+Gatienne, was faintly audible.
+
+Then we would go down and mix with them. Thus, at one moment, we would
+be in the midst of a charming old-fashioned French family group of
+shadows: Gatienne, with her lovely twin-daughters Jeanne and Anne, and
+her gardeners round her, all trailing young peach and apricot trees
+against what still remained of the ancient buttresses and walls of the
+Abbaye de Verny le Moustier--all this more than a hundred years ago--the
+pale sun of a long-past noon casting the fainter shadows of these faint
+shadows on the shadowy garden-path.
+
+Then, presto! Changing the scene as one changes a slide in a
+magic-lantern, we would skip a century, and behold!
+
+Another French family group, equally charming, on the self-same spot,
+but in the garb of to-day, and no longer shadowy or mute by any means.
+Little trees have grown big; big trees have disappeared to make place
+for industrious workshops and machinery; but the old abbey walls have
+been respected, and gay, genial father, and handsome mother, and lovely
+daughters, all pressing on "la belle Duchesse Anglaise" peaches and
+apricots of her great-great-grandmother's growing.
+
+For this amiable family of the Chamorin became devoted to Mary in a very
+short time--that is, the very moment they first saw her; and she never
+forgot their kindness, courtesy, and hospitality; they made her feel in
+five minutes as though she had known them for many years.
+
+I may as well state here that a few months later she received from
+Mademoiselle du Chamorin (with a charming letter) the identical violin
+that had once belonged to _la belle Verriere_, and which Count Hector
+had found in the possession of an old farmer--the great-grandson of
+Gatienne's coachman--and had purchased, that he might present it as a
+New-year's gift to her descendant, the Duchess of Towers.
+
+It is now mine, alas! I cannot play it; but it amuses and comforts me to
+hold in my hand, when broad and wide awake, an instrument that Mary and
+I have so often heard and seen in our dream, and which has so often rung
+in by-gone days with the strange melody that has had so great an
+influence on our lives. Its aspect, shape, and color, every mark and
+stain of it, were familiar to us before we had ever seen it with the
+bodily eye or handled it with the hand of flesh. It thus came straight
+to us out of the dim and distant past, heralded by the ghost of itself!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To return. Gradually, by practice and the concentration of our united
+will, the old-time figures grew to gain substance and color, and their
+voices became perceptible; till at length there arrived a day when we
+could move among them, and hear them and see them as distinctly as we
+could our own immediate progenitors close by--as Gogo and Mimsey, as
+Monsieur le Major, and the rest.
+
+The child who went about hand in hand with the white-haired lady (whose
+hair was only powdered) and fed the pigeons was my grandmother, Jeanne
+de Boismorinel (who married Francois Pasquier de la Mariere). It was her
+father who wore red heels to his shoes, and made her believe she could
+manufacture little cocked-hats in colored glass; she had lived again in
+me whenever, as a child, I had dreamed that exquisite dream.
+
+I could now evoke her at will; and, with her, many buried memories were
+called out of nothingness into life.
+
+Among other wonderful things, I heard the red-heeled gentleman, M. de
+Boismorinel (my great-grandfather), sing beautiful old songs by Lulli
+and others to the spinet, which he played charmingly a rare
+accomplishment in those days. And lo! these tunes were tunes that had
+risen oft and unbidden in my consciousness, and I had fondly imagined
+that I had composed them myself--little impromptus of my own. And lo,
+again! His voice, thin, high, nasal, but very sympathetic and musical,
+was that never still small voice that has been singing unremittingly for
+more than half a century in the unswept, ungarnished corner of my brain
+where all the cobwebs are.
+
+[Illustration: "THAT NEVER STILL SMALL VOICE."]
+
+And these cobwebs?
+
+Well, I soon became aware, by deeply diving into my inner consciousness
+when awake and at my daily prison toil (which left the mind singularly
+clear and free), that I was full, quite full, of slight elusive
+reminiscences which were neither of my waking life nor of my dream-life
+with Mary: reminiscences of sub-dreams during sleep, and belonging to
+the period of my childhood and early youth; sub-dreams which no doubt
+had been forgotten when I woke, at which time I could only remember the
+surface dreams that had just preceded my waking.
+
+Ponds, rivers, bridges, roads, and streams, avenues of trees, arbors,
+windmills and water-mills, corridors and rooms, church functions,
+village fairs, festivities, men and women and animals, all of another
+time and of a country where I had never set my foot, were familiar to my
+remembrance. I had but to dive deep enough into myself, and there they
+were; and when night came, and sleep, and "Magna sed Apta," I could
+re-evoke them all, and make them real and complete for Mary and myself.
+
+That these subtle reminiscences were true antenatal memories was soon
+proved by my excursions with Mary into the past; and her experience of
+such reminiscences, and their corroboration, were just as my own. We
+have heard and seen her grandfather play the "Chant du Triste Commensal"
+to crowded concert-rooms, applauded to the echo by men and women long
+dead and buried and forgotten!
+
+Now, I believe such reminiscences to form part of the sub-consciousness
+of others, as well as Mary's and mine, and that by perseverance in
+self-research many will succeed in reaching them--perhaps even more
+easily and completely than we have done.
+
+It is something like listening for the overtones of a musical note; we
+do not hear them at first, though they are there, clamoring for
+recognition; and when at last we hear them, we wonder at our former
+obtuseness, so distinct are they.
+
+Let a man with an average ear, however uncultivated, strike the C low
+down on a good piano-forte, keeping his foot on the loud pedal. At first
+he will hear nothing but the rich fundamental note C.
+
+But let him become _expectant_ of certain other notes; for instance, of
+the C in the octave immediately above, then the G immediately above
+that, then the E higher still; he will hear them all in time as clearly
+as the note originally struck; and, finally, a shrill little ghostly and
+quite importunate B flat in the treble will pulsate so loudly in his ear
+that he will never cease to hear it whenever that low C is sounded.
+
+By just such a process, only with infinitely more pains (and in the end
+with what pleasure and surprise), will he grow aware in time of a dim,
+latent, antenatal experience that underlies his own personal experience
+of this life.
+
+We also found that we were able not only to assist as mere spectators at
+such past scenes as I have described (and they were endless), but also
+to identify ourselves occasionally with the actors, and cease for the
+moment to be Mary Seraskier and Peter Ibbetson. Notably was this the
+case with Gatienne. We could each be Gatienne for a space (though never
+both of us together), and when we resumed our own personality again we
+carried back with it a portion of hers, never to be lost again--a
+strange phenomenon, if the reader will but think of it, and
+constituting the germ of a comparative personal immortality on earth.
+
+At my work in prison, even, I could distinctly remember having been
+Gatienne; so that for the time being, Gatienne, a provincial French
+woman who lived a hundred years ago, was contentedly undergoing penal
+servitude in an English jail during the latter half of the
+nineteenth century.
+
+A questionable privilege, perhaps.
+
+But to make up for it, when she was not alive in me she could be brought
+to life in Mary (only in one at a time, it seemed), and travel by rail
+and steamer, and know the uses of gas and electricity, and read the
+telegrams of "our special correspondents" in the _Times_, and taste her
+nineteenth century under more favorable conditions.
+
+Thus we took _la belle Verriere_ by turns, and she saw and heard things
+she little dreamed of a hundred years ago. Besides, she was made to
+share in the glories of "Magna sed Apta."
+
+And the better we knew her the more we loved her; she was a very nice
+person to descend from, and Mary and I were well agreed that we could
+not have chosen a better great-great-grandmother, and wondered what each
+of our seven others was like, for we had fifteen of these between us,
+and as many great-great-grandfathers.
+
+Thirty great-great-grandfathers and great-great-grandmothers had made us
+what we were; it was no good fighting against them and the millions at
+their backs.
+
+Which of them all, strong, but gentle and shy, and hating the very
+sight of blood, yet saw scarlet when he was roused, and thirsted for the
+blood of his foe?
+
+Which of them all, passionate and tender, but proud, high-minded, and
+chaste, and with the world at her feet, was yet ready to "throw her cap
+over the windmills," and give up all for love, deeming the world
+well lost?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That we could have thus identified ourselves, only more easily and
+thoroughly, with our own more immediate progenitors, we felt certain
+enough. But after mature thought we resolved to desist from any further
+attempt at such transfusion of identity, for sacred reasons of
+discretion which the reader will appreciate.
+
+But that this will be done some day (now the way has been made clear),
+and also that the inconveniences and possible abuses of such a faculty
+will be obviated or minimized by the ever-active ingenuity of mankind,
+is to my mind a foregone conclusion.
+
+It is too valuable a faculty to be left in abeyance, and I leave the
+probable and possible consequences of its culture to the reader's
+imagination--merely pointing out to him (as an inducement to cultivate
+that faculty in himself) that if anything can keep us well within the
+thorny path that leads to happiness and virtue, it is the certainty that
+those who come after us will remember having been ourselves, if only in
+a dream--even as the newly-hatched chicken has remembered in its egg the
+use of eyes and ears and the rest, out of the fulness of its long
+antenatal experience; and more fortunate than the helpless human infant
+in this respect, can enter on the business and pleasures of its brief,
+irresponsible existence at once!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Wherefore, oh reader, if you be but sound in mind and body, it most
+seriously behooves you (not only for the sake of those who come after
+you, but your own) to go forth and multiply exceedingly, to marry early
+and much and often, and to select the very best of your kind in the
+opposite sex for this most precious, excellent, and blessed purpose;
+that all your future reincarnations (and hers), however brief, may be
+many; and bring you not only joy and peace and pleasurable wonderment
+and recreation, but the priceless guerdon of well-earned self-approval!
+
+For whoever remembers having once been you, wakes you for the nonce out
+of--nirvana, shall we say? His strength, his beauty, and his wit are
+yours; and the felicity he derives from them in this earthly life is for
+you to share, whenever this subtle remembrance of you stirs in his
+consciousness; and you can never quite sink back again into--nirvana,
+till all your future wakers shall cease to be!
+
+It is like a little old-fashioned French game we used to play at Passy,
+and which is not bad for a dark, rainy afternoon: people sit all round
+in a circle, and each hands on to his neighbor a spill or a
+lucifer-match just blown out, but in which a little live spark still
+lingers; saying, as he does so--
+
+_"Petit bonhomme vit encore!"_
+
+And he, in whose hand the spark becomes extinct, has to pay forfeit and
+retire--"Helas! petit bonhomme n'est plus! ... Pauv' petit bonhomme!"
+
+Ever thus may a little live spark of your own individual consciousness,
+when the full, quick flame of your actual life here below is
+extinguished, be handed down mildly incandescent to your remotest
+posterity. May it never quite go out--it need not! May you ever be able
+to say of yourself, from generation to generation, "Petit bonhomme vit
+encore!" and still keep one finger at least in the pleasant earthly pie!
+
+And, reader, remember so to order your life on earth that the memory of
+you (like that of Gatienne, la belle Verriere de Verny le Moustier) may
+smell sweet and blossom in the dust--a memory pleasant to recall--to
+this end that its recallings and its recallers may be as numerous as
+filial love and ancestral pride can make them....
+
+And oh! looking _backward_ (as _we_ did), be tender to the failings of
+your forbears, who little guessed when alive that the secrets of their
+long buried hearts should one day be revealed to _you_! Their faults are
+really your own, like the faults of your innocent, ignorant childhood,
+so to say, when you did not know better, as you do now; or will
+soon, thanks to
+
+_"Le Chant du Triste Commensal!"_
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Wherefore, also, beware and be warned in time, ye tenth transmitters of
+a foolish face, ye reckless begetters of diseased or puny bodies, with
+hearts and brains to match! Far down the corridors of time shall
+club-footed retribution follow in your footsteps, and overtake you at
+every turn! Most remorselessly, most vindictively, will you be aroused,
+in sleepless hours of unbearable misery (future-waking nightmares), from
+your false, uneasy dream of death; to participate in an inheritance of
+woe still worse than yours--worse with all the accumulated interest of
+long years and centuries of iniquitous self-indulgence, and poisoned by
+the sting of a self-reproach that shall never cease till the last of
+your tainted progeny dies out, and finds his true nirvana, and yours, in
+the dim, forgetful depths of interstellar space!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And here let me most conscientiously affirm that, partly from my keen
+sense of the solemnity of such an appeal, and the grave responsibility I
+take upon myself in making it; but more especially in order to impress
+you, oh reader, with the full significance of this apocalyptic and
+somewhat minatory utterance (that it may haunt your finer sense during
+your midnight hours of introspective self-communion), I have done my
+best, my very best, to couch it in the obscurest and most unintelligible
+phraseology I could invent. If I have failed to do this, if I have
+unintentionally made any part of my meaning clear, if I have once
+deviated by mistake into what might almost appear like sense--mere
+common-sense--it is the fault of my half-French and wholly imperfect
+education. I am but a poor scribe!
+
+Thus roughly have I tried to give an account of this, the most
+important of our joint discoveries in the strange new world revealed to
+us by chance. More than twenty years of our united lives have been
+devoted to the following out of this slender clew--with what surprising
+results will, I trust, be seen in subsequent volumes.
+
+We have not had time to attempt the unravelling of our English ancestry
+as well--the Crays, and the Desmonds, the Ibbetsons, and Biddulphs,
+etc.--which connects us with the past history of England. The farther we
+got back into France, the more fascinating it became, and the
+easier--and the more difficult to leave.
+
+What an unexampled experience has been ours! To think that we have
+seen--actually seen--_de nos propres yeux vu_--Napoleon Bonaparte
+himself, the arch-arbiter of the world, on the very pinnacle of his
+pride and power; in his little cocked hat and gray double-breasted
+overcoat, astride his white charger, with all his staff around him, just
+as he has been so often painted! Surely the most impressive,
+unforgettable, ineffaceable little figure in all modern history, and
+clothed in the most cunningly imagined make-up that ever theatrical
+costumier devised to catch the public eye and haunt the public memory
+for ages and ages yet to come!
+
+It is a singularly new, piquant, and exciting sensation to stare in
+person, and as in the present, at bygone actualities, and be able to
+foretell the past and remember the future all in one!
+
+To think that we have even beheld him before he was first consul--slim
+and pale, his lank hair dangling down his neck and cheeks, if possible
+more impressive still as innocent as a child of all that lay before him!
+Europe at his feet--the throne--Waterloo-St. Helena--the Iron English
+Duke--the pinnacle turned into a pillory so soon!
+
+_"O corse a cheveux plats, que la France etait belle Au soleil de
+Messidor!"_
+
+And Mirabeau and Robespierre, and Danton and Marat and Charlotte Corday!
+we have seen them too; and Marie Antoinette and the fish-wives, and "the
+beautiful head of Lamballe" (on its pike!) ... and watched the tumbrils
+go by to the Place du Carrousel, and gazed at the guillotine by
+moonlight--silent and terror-stricken, our very hearts in our mouths....
+
+And in the midst of it all, ridiculous stray memories of Madame Tussaud
+would come stealing into our ghastly dream of blood and retribution,
+mixing up past and present and future in a manner not to be described,
+and making us smile through our tears!
+
+Then we were present (several times!) at the taking of the Bastille, and
+indeed witnessed most of the stormy scenes of that stormy time, with our
+Carlyle in our hands; and often have we thought, and with many a hearty
+laugh, what fun it must be to write immortal histories, with never an
+eye-witness to contradict you!
+
+And going further back we have haunted Versailles in the days of its
+splendor, and drunk our fill of all the glories of the court of
+Louis XIV!
+
+What imposing ceremonials, what stupendous royal functions have we not
+attended--where all the beauty, wit, and chivalry of France, prostrate
+with reverence and awe (as in the very presence of a god), did loyal
+homage to the greatest monarch this world has ever seen--while we sat
+by, on the very steps of his throne, as he solemnly gave out his royal
+command! and laughed aloud under his very nose--the shallow, silly,
+pompous little snob--and longed to pull it! and tried to disinfect his
+greasy, civet-scented, full-bottomed wig with wholesome whiffs from a
+nineteenth-century regalia!
+
+Nothing of that foolish but fascinating period escaped us. Town, hamlet,
+river, forest, and field; royal palace, princely castle, and starving
+peasants' hut; pulpit, stage, and salon; port, camp, and marketplace;
+tribunal and university; factory, shop, studio, smithy; tavern and
+gambling-hell and den of thieves; convent and jail, torture-chamber and
+gibbet-close, and what not all!
+
+And at every successive step our once desponding, over-anxious,
+over-burdened latter-day souls have swelled with joy and pride and hope
+at the triumphs of our own day all along the line! Yea, even though we
+have heard the illustrious Bossuet preach, and applauded Moliere in one
+of his own plays, and gazed at and listened to (and almost forgiven)
+Racine and Corneille, and Boileau and Fenelon, and the good
+Lafontaine--those five ruthless persecutors of our own innocent French
+childhood!
+
+And still ascending the stream of time, we have hobnobbed with Montaigne
+and Rabelais, and been personally bored by Malherbe, and sat at
+Ronsard's feet, and ridden by Froissart's side, and slummed with
+Francois Villon--in what enchanted slums! ...
+
+Francois Villon! Think of that, ye fond British bards and bardlets
+of to-day--ye would-be translators and imitators of that
+never-to-be-translated, never-to-be-imitated lament, the immortal
+_Ballade des Dames du Temps jadis_!
+
+And while I speak of it, I may as well mention that we have seen them
+too, or some of them--those fair ladies _he_ had never seen, and who had
+already melted away before his coming, like the snows of yester year,
+_les neiges d'antan!_ Bertha, with the big feet; Joan of Arc, the good
+Lorrainer (what would she think of her native province now!); the very
+learned Heloise, for love of whom one Peter Esbaillart, or Abelard (a
+more luckless Peter than even I!), suffered such cruel indignities at
+monkish hands; and that haughty, naughty queen, in her Tower of Nesle,
+
+_"Qui commanda que Buridan Fut jecte en ung Sac en Seine...."_
+
+Yes, we have seen them with the eye, and heard them speak and sing, and
+scold and jest, and laugh and weep, and even pray! And I have sketched
+them, as you shall see some day, good reader! And let me tell you that
+their beauty was by no means maddening: the standard of female
+loveliness has gone up, even in France! Even _la tres sage Helois_ was
+scarcely worth such a sacrifice as--but there! Possess your soul in
+patience; all that, and it is all but endless, will appear in due time,
+with such descriptions and illustrations as I flatter myself the world
+has never bargained for, and will value as it has never valued any
+historical records yet!
+
+Day after day, for more than twenty years, Mary has kept a voluminous
+diary (in a cipher known to us both); it is now my property, and in it
+every detail of our long journey into the past has been set down.
+
+Contemporaneously, day by day (during the leisure accorded to me by the
+kindness of Governor----) I have drawn over again from memory the
+sketches of people and places I was able to make straight from nature
+during those wonderful nights at "Magna sed Apta." I can guarantee the
+correctness of them, and the fidelity of their likenesses; no doubt
+their execution leaves much to be desired.
+
+Both her task and mine (to the future publication of which this
+autobiography is but an introduction) have been performed with the
+minutest care and conscientiousness; no time or trouble have been
+spared. For instance, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew alone, which we
+were able to study from seventeen different points of view, cost us no
+less than two months' unremitting labor.
+
+As we reached further and further back through the stream of time, the
+task became easier in a way; but we have had to generalize more, and
+often, for want of time and space, to use types in lieu of individuals.
+For with every successive generation the number of our progenitors
+increased in geometrical progression (as in the problem of the nails in
+the horseshoe) until a limit of numbers was reached--namely, the sum of
+the inhabitants of the terrestrial globe. In the seventh century there
+was not a person living in France (not to mention Europe) who was not in
+the line of our direct ancestry, excepting, of course, those who had
+died without issue and were mere collaterals.
+
+[Illustration: "THE MAMMOTH."]
+
+We have even just been able to see, as in a glass darkly, the faint
+shadows of the Mammoth and the cave bear, and of the man who hunted and
+killed and ate them, that he might live and prevail.
+
+The Mammoth!
+
+We have walked round him and under him as he browsed, and even _through_
+him where he lay and rested, as one walks through the dun mist in a
+little hollow on a still, damp morning; and turning round to look (at
+the proper distance) there was the unmistakable shape again, just thick
+enough to blot out the lines of the dim primeval landscape beyond, and
+make a hole in the blank sky. A dread silhouette, thrilling our hearts
+with awe--blurred and indistinct like a composite photograph--merely the
+_type_, as it had been seen generally by all who had ever seen it at
+all, every one of whom _(exceptis excipiendis)_ was necessarily an
+ancestor of ours, and of every man now living.
+
+There it stood or reclined, the monster, like the phantom of an
+overgrown hairy elephant; we could almost see, or fancy we saw, the
+expression of his dull, cold, antediluvian eye--almost perceive a
+suggestion of russet-brown in his fell.
+
+Mary firmly believed that we should have got in time to our hairy
+ancestor with pointed ears and a tail, and have been able to ascertain
+whether he was arboreal in his habits or not. With what passionate
+interest she would have followed and studied and described him! And I!
+With what eager joy, and yet with what filial reverence, I would have
+sketched his likeness--with what conscientious fidelity as far as my poor
+powers would allow! (For all we know to the contrary he may have been
+the most attractive and engaging little beast that ever was, and far
+less humiliating to descend from than many a titled yahoo of the
+present day.)
+
+Fate, alas, has willed that it should be otherwise, and on others, duly
+trained, must devolve the delightful task of following up the clew we
+have been so fortunate as to discover.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now the time has come for me to tell as quickly as I may the story
+of my bereavement--a bereavement so immense that no man, living or dead,
+can ever have experienced the like; and to explain how it is that I have
+not only survived it and kept my wits (which some people seem to doubt),
+but am here calmly and cheerfully writing my reminiscences, just as if I
+were a famous Academician, actor, novelist, statesman, or general
+diner-out--blandly garrulous and well-satisfied with myself and
+the world.
+
+During the latter years of our joint existence Mary and I engrossed by
+our fascinating journey through the centuries, had seen little or
+nothing of each other's outer lives, or rather I had seen nothing of
+hers (for she still came back sometimes with me to my jail); I only saw
+her as she chose to appear in our dream.
+
+Perhaps at the bottom of this there may have been a feminine dislike on
+her part to be seen growing older, for at "Magna sed Apta" we were
+always twenty-eight or thereabouts--at our very best. We had truly
+discovered the fountain of perennial youth, and had drunk thereof! And
+in our dream we always felt even younger than we looked; we had the
+buoyancy of children and their freshness.
+
+Often had we talked of death and separation and the mystery beyond, but
+only as people do for whom such contingencies are remote; yet in reality
+time flew as rapidly for us as for others, although we were less
+sensible of its flight.
+
+There came a day when Mary's exuberant vitality, so constantly
+overtaxed, broke down, and she was ill for a while; although that did
+not prevent our meeting as usual, and there was no perceptible
+difference in her when we met. But I am certain that in reality she was
+never quite the same again as she had been, and the dread possibility of
+parting any day would come up oftener in our talk; in our minds, only
+too often, and our minds were as one.
+
+She knew that if I died first, everything I had brought into "Magna sed
+Apta" (and little it was) would be there no more; even to my body, ever
+lying supine on the couch by the enchanted window, it she had woke by
+chance to our common life before I had, or remained after I had been
+summoned away to my jail.
+
+And I knew that, if she died, not only her body on the adjacent couch,
+but all "Magna sed Apta" itself would melt away, and be as if it had
+never been, with its endless galleries and gardens and magic windows,
+and all the wonders it contained.
+
+Sometimes I felt a hideous nervous dread, on sinking into sleep, lest I
+should find it was so, and the ever-heavenly delight of waking there,
+and finding all as usual, was but the keener. I would kneel by her
+inanimate body, and gaze at her with a passion of love that seemed made
+up of all the different kinds of love a human being can feel; even the
+love of a dog for his mistress was in it, and that of a wild beast for
+its young.
+
+With eager, tremulous anxiety and aching suspense I would watch for the
+first light breath from her lips, the first faint tinge of carmine in
+her cheek, that always heralded her coming back to life. And when she
+opened her eyes and smiled, and stretched her long young limbs in the
+joy of waking, what transports of gratitude and relief!
+
+[Illustration: "WAITING"]
+
+Ah me! the recollection!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At last a terrible unforgettable night arrived when my presentiment was
+fulfilled.
+
+I awoke in the little lumber-room of "Parva sed Apta," where the door
+had always been that led to and from our palace of delight; but there
+was no door any longer--nothing but a blank wall....
+
+I woke back at once in my cell, in such a state as it is impossible to
+describe. I felt there must be some mistake, and after much time and
+effort was able to sink into sleep again, but with the same result: the
+blank wall, the certainty that "Magna sed Apta" was closed forever, that
+Mary was dead; and then the terrible jump back into my prison
+life again.
+
+This happened several times during the night, and when the morning
+dawned I was a raving madman. I took the warder who first came
+(attracted by my cries of "Mary!") for Colonel Ibbetson, and tried to
+kill him, and should have done so, but that he was a very big man,
+almost as powerful as myself and only half my age.
+
+Other warders came to the rescue, and I took them all for Ibbetsons, and
+fought like the maniac I was.
+
+When I came to myself, after long horrors and brain-fever and what not,
+I was removed from the jail infirmary to another place, where I am now.
+
+I had suddenly recovered my reason, and woke to mental agony such as I,
+who had stood in the dock and been condemned to a shameful death, had
+never even dreamed of.
+
+I soon had the knowledge of my loss confirmed, and heard (it had been
+common talk for more than nine days) that the famous Mary, Duchess of
+Towers, had met her death at the ------ station of the Metropolitan
+Railway.
+
+A woman, carrying a child, had been jostled by a tipsy man just as a
+train was entering the station, and dropped her child onto the metals.
+She tried to jump after it but was held back, and Mary, who had just
+come up, jumped in her stead, and by a miracle of strength and agility
+was just able to clutch the child and get onto the six-foot way as the
+engine came by.
+
+She was able to carry the child to the end of the train, and was helped
+onto the platform. It was her train, and she got into a carriage, but
+she was dead before it reached the next station. Her heart, (which, it
+seems, had been diseased for some time) had stopped, and all was over.
+
+So died Mary Seraskier, at fifty-three.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I lay for many weeks convalescent in body, but in a state of dumb, dry
+tearless, despair, to which there never came a moment's relief, except
+in the dreamless sleep I got from chloral, which was given to me in
+large quantities--and then, the _waking_!
+
+I never spoke nor answered a question, and hardly ever stirred. I had
+one fixed idea--that of self-destruction; and after two unsuccessful
+attempts, I was so closely bound and watched night and day that any
+further attempt was impossible. They would not trust me with a toothpick
+or a button or a piece of common packthread.
+
+I tried to starve myself to death and refused all solid food: but an
+intolerable thirst (perhaps artificially brought on) made it impossible
+for me to refuse any liquid that was offered, and I was tempted with
+milk, beef-tea, port, and sherry, and these kept me alive....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I had lost all wish to dream.
+
+At length, one afternoon, a strange, inexplicable, overwhelming
+nostalgic desire came over me to see once more the Mare d'Auteuil--only
+once; to walk thither for the last time through the Chaussee de la
+Muette, and by the fortifications.
+
+It grew upon me till it became a torture to wait for bedtime, so frantic
+was my impatience.
+
+When the long-wished-for hour arrived at last, I laid myself down once
+more (as nearly as I could for my bonds) in the old position I had not
+tried for so long; my will intent upon the Porte de la Muette, an old
+stone gate-way that separated the Grande Rue de Passy from the entrance
+to the Bois de Boulogne--a kind of Temple Bar.
+
+It was pulled down forty-five years ago.
+
+I soon found myself there, just where the Grande Rue meets the Rue de la
+Pompe, and went through the arch and looked towards the Bois.
+
+It was a dull, leaden day in autumn; few people were about, but a gay
+_repas de noces_ was being held at a little restaurant on my right-hand
+side. It was to celebrate the wedding of Achille Grigoux, the
+green-grocer, with Felicite Lenormand, who had been the Seraskiers'
+house-maid. I suddenly remembered all this, and that Mimsey and Gogo
+were of the party--the latter, indeed, being _premier garcon d'honneur_,
+on whom would soon devolve the duty of stealing the bride's garter, and
+cutting it up into little bits to adorn the button-holes of the male
+guests before the ball began.
+
+In an archway on my left some forlorn, worn-out old rips, broken-kneed
+and broken-winded, were patiently waiting, ready saddled and bridled, to
+be hired--Chloris, Murat, Rigolette, and others: I knew and had ridden
+them all nearly half a century ago. Poor old shadows of the long-dead
+past, so life-like and real and pathetic--it "split me the heart" to
+see them!
+
+A handsome young blue-coated, silver-buttoned courier of the name of
+Lami came trotting along from St. Cloud on a roan horse, with a great
+jingling of his horse's bells and clacking of his short-handled whip. He
+stopped at the restaurant and called for a glass of white wine, and
+rising in his stirrups, shouted gayly for Monsieur et Madame Grigoux.
+They appeared at the first-floor window, looking very happy, and he
+drank their health, and they his. I could see Gogo and Mimsey in the
+crowd behind them, and mildly wondered again, as I had so often wondered
+before, how I came to see it all from the outside--from another point of
+view than Gogo's.
+
+Then the courier bowed gallantly, and said, _"Bonne chance!"_ and went
+trotting down the Grande Rue on his way to the Tuileries, and the
+wedding guests began to sing: they sang a song beginning--
+
+_"Il etait un petit navire, Qui n'avait jamais navigue_...."
+
+I had quite forgotten it, and listened till the end, and thought it very
+pretty; and was interested in a dull, mechanical way at discovering
+that it must be the original of Thackeray's famous ballad of "Little
+Billee," which I did not hear till many years after. When they came to
+the last verse--
+
+"_Si cette histoire vous embete, Nous allons la recommencer_,"
+
+I went on my way. This was my last walk in dreamland, perhaps, and
+dream-hours are uncertain, and I would make the most of them, and
+look about me.
+
+I walked towards Ranelagh, a kind of casino, where they used to give
+balls and theatrical performances on Sunday and Thursday nights (and
+where afterwards Rossini spent the latter years of his life; then it was
+pulled down, I am told, to make room for many smart little villas).
+
+In the meadow opposite M. Erard's park, Saindou's school-boys were
+playing rounders--_la balle au camp_--from which I concluded it was a
+Thursday afternoon, a half-holiday; if they had had clean shirts on
+(which they had not) it would have been Sunday, and the holiday a
+whole one.
+
+I knew them all, and the two _pions_, or ushers, M. Lartigue and _le
+petit Cazal_; but no longer cared for them or found them amusing or
+interesting in the least.
+
+Opposite the Ranelagh a few old hackney-coach men were pacifically
+killing time by a game of _bouchon_--knocking sous off a cork with other
+sous--great fat sous and double sous long gone out of fashion. It is a
+very good game, and I watched it for a while and envied the
+long-dead players.
+
+Close by was a small wooden shed, or _baraque_, prettily painted and
+glazed, and ornamented at the top with little tricolor flags; it
+belonged to a couple of old ladies, Mere Manette and Grandmere
+Manette-the two oldest women ever seen. They were very keen about
+business, and would not give credit for a centime--not even to English
+boys. They were said to be immensely rich and quite alone in the world.
+How very dead they must be now! I thought. And I gazed at them and
+wondered at their liveliness and the pleasure they took in living. They
+sold many things: nougat, _pain d'epices_, mirlitons, hoops, drums,
+noisy battledoors and shuttlecocks; and little ten-sou hand-mirrors,
+neatly bound in zinc, that could open and shut.
+
+I looked at myself in one of these that was hanging outside; I was old
+and worn and gray-my face badly shaven--my hair almost white. I had
+never been old in a dream before.
+
+I walked through the gate in the fortifications on to the outer Talus
+(which was quite bare in those days), in the direction of the Mare
+d'Auteuil. The place seemed very deserted and dull for a Thursday. It
+was a sad and sober walk; my melancholy was not to be borne--my heart
+was utterly broken, and my body so tired I could scarcely drag myself
+along. Never before had I known in a dream what it was to be tired.
+
+I gazed at the famous fortifications in all their brand-new pinkness,
+the scaffoldings barely removed--some of them still lying in the dry
+ditch between--and smiled to think how these little brick and granite
+walls would avail to keep the Germans out of Paris thirty years later
+(twenty years ago). I tried to throw a stone across the narrow part, and
+found I could no longer throw stones; so I sat down and rested. How thin
+my legs were! and how miserably clad--in old prison trousers, greasy,
+stained, and frayed, and ignobly kneed--and what boots!
+
+[Illustration: "I sat down and rested."]
+
+Never had I been shabby in a dream before.
+
+Why could not I, once for all, walk round to the other side and take a
+header _a la hussarde_ off those lofty bulwarks, and kill myself for
+good and all? Alas! I should only blur the dream, and perhaps even wake
+in my miserable strait-waistcoat. And I wanted to see the _mare_ once
+more, very badly.
+
+This set me thinking. I would fill my pockets with stones, and throw
+myself into the Mare d'Auteuil after I had taken a last good look at it,
+and around. Perhaps the shock of emotion, in my present state of
+weakness, might really kill me in my sleep. Who knows? it was worth
+trying, anyhow.
+
+I got up and dragged myself to the _mare_. It was deserted but for one
+solitary female figure, soberly clad in black and gray, that sat
+motionless on the bench by the old willow.
+
+I walked slowly round in her direction, picking up stones and putting
+them into my pockets, and saw that she was gray-haired and middle-aged,
+with very dark eyebrows, and extremely tall, and that her magnificent
+eyes were following me.
+
+Then, as I drew nearer, she smiled and showed gleaming white teeth, and
+her eyes crinkled and nearly closed up as she did so.
+
+"Oh, my God!" I shrieked; "it is Mary Seraskier!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I ran to her--I threw myself at her feet, and buried my face in her lap,
+and there I sobbed like a hysterical child, while she tried to soothe me
+as one soothes a child.
+
+After a while I looked up into her face. It was old and worn and gray,
+and her hair nearly white, like mine. I had never seen her like that
+before; she had always been eight-and-twenty. But age became her
+well--she looked so benignly beautiful and calm and grand that I was
+awed--and quick, chill waves went down my backbone.
+
+Her dress and bonnet were old and shabby, her gloves had been
+mended--old kid gloves with fur about the wrists. She drew them off, and
+took my hands and made me sit beside her, and looked at me for a while
+with all her might in silence.
+
+At length she said: "Gogo mio, I know all you have been through by the
+touch of your hands. Does the touch of mine tell you nothing?"
+
+It told me nothing but her huge love for me, which was all I cared for,
+and I said so.
+
+She sighed, and said: "I was afraid it would be like this. The old
+circuit is broken, and can't be restored--not yet!"
+
+We tried again hard; but it was useless.
+
+She looked round and about and up at the tree-tops, everywhere; and then
+at me again, with great wistfulness, and shivered, and finally began to
+speak, with hesitation at first, and in a manner foreign to her. But
+soon she became apparently herself, and found her old swift smile and
+laugh, her happy slight shrugs and gestures, and quaint polyglot
+colloquialisms (which I omit, as I cannot always spell them); her
+homely, simple ways of speech, her fluent, magnetic energy, the winning
+and sympathetic modulations of her voice, its quick humorous changes
+from grave to gay--all that made everything she said so suggestive of
+all she wanted to say besides.
+
+"Gogo, I knew you would come. I _wished_ it! How dreadfully you have
+suffered! How thin you are! It shocks me to see you! But that will not
+be any more; we are going to change all that.
+
+"Gogo, you have no idea how difficult it has been for me to come back,
+even for a few short hours, for I can't hold on very long. It is like
+hanging on to the window-sill by one's wrists. This time it is Hero
+swimming to Leander, or Juliet climbing up to Romeo.
+
+"Nobody has ever come back before.
+
+"I am but a poor husk of my former self, put together at great pains for
+you to know me by. I could not make myself again what I have always been
+to you. I had to be content with this, and so must you. These are the
+clothes I died in. But you knew me directly, dear Gogo.
+
+"I have come a long way--such a long way--to have an _abboccamento_ with
+you. I had so many things to say. And now we are both here, hand in hand
+as we used to be, I can't even understand what they were; and if I
+could, I couldn't make _you_ understand. But you will know some day, and
+there is no hurry whatever.
+
+"Every thought you have had since I died, I know already; _your_ share
+of the circuit is unbroken at least. I know now why you picked up those
+stones and put them in your pockets. You must never think of _that_
+again--you never will. Besides, it would be of no use, poor Gogo!"
+
+Then she looked up at the sky and all round her again, and smiled in her
+old happy manner, and rubbed her eyes with the backs of her hands, and
+seemed to settle herself for a good long talk--an _abboccamento!_
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Of all she said I can only give a few fragments--whatever I can recall
+and understand when awake. Wherever I have forgotten I will put a line
+of little dots. Only when I sleep and dream can I recall and understand
+the rest. It seems all very simple then. I often say to myself, "I will
+fix it well in my mind, and put it into well-chosen words--_her_
+words--and learn them by heart; and then wake cautiously and remember
+them, and write them all down in a book, so that they shall do for
+others all they have done for me, and turn doubt into happy certainty,
+and despair into patience and hope and high elation."
+
+[Illustration: "IT IS MARY SERASKIER!"]
+
+But the bell rings and I wake, and my memory plays me false. Nothing
+remains but the knowledge _that all will be well for us all, and of such
+a kind that those who do not sigh for the moon will be well content_.
+
+Alas, this knowledge: I cannot impart it to others. Like many who have
+lived before me, I cannot prove--I can only affirm....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"How odd and old-fashioned it feels," she began, "to have eyes and ears
+again, and all that--little open windows on to what is near us. They are
+very clumsy contrivances! I had already forgotten them."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Look, there goes our old friend, the water-rat, under the bank--the old
+fat father--_le bon gros pere_--as we used to call him. He is only a
+little flat picture moving upsidedown in the opposite direction across
+the backs of our eyes, and the farther he goes the smaller he seems. A
+couple of hundred yards off we shouldn't see him at all. As it is, we
+can only see the outside of him, and that only on one side at a time;
+and yet he is full of important and wonderful things that have taken
+millions of years to make--like us! And to see him at all we have to
+look straight at him--and then we can't see what's behind us or
+around--and if it was dark we couldn't see anything whatever.
+
+Poor eyes! Little bags full of water, with a little magnifying-glass
+inside, and a nasturtium leaf behind--to catch the light and feel it!
+
+A celebrated German oculist once told papa that if his instrument-maker
+were to send him such an ill-made machine as a human eye, he would send
+it back and refuse to pay the bill. I can understand that now; and yet
+on earth where should we be without eyes? And afterwards where should we
+be if some of us hadn't once had them on earth?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I can hear your dear voice, Gogo, with both ears. Why two ears? Why
+only two? What you want, or think, or feel, you try to tell me in sounds
+that you have been taught--English, French. If I didn't know English and
+French, it would be no good whatever. Language is a poor thing. You fill
+your lungs with wind and shake a little slit in your throat, and make
+mouths, and that shakes the air; and the air shakes a pair of little
+drums in my head--a very complicated arrangement, with lots of bones
+behind--and my brain seizes your meaning in the rough. What a roundabout
+way, and what a waste of time!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And so with all the rest. We can't even smell straight! A dog would
+laugh at us--not that even a dog knows much!
+
+And feeling! We can feel too hot or too cold, and it sometimes makes us
+ill, or even kills us. But we can't feel the coming storm, or which is
+north and south, or where the new moon is, or the sun at midnight, or
+the stars at noon, or even what o'clock it is by our own measurement. We
+cannot even find our way home blindfolded--not even a pigeon can do
+that, nor a swallow, nor an owl! Only a mole, or a blind man, perhaps,
+feebly groping with a stick, if he has already been that way before.
+
+And taste! It is well said there is no accounting for it.
+
+And then, to keep all this going, we have to eat, and drink, and sleep,
+and all the rest. What a burden!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And you and I are the only mortals that I know of who ever found a way
+to each other's inner being by the touch of the hands. And then we had
+to go to sleep first. Our bodies were miles apart; not that _that_ would
+have made any difference, for we could never have done it waking--never;
+not if we hugged each other to extinction!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Gogo, I cannot find any words to tell you _how_, for there are none in
+any language that _I_ ever knew to tell it; but where I am it is all ear
+and eye and the rest in _one_, and there is, oh, how much more besides!
+Things a homing-pigeon has known, and an ant, and a mole, and a
+water-beetle, and an earthworm, and a leaf, and a root, and a
+magnet--even a lump of chalk, and more. One can see and smell and touch
+and taste a sound, as well as hear it, and _vice versa_. It is very
+simple, though it may not seem so to you now.
+
+And the sounds! Ah, what sounds! The thick atmosphere of earth is no
+conductor for such as _they_, and earthly ear-drums no receiver. Sound
+is everything. Sound and light are one.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And what does it all mean?
+
+I knew what it meant when I was there--part of it, at least--and should
+know again in a few hours. But this poor old earth-brain of mine, which
+I have had to put on once more as an old woman puts on a nightcap, is
+like my eyes and ears. It can now only understand what is of the
+earth--what _you_ can understand, Gogo, who are still of the earth. I
+forget, as one forgets an ordinary dream, as one sometimes forgets the
+answer to a riddle, or the last verse of a song. It is on the tip of the
+tongue; but there it sticks, and won't come any farther.
+
+Remember, it is only in your brain I am living now--your earthly brain,
+that has been my only home for so many happy years, as mine has
+been yours.
+
+How we have nestled!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But this I know: one must have had them all once--brains, ears, eyes,
+and the rest--on earth. 'Il faut avoir passe par la!' or no
+after-existence for man or beast would be possible or even conceivable.
+
+One cannot teach a born deaf-mute how to understand a musical score,
+nor a born blind man how to feel color. To Beethoven, who had once heard
+with the ear, his deafness made no difference, nor their blindness to
+Homer and Milton.
+
+Can you make out my little parable?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Sound and light and heat, and electricity and motion, and will and
+thought and remembrance, and love and hate and pity, and the desire to
+be born and to live, and the longing of all things alive and dead to get
+near each other, or to fly apart--and lots of other things besides! All
+that comes to the same--'C'est comme qui dirait bonnet blanc et blanc
+bonnet,' as Monsieur le Major used to say. 'C'est simple comme bonjour!'
+
+Where I am, Gogo, I can hear the sun shining on the earth and making
+the flowers blow, and the birds sing, and the bells peal for birth and
+marriage and death--happy, happy death, if you only knew--'C'est la clef
+des champs!'
+
+It shines on moons and planets, and I can hear it, and hear the echo
+they give back again. The very stars are singing; rather a long way off!
+but it is well worth their while with such an audience as lies between
+us and them; and they can't help it....
+
+I can't hear it here--not a bit--now that I've got my ears on; besides,
+the winds of the earth are too loud....
+
+Ah, that _is_ music, if you like; but men and women are stone-deaf to
+it--their ears are in the way! ...
+
+Those poor unseen flat fish that live in the darkness and mud at the
+bottom of deep seas can't catch the music men and women make upon the
+earth--such poor music as it is! But if ever so faint a murmur, borne on
+the wings and fins of a sunbeam, reaches them for a few minutes at
+mid-day, and they have a speck of marrow in their spines to feel it, and
+no ears or eyes to come between, they are better off than any man, Gogo.
+Their dull existence is more blessed than his.
+
+But alas for them, as yet! They haven't got the memory of the eye and
+ear, and without that no speck of spinal marrow will avail; they must be
+content to wait, like you.
+
+The blind and deaf?
+
+Oh yes; _la bas_, it is all right for the poor deaf-mutes and born
+blind of the earth; they can remember with the past eyes and ears of all
+the rest. Besides, it is no longer _they_. There is no _they_! That is
+only a detail.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+You must try and realize that it is just as though all space between us
+and the sun and stars were full of little specks of spinal marrow, much
+too small to be seen in any microscope--smaller than anything in the
+world. All space is full of them, shoulder to shoulder--almost as close
+as sardines in a box--and there is still room for more! Yet a single
+drop of water would hold them all, and not be the less transparent. They
+all remember having been alive on earth or elsewhere, in some form or
+other, and each knows all the others remember. I can only compare it
+to that.
+
+Once all that space was only full of stones, rushing, whirling,
+meeting, and crushing together, and melting and steaming in the
+white-heat of their own hurry. But now there's a crop of something
+better than stones, I can promise you! It goes on gathering, and being
+garnered and mingled and sifted and winnowed--the precious,
+indestructible harvest of how many millions of years of life!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And this I know: the longer and more strenuously and completely one
+lives one's life on earth the better for all. It is the foundation of
+everything. Though if men could guess what is in store for them when
+they die, without also knowing _that_, they would not have the patience
+to live--they wouldn't wait! For who would fardels bear? They would just
+put stones in their pockets, as you did, and make for the nearest pond.
+
+They mustn't!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Nothing is lost--nothing! From the ineffable, high, fleeting thought a
+Shakespeare can't find words to express, to the slightest sensation of
+an earthworm--nothing! Not a leaf's feeling of the light, not a
+loadstone's sense of the pole, not a single volcanic or electric thrill
+of the mother earth.
+
+All knowledge must begin on earth for _us_. It is the most favored
+planet in this poor system of ours just now, and for a few short
+millions of years to come. There are just a couple of others, perhaps
+three; but they are not of great consequence. 'Il y fait trop chaud--ou
+pas assez!' They are failures.
+
+The sun, the father sun, _le bon gros pere_, rains life on to the
+mother earth. A poor little life it was at first, as you know--grasses
+and moss, and little wriggling, transparent things--all stomach; it is
+quite true! That is what we come from--Shakespeare, and you, and I!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After each individual death the earth retains each individual clay to
+be used again and again; and, as far as I can see, it rains back each
+individual essence to the sun--or somewhere near it--like a precious
+water-drop returned to the sea, where it mingles, after having been
+about and seen something of the world, and learned the use of five small
+wits--and remembering all! Yes, like that poor little exiled wandering
+water-drop in the pretty song your father used to sing, and which always
+manages to find its home at last--
+
+     _'Va passaggier' in fiume,
+     Va prigionier' in fonte,
+       Ma sempre ritorn' al mar.'_
+
+Or else it is as if little grains of salt were being showered into the
+Mare d'Auteuil, to melt and mingle with the water and each other till
+the Mare d'Auteuil itself was as salt as salt can be.
+
+Not till that Mare d'Auteuil of the sun is saturated with the salt of
+the earth, of earthly life and knowledge, will the purpose be complete,
+and then old mother earth may well dry up into a cinder like the moon;
+its occupation will be gone, like hers--'adieu, panier, les vendanges
+sont faites!'
+
+And, as for the sun and its surrounding ocean of life--ah, that is
+beyond _me_! but the sun will dry up, too, and its ocean of life no
+doubt be drawn to other greater suns. For everything seems to go on more
+or less in the same way, only crescendo, everywhere and forever.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+You must understand that it is not a bit like an ocean, nor a bit like
+water-drops, or grains of salt, or specks of spinal marrow; but it is
+only by such poor metaphors that I can give you a glimpse of what I
+mean, since you can no longer understand me, as you used to do on
+earthly things, by the mere touch of our hands.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Gogo, I am the only little water-drop, the one grain of salt that has
+not yet been able to dissolve and melt away in that universal sea; I am
+the exception.
+
+It is as though a long, invisible chain bound me still to the earth,
+and I were hung at the other end of it in a little transparent locket, a
+kind of cage, which lets me see and hear things all round, but keeps me
+from melting away.
+
+And soon I found that this locket was made of that half of you that is
+still in me, so that I couldn't dissolve, because half of me wasn't dead
+at all; for the chain linked me to that half of myself I had left in
+you, so that half of me actually wasn't there to be dissolved.... I am
+getting rather mixed!
+
+But oh, my heart's true love, how I hugged my chain, with you at the
+other end of it!
+
+With such pain and effort as you cannot conceive, I have crept along it
+back to you, like a spider on an endless thread of its own spinning.
+Such love as mine is stronger then death indeed!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have come to tell you that we are inseparable forever, you and I, one
+double speck of spinal marrow--'Philipschen!'--one little grain of salt,
+one drop. There is to be no parting for _us_--I can see that; but such
+extraordinary luck seems reserved for you and me alone up to now; and it
+is all our own doing.
+
+But not till you join me shall you and I be complete, and free to melt
+away in that universal ocean, and take our part, as One, in all is
+to be.
+
+That moment--you must not hasten it by a moment. Time is nothing. I'm
+even beginning to believe there's no such thing; there is so little
+difference, _la-bas_, between a year and a day. And as for space--dear
+me, an inch is as as an ell!
+
+Things cannot be measured like that.
+
+A midge's life is as long as a man's, for it has time to learn its
+business, and do all the harm it can, and fight, and make love, and
+marry, and reproduce its kind, and grow disenchanted and bored and sick
+and content to die--all in a summer afternoon. An average man can live
+to seventy years without doing much more.
+
+And then there are tall midges, and clever and good-looking ones, and
+midges of great personal strength and cunning, who can fly a little
+faster and a little farther than the rest, and live an hour longer to
+drink a whole drop more of some other creature's blood; but it does not
+make a very great difference!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+No, time and space mean just the same as 'nothing.'
+
+But for you they mean much, as you have much to do. Our joint life must
+be revealed--that long, sweet life of make-believe, that has been so
+much more real than reality. Ah! where and what were time or space to
+us then?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And you must tell all we have found out, and how; the way must be shown
+to others with better brains and better training than _we_ had. The
+value to mankind--to mankind here and hereafter--may be incalculable.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For some day, when all is found out that can be found out on earth, and
+made the common property of all (or even before that), the great man
+will perhaps arise and make the great guess that is to set us all free,
+here and hereafter. Who knows?
+
+I feel this splendid guesser will be some inspired musician of the
+future, as simple as a little child in all things but his knowledge of
+the power of sound; but even little children will have learned much in
+those days. He will want new notes and find them--new notes between the
+black and white keys. He will go blind like Milton and Homer, and deaf
+like Beethoven; and then, all in the stillness and the dark, all in the
+depths of his forlorn and lonely soul, he will make his best music, and
+out of the endless mazes of its counterpoint he will evolve a secret, as
+we did from the "Chant du Triste Commensal," but it will be a greater
+secret than ours. Others will have been very near this hidden treasure;
+but he will happen right _on_ it, and unearth it, and bring it to light.
+
+I think I see him sitting at the key-board, so familiar of old to the
+feel of his consummate fingers; painfully dictating his score to some
+most patient and devoted friend--mother, sister, daughter, wife--that
+score that he will never see or hear.
+
+What a stammerer! Not only blind and deaf, but _mad_--mad in the
+world's eyes, for fifty, a hundred, a thousand years. Time is nothing;
+but that score will survive....
+
+He will die of it, of course; and when he dies and comes to us, there
+will be joy from here to Sirius, and beyond.
+
+And one day they will find out on earth that he was only deaf and
+blind--not mad at all. They will hear and _understand_--they will know
+that he saw and heard as none had ever heard or seen before!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For 'as we sow we reap'; that is a true saying, and all the sowing is
+done here on earth, and the reaping beyond. Man is a grub; his dead
+clay, as he lies coffined in his grave, is the left-off cocoon he has
+spun for himself during his earthly life, to burst open and soar from
+with all his memories about him, even his lost ones. Like the
+dragon-fly, the butterfly, the moth ... and when _they_ die it is the
+same, and the same with a blade of grass. We are all, _tous tant que
+nous sommes_, little bags of remembrance that never dies; that's what
+we're _for_. But we can only bring with us to the common stock what
+we've got. As Pere Francois used to say, 'La plus belle fille au monde
+ne peut donner que ce qu'elle a.'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Besides all this I am your earthly wife, Gogo--your loving, faithful,
+devoted wife, and I wish it to be known.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And then at last, in the fulness of time--a very few years--ah,
+then----
+
+"Once more shall Neuha lead her Torquil by the hand."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Oh, Mary!" I cried, "shall we be transcendently happy again? As happy
+as we were--_happier_ even?"
+
+Ah, Gogo, is a man happier than a mouse, or a mouse than a turnip, or
+a turnip than a lump of chalk? But what man would be a mouse or a
+turnip, or _vice versa_? What turnip would be a lump--of anything but
+itself? Are two people happier than one? You and I, yes; because we
+_are_ one; but who else? It is one and all. Happiness is like time
+and space--we make and measure it ourselves; it is a fancy--as big, as
+little, as you please; just a thing of contrasts and comparisons, like
+health or strength or beauty or any other good--that wouldn't even be
+noticed but for sad personal experience of its opposite!--or
+its greater!
+
+"I have forgotten all I know but this, which is for you and me: we are
+inseparable forever. Be sure we shall not want to go back again for
+a moment."
+
+"And is there no punishment or reward?"
+
+Oh, there again! What a detail! Poor little naughty perverse
+midges--who were _born_ so--and _can't_ keep straight! poor little
+exemplary midges who couldn't go wrong if they tried! Is it worth while?
+Isn't it enough for either punishment or reward that the secrets of all
+midges' hearts shall be revealed, and for all other midges to see?
+Think of it!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There are battles to be fought and races to be won, but no longer
+against '_each other_.' And strength and swiftness to win them; but no
+longer any strong and swift. There is weakness and cowardice, but no
+longer any cowards or weaklings. The good and the bad and the worst and
+the best--it is all mixed up. But the good comes to the top; the bad
+goes to the bottom--it is precipitated, as papa used to say. It is not
+an agreeable sediment, with its once useful cruelty at the lowest bottom
+of all--out of sight, out of mind--all but forgotten. _C'est deja
+le ciel_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"And the goal? The cause, the whither, and the why of it all? Ah!
+Gogo--as inscrutable, as unthinkable as ever, till the great guesser
+comes! At least so it seems to me, speaking as a fool, out of the depths
+of my poor ignorance; for I am a new arrival, and a complete outsider,
+with my chain and locket, waiting for you.
+
+"I have only picked up a few grains of sand on the shore of that sea--a
+few little shells, and I can't even show you what they are like. I see
+that it is no good even talking of it, alas! And I had promised myself
+_so_ much.
+
+"Oh! how my earthly education was neglected, and yours! and how I feel
+it now, with so much to say in words, mere words! Why, to tell you in
+words the little I can see, the very little--so that you could
+understand--would require that each of us should be the greatest poet
+and the greatest mathematician that ever were, rolled into one! How I
+pity you, Gogo--with your untrained, unskilled, innocent pen, poor
+scribe! having to write all this down--for you _must_--and do your poor
+little best, as I have done mine in telling you! You must let the heart
+speak, and not mind style or manner! Write _any_ how! write for the
+greatest need and the greatest number.
+
+"But do just try and see this, dearest, and make the best of it you can:
+as far as _I_ can make it out, everything everywhere seems to be an
+ever-deepening, ever-broadening stream that makes with inconceivable
+velocity for its own proper level, WHERE PERFECTION IS! ... and ever
+gets nearer and nearer, and never finds it, and fortunately never will!
+
+"Only that, unlike an earthly stream, and more like a fresh flowing tide
+up an endless, boundless, shoreless creek (if you can imagine that), the
+level it seeks is immeasurably higher than its source. And everywhere in
+it is Life, Life, Life! ever renewing and doubling itself, and ever
+swelling that mighty river which has no banks!
+
+"And everywhere in it like begets like, _plus_ a little better or a
+little worse; and the little worse finds its way into some backwater and
+sticks there, and finally goes to the bottom, and nobody cares. And the
+little better goes on bettering and bettering--not all man's folly or
+perverseness can hinder _that_, nor make that headlong torrent stay, or
+ebb, or roll backward for a moment--_c'est plus fort que nous_! ... The
+record goes on beating itself, the high-water-mark gets higher and
+higher till the highest on earth is reached that can be--and then, I
+suppose, the earth grows cold and the sun goes out--to be broken up into
+bits, and used all over again, perhaps! And betterness flies to warmer
+climes and higher systems, to better itself still! And so on, from
+better to better, from higher to higher, from warmer to warmer, and
+bigger to bigger--for ever and ever and ever!
+
+"But the final superlative of all, absolute all--goodness and
+all-highness, absolute all-wisdom, absolute omnipotence, beyond which
+there neither is nor can be anything more, will never be reached at
+all--since there are no such things; they are abstractions; besides
+which, attainment means rest, and rest stagnation, and stagnation an end
+of all! And there is no end, and never can be--no end to Time and all
+the things that are done in it--no end to Space and all the things that
+fill it, or all would come together in a heap and smash up in the
+middle--and there _is_ no middle!--no end, no beginning, no middle! _no
+middle_, Gogo! think of _that_! it is the most inconceivable thing
+of all!!!
+
+"So who shall say where Shakespeare and you and I come in--tiny links in
+an endless chain, so tiny that even Shakespeare is no bigger than we!
+And just a little way behind us, those little wriggling transparent
+things, all stomach, that we descend from; and far ahead of ourselves,
+but in the direct line of a long descent from _us_, an ever-growing
+conscious Power, so strong, so glad, so simple, so wise, so mild, and so
+beneficent, that what can we do, even now, but fall on our knees with
+our foreheads in the dust, and our hearts brimful of wonder, hope, and
+love, and tender shivering awe; and worship as a yet unborn, barely
+conceived, and scarce begotten _Child_--that which we have always been
+taught to worship as a _Father_--That which is not now, but _is_ to
+be--That which we shall all share in and be part and parcel of in the
+dim future--That which is slowly, surely, painfully weaving Itself out
+of us and the likes of us all through the limitless Universe, and Whose
+coming we can but faintly foretell by the casting of its shadow on our
+own slowly, surely, painfully awakening souls!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Then she went on to speak of earthly things, and ask questions in her
+old practical way. First of my bodily health, with the tenderest
+solicitude and the wisest advice--as a mother to a son. She even
+insisted on listening to my heart, like a doctor.
+
+Then she spoke at great length of the charities in which she had been
+interested, and gave me many directions which I was to write, as coming
+from myself, to certain people whose names and addresses she impressed
+upon me with great care.
+
+I have done as she wished, and most of these directions have been
+followed to the letter, with no little wonder on the world's part (as
+the world well knows) that such sagacious and useful reforms should have
+originated with the inmate of a criminal lunatic asylum.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At last the time came for us to part. She foresaw that I should have to
+wake in a few minutes, and said, rising----
+
+"And now, Gogo, the best beloved that ever was on earth, take me once
+more in your dear arms, and kiss me good-bye for a little while--_auf
+wiedersehen_. Come here to rest and think and remember when your body
+sleeps. My spirit will always be here with you. I may even be able to
+come back again myself--just this poor husk of me--hardly more to look
+at than a bundle of old clothes; but yet a world made up of love for
+_you_. Good-bye, good-bye, dearest and best. Time is nothing, but I
+shall count the hours. Good-bye...."
+
+Even as she strained me to her breast I awoke.
+
+[Illustration: "GOOD-BYE"]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I awoke, and knew that the dread black shadow of melancholia had passed
+away from me like a hideous nightmare--like a long and horrible winter.
+My heart was full of the sunshine of spring--the gladness of awaking to
+a new life.
+
+I smiled at my night attendant, who stared back at me in astonishment,
+and exclaimed----
+
+"Why, sir, blest if you ain't a new man altogether. There, now!"
+
+I wrung his hand, and thanked him for all his past patience, kindness,
+and forbearance with such effusion that his eyes had tears in them. I
+had not spoken for weeks, and he heard my voice for the first time.
+
+That day, also, without any preamble or explanation, I gave the doctor
+and the chaplain and the governor my word of honor that I would not
+attempt my life again, or any one else's, and was believed and trusted
+on the spot; and they unstrapped me.
+
+I was never so touched in my life.
+
+In a week I recovered much of my strength; but I was an old man. That
+was a great change.
+
+Most people age gradually and imperceptibly. To me old age had come of a
+sudden--in a night, as it were; but with it, and suddenly also, the
+resigned and cheerful acquiescence, the mild serenity, that are its
+compensation and more.
+
+My hope, my certainty to be one with Mary some day--that is my haven, my
+heaven--a consummation of completeness beyond which there is nothing to
+wish for or imagine. Come what else may, that is safe, and that is all I
+care for. She was able to care for me, and for many other things
+besides, and I love her all the more for it; but I can only care
+for _her_.
+
+Sooner or later--a year--ten years; it does not matter much. I also am
+beginning to disbelieve in the existence of time.
+
+That waking was the gladdest in my life--gladder even than the waking
+in my condemned cell the morning after my sentence of death, when
+another black shadow passed away--that of the scaffold.
+
+Oh, Mary! What has she not done for me--what clouds has she not
+dispelled!
+
+When night came round again I made once more, step by step, the journey
+from the Porte de la Muette to the Mare d'Auteuil, with everything the
+same--the gay wedding-feast, the blue and silver courier, the merry
+guests singing
+
+     _"Il etait un petit navire."_
+
+Nothing was altered, even to the dull gray weather. But, oh, the
+difference to me!
+
+I longed to play at _bouchon_ with the hackney coachmen, or at _la balle
+au camp_ with my old schoolfellows. I could have even waltzed with
+"Monsieur Lartigue" and "le petit Cazal."
+
+I looked in Mere Manette's little mirror and saw my worn, gray, haggard,
+old face again; and liked it, and thought it quite good-looking. I sat
+down and rested by the fortifications as I had done the night before,
+for I was still tired, but with a most delicious fatigue; my very
+shabbiness was agreeable to me--_pauvre, mais honnete_. A convict, a
+madman, but a prince among men--still the beloved of Mary!
+
+And when at last I reached the spot I had always loved the best on earth
+ever since I first saw it as a child, I fell on my knees and wept for
+sheer excess of joy. It was mine indeed; it belonged to me as no land or
+water had ever belonged to any man before.
+
+Mary was not there, of course; I did not expect her.
+
+But, strange and incomprehensible as it seems, she had forgotten her
+gloves; she had left them behind her. One was on the bench, one was on
+the ground; poor old gloves that had been mended, with the well-known
+shape of her dear hand in them; every fold and crease preserved as in a
+mould--the very cast of her finger-nails; and the scent of sandal-wood
+she and her mother had so loved.
+
+I laid them side by side, palms upward, on the bench where we had sat
+the night before. No dream-wind has blown them away; no dream-thief has
+stolen them; there they lie still, and will lie till the great change
+comes over me, and I am one with their owner.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I am there every night--in the lovely spring or autumn
+sunshine--meditating, remembering, taking notes--dream-notes to be
+learned by heard, and used next day for a real purpose.
+
+I walk round and round, or sit on the benches, or lie in the grass by
+the brink, and smoke cigarettes without end, and watch the old
+amphibious life I found so charming half a century ago, and find it
+charming still.
+
+Sometimes I dive into the forest (which has now been razed to the
+ground. Ever since 1870 there is an open space all round the Mare
+d'Auteuil. I had seen it since then in a dream with Mary, who went to
+Paris after the war, and mad pilgrimages by day to all the places so
+dear to our hearts, and so changed; and again, when the night came,
+with me for a fellow-pilgrim. It was a sad disenchantment for us both).
+
+_My_ Mare d'Auteuil, where I spend so many hours, is the Mare d'Auteuil
+of Louis Philippe, unchangeable except for such slight changes as _will_
+occur, now and then, between the years 1839 and 1846: a broken bench
+mended, a new barrier put up by the high-road, a small wooden dike
+where the brink is giving way.
+
+[Illustration: "I AM THERE EVERY NIGHT."]
+
+And the thicket beside and behind it is dark and dense for miles, with
+many tall trees and a rich, tangled undergrowth.
+
+There is a giant oak which it is difficult to find in that labyrinth (it
+now stands, for the world, alone in the open; an ornament to the Auteuil
+race-course) I have often climbed it as a boy, with Mimsey and the
+rest; I cannot climb it now, but I love to lie on the grass in its
+shade, and dream in my dream there, shut in on all sides by fragrant,
+impenetrable verdure; with birds and bees and butterflies and
+dragon-flies and strange beetles and little field-mice with bright eyes,
+and lithe spotted snakes and lively brown squirrels and beautiful green
+lizards for my company. Now and then a gentle roebuck comes and feeds
+close by me without fear, and the mole throws up his little mound of
+earth and takes an airing.
+
+It is a very charming solitude.
+
+It amuses me to think by day, when broad awake in my sad English prison,
+and among my crazy peers, how this nightly umbrageous French solitude of
+mine, so many miles and years away, is now but a common, bare, wide
+grassy plain, overlooked by a gaudy, beflagged grand-stand. It is
+Sunday, let us say--and for all I know a great race may be going on--all
+Paris is there, rich and poor. Little red-legged soldiers, big
+blue-legged gendarmes, keep the course clear; the sun shines, the
+tricolour waves, the gay, familiar language makes the summer breeze
+musical. I dare say it is all very bright and animated, but the whole
+place rings with the vulgar din of the bookmakers, and the air is full
+of dust and foul with the scent of rank tobacco, the reek of struggling
+French humanity; and the gaunt Eiffel Tower looks down upon it all from
+the sky over Paris (so, at least, I am told) like a skeleton at a feast.
+
+Then twilight comes, and the crowds have departed; on foot, on
+horseback, on bicycles and tricycles, in every kind of vehicle; many by
+the _chemin de fer de ceinture_, the Auteuil station of which is close
+by ... all is quiet and bare and dull.
+
+Then down drops the silent night like a curtain, and beneath its
+friendly cover the strange transformation effects itself quickly, and
+all is made ready for _me_. The grand-stand evaporates, the railway
+station melts away into thin air; there is no more Eiffel Tower with its
+electric light! The sweet forest of fifty years ago rises suddenly out
+of the ground, and all the wild live things that once lived in it wake
+to their merry life again.
+
+A quiet deep old pond in a past French forest, hallowed by such
+memories! What _can_ be more enchanting? Oh, soft and sweet nostalgia,
+so soon to be relieved!
+
+Up springs the mellow sun, the light of other days, to its appointed
+place in the heavens--zenith, or east or west, according to order. A
+light wind blows from the south--everything is properly disinfected, and
+made warm and bright and comfortable--and lo! old Peter Ibbetson appears
+upon the scene, absolute monarch of all he surveys for the next eight
+hours--one whose right there are literally none to dispute.
+
+I do not encourage noisy gatherings there as a rule, nor by the pond; I
+like to keep the sweet place pretty much to myself; there is no
+selfishness in this, for I am really depriving nobody. Whoever comes
+there now, comes there nearly fifty years ago and does not know it; they
+must have all died long since.
+
+Sometimes it is a _garde champetre_ in Louis Philippe's blue and silver,
+with his black pipe, his gaiters, his old flint gun, and his
+embroidered game-bag. He does well in the landscape.
+
+Sometimes it is a pair of lovers, if they are good-looking and
+well-behaved, or else the boys from Saindou's school to play fly the
+garter--_la raie_.
+
+Sometimes it is Monsieur le Cure, peacefully conning his "Hours," as
+with slow and thoughtful step he paces round and round. I can now read
+his calm, benevolent face by the light of half a century's experience of
+life, and have learned to love that still, black, meditative aspect
+which I found so antipathetic as a small boy--_he_ is no burner alive of
+little heretics! This world is big enough for us both--and so is the
+world to come! And he knows it. Now, at all events!
+
+[Illustration: "THIS WORLD IS BIG ENOUGH FOR US BOTH"]
+
+Sometimes even a couple of Prendergasts are admitted, or even three;
+they are not so bad, after all; they have the qualities of their faults,
+although you might not think it.
+
+But very often the old beloved shades arrive with their fishing-nets,
+and their high spirits, and their ringing Anglo-French--Charlie, and
+Alfred, and Madge, and the rest, and the grinning, barking, gyrating
+Medor, who dives after stones.
+
+Oh, how it does my heart good to see and hear them!
+
+They make me feel like a grandfather. Even Monsieur le Major is younger
+than I--his mustache less white than mine. He only comes to my chin; but
+I look up to him still, and love and revere him as when I was a
+little child.
+
+And Dr. Seraskier! I place myself between him and what he is looking at,
+so that he seems to be looking straight at me; but with a far-away look
+in his eyes, as is only natural. Presently something amuses him, and he
+smiles, and his eyes crinkle up as his daughter's used to do when she
+was a woman, and his majestic face becomes as that of an angel,
+like hers.
+
+_L'ange du sourire!_
+
+And my gay, young, light-hearted father, with his vivacity and
+rollicking laugh and eternal good-humor! He is just like a boy to me
+now, le beau Pasquier! He has got a new sling of his own invention; he
+pulls it out of his pocket, and slings stones high over the tree-tops
+and far away out of sight--to the joy of himself and everybody else--and
+does not trouble much as to where they will fall.
+
+My mother is young enough now to be my daughter; it is as a daughter, a
+sweet, kind, lovely daughter, that I love her now--a happily-married
+daughter with a tall, handsome husband who yodles divinely and slings
+stones, and who has presented me with a grandson--_beau comme le
+jour_--for whatever Peter Ibbetson may have been in his time, there is
+no gainsaying the singular comeliness of little Gogo Pasquier.
+
+And Mimsey is just a child angel! Monsieur le Major is infallible.
+
+"Elle a toutes les intelligences de la tete et du coeur! Vous verrez un
+jour, quand ca ira mieux; vous verrez!"
+
+That day has long come and gone; it is easy to see all that now--to have
+the eyes of Monsieur le Major.
+
+Ah, poor little Mimsey, with her cropped head and her pale face, and
+long, thin arms and legs, and grave, kind, luminous eyes, that have not
+yet learned to smile. What she is to _me!!!!_
+
+And Madame Seraskier, in all the youthful bloom and splendor of her
+sacred beauty! A chosen lily among women--the mother of Mary!
+
+She sits on the old bench by the willow, close to her daughter's gloves.
+Sometimes (a trivial and almost comic detail!) she actually seems to sit
+_upon_ them, to my momentary distress; but when she goes away, there
+they are still, not flattened a bit--the precious mould of those
+beautiful, generous hands to which I owe everything here and hereafter.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have not been again to my old home. I dread the sight of the avenue. I
+cannot face "Parva sed Apta."
+
+But I have seen Mary again--seven times.
+
+And every time she comes she brings a book with her, gilt-edged and
+bound in green morocco like the Byron we read when we were children, or
+in red morocco like the _Elegant Extracts_ out of which we used to
+translate Gray's "Elegy," and the "Battle of Hohenlinden," and
+Cunningham's "Pastorals" into French.
+
+Such is her fancy!
+
+But inside these books are very different. They are printed in cipher,
+and in a language I can only understand in my dream. Nothing that I, or
+any one else, has ever read in any living book can approach, for
+interest and importance, what I read in these. There are seven of them.
+
+I say to myself when I read them: it is perhaps well that I shall not
+remember this when I wake, after all!
+
+For I might be indiscreet and injudicious, and either say too much or
+not enough; and the world might come to a stand-still, all through me.
+For who would fardels bear, as Mary said! No! The world must be content
+to wait for the great guesser!
+
+Thus my lips are sealed.
+
+All I know is this: _that all will be well for us all, and of such a
+kind that all who do not sigh for the moon will be well content_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In such wise have I striven, with the best of my ability, to give some
+account of my two lives and Mary's. We have lived three lives between
+us--three lives in one.
+
+It has been a happy task, however poorly performed, and all the
+conditions of its performance have been singularly happy also.
+
+A cell in a criminal lunatic asylum! That does not sound like a bower in
+the Elysian Fields! It is, and has been for me.
+
+Besides the sun that lights and warms my inner life, I have been treated
+with a kindness and sympathy and consideration by everybody here, from
+the governor downward, that fills me with unspeakable gratitude.
+
+Most especially do I feel grateful to my good friends, the doctor, the
+chaplain, and the priest--best and kindest of men--each of whom has made
+up his mind about everything in heaven and earth and below, and each in
+a contrary sense to the two others!
+
+There is but one thing they are neither of them quite cocksure about,
+and that is whether I am mad or sane.
+
+And there is one thing--the only one on which they are agreed; namely,
+that, mad or sane, I am a great undiscovered genius!
+
+My little sketches, plain or colored, fill them with admiration and
+ecstasy. Such boldness and facility and execution, such an overwhelming
+fertility in the choice of subjects, such singular realism in the
+conception and rendering of past scenes, historical and otherwise, such
+astounding knowledge of architecture, character, costume, and what not,
+such local color--it is all as if I had really been there to see!
+
+I have the greatest difficulty in keeping my fame from spreading beyond
+the walls of the asylum. My modesty is as great as my talent!
+
+No, I do not wish this great genius to be discovered just yet. It must
+all go to help and illustrate and adorn the work of a much greater
+genius, from which it has drawn every inspiration it ever had.
+
+It is a splendid and delightful task I have before me: to unravel and
+translate and put in order these voluminous and hastily-penned
+reminiscences of Mary's, all of them written in the cipher we invented
+together in our dream--a very transparent cipher when once you have
+got the key!
+
+It will take five years at least, and I think that, without presumption,
+I can count on that, strong and active as I feel, and still so far from
+the age of the Psalmist.
+
+First of all, I intend
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Note_.--Here ends my poor cousin's memoir. He was found dead from
+effusion of blood on the brain, with his pen still in his hand, and his
+head bowed down on his unfinished manuscript, on the margin of which he
+had just sketched a small boy wheeling a toy wheelbarrow full of stones
+from one open door to another. One door is labelled _Passe_, the
+other _Avenir_.
+
+I arrived in England, after a long life spent abroad, at the time his
+death occurred, but too late to see him alive. I heard much about him
+and his latter days. All those whose duties brought them into contact
+with him seemed to have regarded him with a respect that bordered on
+veneration.
+
+I had the melancholy satisfaction of seeing him in his coffin. I had
+not seen him since he was twelve years old.
+
+As he lay there, in his still length and breadth, he appeared
+gigantic--the most magnificent human being I ever beheld; and the
+splendor of his dead face will haunt my memory till I die.
+
+MADGE PLUNKET.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Peter Ibbetson, by George Du Maurier
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PETER IBBETSON ***
+
+***** This file should be named 9817.txt or 9817.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        https://www.gutenberg.org/9/8/1/9817/
+
+Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Keren Vergon, Charlie
+Kirschner, and Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
diff --git a/9817.zip b/9817.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..088987d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/9817.zip
diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6312041
--- /dev/null
+++ b/LICENSE.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5bb03c3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #9817 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9817)
diff --git a/old/7pibb10.txt b/old/7pibb10.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..094e532
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/7pibb10.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,10582 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Peter Ibbetson, by George du Marier et al
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
+copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
+this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
+
+This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
+Gutenberg file.  Please do not remove it.  Do not change or edit the
+header without written permission.
+
+Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
+eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file.  Included is
+important information about your specific rights and restrictions in
+how the file may be used.  You can also find out about how to make a
+donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.
+
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+
+Title: Peter Ibbetson
+
+Author: George du Marier et al
+
+Release Date: February, 2006  [EBook #9817]
+[This file was first posted on October 20, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: US-ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, PETER IBBETSON ***
+
+
+
+
+E-text prepared by Charles Aldarondo, Keren Vergon, Charlie Kirschner, and
+Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PETER IBBETSON
+
+by George du Maurier
+
+With an Introduction by His Cousin Lady **** ("Madge Plunket")
+
+Edited and Illustrated by George Du Maurier
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Part One
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+The writer of this singular autobiography was my cousin, who died at
+the ----- Criminal Lunatic Asylum, of which he had been an inmate
+three years.
+
+He had been removed thither after a sudden and violent attack of
+homicidal mania (which fortunately led to no serious consequences),
+from ----- Jail, where he had spent twenty-five years, having been
+condemned to penal servitude for life, for the murder of ---- ----,
+his relative.
+
+He had been originally sentenced to death.
+
+It was at ---- Lunatic Asylum that he wrote these memoirs, and I received
+the MS. soon after his decease, with the most touching letter, appealing
+to our early friendship, and appointing me his literary executrix.
+
+It was his wish that the story of his life should be published just as
+he had written it.
+
+I have found it unadvisable to do this. It would revive, to no useful
+purpose, an old scandal, long buried and forgotten, and thereby give
+pain or annoyance to people who are still alive.
+
+Nor does his memory require rehabilitation among those who knew him, or
+knew anything of him--the only people really concerned. His dreadful
+deed has long been condoned by all (and they are many) who knew the
+provocation he had received and the character of the man who had
+provoked him.
+
+On mature consideration, and with advice, I resolved (in order that his
+dying wishes should not be frustrated altogether) to publish the memoir
+with certain alterations and emendations.
+
+I have nearly everywhere changed the names of people and places;
+suppressed certain details, and omitted some passages of his life (most
+of the story of his school-days, for instance, and that of his brief
+career as a private in the Horse Guards) lest they should too easily
+lead to the identification and annoyance of people still alive, for he
+is strongly personal at times, and perhaps not always just; and some
+other events I have carefully paraphrased (notably his trial at the Old
+Bailey), and given for them as careful an equivalent as I could manage
+without too great a loss of verisimilitude.
+
+I may as well state at once that, allowing for these alterations, every
+incident of his _natural_ life as described by himself is absolutely
+true, to the minutest detail, as I have been able to ascertain.
+
+For the early part of it--the life at Passy he describes with such
+affection--I can vouch personally; I am the Cousin "Madge" to whom he
+once or twice refers.
+
+I well remember the genial abode where he lived with his parents (my
+dear uncle and aunt); and the lovely "Madame Seraskier," and her husband
+and daughter, and their house, "Parva sed Apta," and "Major Duquesnois,"
+and the rest.
+
+And although I have never seen him since he was twelve years old, when
+his parents died and he went to London (as most of my life has been
+spent abroad), I received occasional letters from him.
+
+I have also been able to obtain much information about him from others,
+especially from a relative of the late "Mr. and Mrs. Lintot," who knew
+him well, and from several officers in his regiment who remembered him;
+also from the "Vicar's daughter," whom he met at "Lady Cray's" and who
+perfectly recollects the conversation she had with him at dinner, his
+sudden indisposition, and his long interview with the "Duchess of
+Towers," under the ash-tree next morning; she was one of the
+croquet-players.
+
+He was the most beautiful boy I ever saw, and so charming, lively, and
+amiable that everybody was fond of him. He had a horror of cruelty,
+especially to animals (quite singular in a boy of his age), and was very
+truthful and brave.
+
+According to all accounts (and from a photograph in my possession), he
+grew up to be as handsome as a man can well be, a personal gift which he
+seems to have held of no account whatever, though he thought so much of
+it in others. But he also became singularly shy and reserved in manner,
+over-diffident and self-distrustful; of a melancholy disposition, loving
+solitude, living much alone, and taking nobody into his confidence; and
+yet inspiring both affection and respect. For he seems to have always
+been thoroughly gentlemanlike in speech, bearing, manner, and aspect.
+
+It is possible, although he does not say so, that having first enlisted,
+and then entered upon a professional career under somewhat inauspicious
+conditions, he felt himself to have fallen away from the social rank
+(such as it was) that belonged to him by birth; and he may have found
+his associates uncongenial.
+
+His old letters to me are charmingly open and effusive.
+
+Of the lady whom (keeping her title and altering her name) I have called
+the "Duchess of Towers," I find it difficult to speak. That they only
+met twice, and in the way he describes, is a fact about which there can
+be no doubt.
+
+It is also indubitable that he received in Newgate, on the morning after
+his sentence to death, an envelope containing violets, and the strange
+message he mentions. Both letter and violets are in my possession, and
+the words are in her handwriting; about that there can be no mistake.
+
+It is certain, moreover, that she separated from her husband almost
+immediately after my cousin's trial and condemnation, and lived in
+comparative retirement from the world, as it is certain that he went
+suddenly mad, twenty-five years later, in ---- Jail, a few hours after
+her tragic death, and before he could possibly have heard of it by the
+ordinary channels; and that he was sent to ---- Asylum, where, after his
+frenzy had subsided, he remained for many days in a state of suicidal
+melancholia, until, to the surprise of all, he rose one morning in high
+spirits, and apparently cured of all serious symptoms of insanity; so he
+remained until his death. It was during the last year of his life that
+he wrote his autobiography, in French and English.
+
+There is nothing to be surprised at, taking all the circumstances into
+consideration, that even so great a lady, the friend of queens and
+empresses, the bearer of a high title and an illustrious name, justly
+celebrated for her beauty and charm (and her endless charities), of
+blameless repute, and one of the most popular women in English society,
+should yet have conceived a very warm regard for my poor cousin; indeed,
+it was an open secret in the family of "Lord Cray" that she had done so.
+But for them she would have taken the whole world into her confidence.
+
+After her death she left him what money had come to her from her father,
+which he disposed of for charitable ends, and an immense quantity of MS.
+in cipher--a cipher which is evidently identical with that he used
+himself in the annotations he put under innumerable sketches he was
+allowed to make during his long period of confinement, which (through
+her interest, and no doubt through his own good conduct) was rendered as
+bearable to him as possible. These sketches (which are very
+extraordinary) and her Grace's MS. are now in my possession.
+
+They constitute a mystery into which I have not dared to pry.
+
+From papers belonging to both I have been able to establish beyond doubt
+the fact (so strangely discovered) of their descent from a common French
+ancestress, whose name I have but slightly modified and the tradition of
+whom still lingers in the "Departement de la Sarthe," where she was a
+famous person a century ago; and her violin, a valuable Amati, now
+belongs to me.
+
+Of the non-natural part of his story I will not say much.
+
+It is, of course, a fact that he had been absolutely and, to all
+appearance, incurably insane before he wrote his life.
+
+There seems to have been a difference of opinion, or rather a doubt,
+among the authorities of the asylum as to whether he was mad after the
+acute but very violent period of his brief attack had ended.
+
+Whichever may have been the case, I am at least convinced of this: that
+he was no romancer, and thoroughly believed in the extraordinary mental
+experience he has revealed.
+
+At the risk of being thought to share his madness--if he _was_ mad--I
+will conclude by saying that I, for one, believe him to have been sane,
+and to have told the truth all through.
+
+MADGE PLUNKET
+
+
+
+
+
+I am but a poor scribe; ill-versed in the craft of wielding words and
+phrases, as the cultivated reader (if I should ever happen to have one)
+will no doubt very soon find out for himself.
+
+[Illustration:]
+
+I have been for many years an object of pity and contempt to all who
+ever gave me a thought--to all but _one_! Yet of all that ever lived on
+this earth I have been, perhaps, the happiest and most privileged, as
+that reader will discover if he perseveres to the end.
+
+My outer and my inner life have been as the very poles--asunder; and if,
+at the eleventh hour, I have made up my mind to give my story to the
+world, it is not in order to rehabilitate myself in the eyes of my
+fellow-men, deeply as I value their good opinion; for I have always
+loved them and wished them well, and would fain express my goodwill and
+win theirs, if that were possible.
+
+It is because the regions where I have found my felicity are accessible
+to all, and that many, better trained and better gifted, will explore
+them to far better purpose than I, and to the greater glory and benefit
+of mankind, when once I have given them the clew. Before I can do this,
+and in order to show how I came by this clew myself, I must tell, as
+well as I may, the tale of my checkered career--in telling which,
+moreover, I am obeying the last behest of one whose lightest wish was
+my law.
+
+If I am more prolix than I need be, it must be set down to my want of
+experience in the art of literary composition--to a natural wish I have
+to show myself neither better nor worse than I believe myself to be; to
+the charm, the unspeakable charm, that personal reminiscences have for
+the person principally concerned, and which he cannot hope to impart,
+however keenly he may feel it, without gifts and advantages that have
+been denied to me.
+
+And this leads me to apologize for the egotism of this Memoir, which is
+but an introduction to another and longer one that I hope to publish
+later. To write a story of paramount importance to mankind, it is true,
+but all about one's outer and one's inner self, to do this without
+seeming somewhat egotistical, requires something akin to genius--and I
+am but a poor scribe.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     "_Combien j'ai douce souvenance
+     Du joli lieu de ma naissance_!"
+
+These quaint lines have been running in my head at intervals through
+nearly all my outer life, like an oft-recurring burden in an endless
+ballad--sadly monotonous, alas! the ballad, which is mine; sweetly
+monotonous the burden, which is by Chateaubriand.
+
+I sometimes think that to feel the full significance of this refrain one
+must have passed one's childhood in sunny France, where it was written,
+and the remainder of one's existence in mere London--or worse than mere
+London--as has been the case with me. If I had spent all my life from
+infancy upward in Bloomsbury, or Clerkenwell, or Whitechapel, my early
+days would be shorn of much of their retrospective glamour as I look
+back on them in these my after-years.
+
+     _"Combien j'ai douce souvenance!"_
+
+It was on a beautiful June morning in a charming French garden, where
+the warm, sweet atmosphere was laden with the scent of lilac and
+syringa, and gay with butterflies and dragon-flies and humblebees, that
+I began my conscious existence with the happiest day of all my
+outer life.
+
+It is true that I had vague memories (with many a blank between) of a
+dingy house in the heart of London, in a long street of desolating
+straightness, that led to a dreary square and back again, and nowhere
+else for me; and then of a troubled and exciting journey that seemed of
+jumbled days and nights. I could recall the blue stage-coach with the
+four tall, thin, brown horses, so quiet and modest and well-behaved; the
+red-coated guard and his horn; the red-faced driver and his husky voice
+and many capes.
+
+Then the steamer with its glistening deck, so beautiful and white it
+seemed quite a desecration to walk upon it--this spotlessness did not
+last very long; and then two wooden piers with a light-house on each,
+and a quay, and blue-bloused workmen and red-legged little soldiers with
+mustaches, and bare-legged fisher-women, all speaking a language that I
+knew as well as the other commoner language I had left behind; but which
+I had always looked upon as an exclusive possession of my father's and
+mother's and mine for the exchange of sweet confidence and the
+bewilderment of outsiders; and here were little boys and girls in the
+street, quite common children, who spoke it as well and better than I
+did myself.
+
+After this came the dream of a strange, huge, top-heavy vehicle, that
+seemed like three yellow carriages stuck together, and a mountain of
+luggage at the top under an immense black tarpaulin, which ended in a
+hood; and beneath the hood sat a blue-bloused man with a singular cap,
+like a concertina, and mustaches, who cracked a loud whip over five
+squealing, fussy, pugnacious white and gray horses, with bells on their
+necks and bushy fox-tails on their foreheads, and their own tails
+carefully tucked up behind.
+
+From the _coupe_ where I sat with my father and mother I could watch
+them well as they led us through dusty roads with endless apple-trees or
+poplars on either side. Little barefooted urchins (whose papas and
+mammas wore wooden shoes and funny white nightcaps) ran after us for
+French half-pennies, which were larger than English ones, and pleasanter
+to have and to hold! Up hill and down we went; over sounding wooden
+bridges, through roughly paved streets in pretty towns to large
+court-yards, where five other quarrelsome steeds, gray and white, were
+waiting to take the place of the old ones--worn out, but
+quarreling still!
+
+And through the night I could hear the gay music of the bells and hoofs,
+the rumbling of the wheels the cracking of the eternal whip, as I
+fidgeted from one familiar lap to the other in search of sleep; and
+waking out of a doze I could see the glare of the red lamps on the five
+straining white and gray backs that dragged us so gallantly through the
+dark summer night.
+
+[Illustration: "A STRANGE, HUGE, TOP-HEAVY VEHICLE."]
+
+Then it all became rather tiresome and intermittent and confused, till
+we reached at dusk next day a quay by a broad river; and as we drove
+along it, under thick trees, we met other red and blue and green lamped
+five-horsed diligences starting on their long journey just as ours was
+coming to an end.
+
+Then I knew (because I was a well-educated little boy, and heard my
+father exclaim, "Here's Paris at last!") that we had entered the capital
+of France--a fact that impressed me very much--so much, it seems, that I
+went to sleep for thirty-six hours at a stretch, and woke up to find
+myself in the garden I have mentioned, and to retain possession of that
+self without break or solution of continuity (except when I went to
+sleep again) until now.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The happiest day in all my outer life!
+
+For in an old shed full of tools and lumber at the end of the garden,
+and half-way between an empty fowl-house and a disused stable (each an
+Eden in itself) I found a small toy-wheelbarrow--quite the most
+extraordinary, the most unheard of and undreamed of, humorously,
+daintily, exquisitely fascinating object I had ever come across in all
+my brief existence.
+
+I spent hours--enchanted hours--in wheeling brick-bats from the stable
+to the fowl-house, and more enchanted hours in wheeling them all back
+again, while genial French workmen, who were busy in and out of the
+house where we were to live, stopped every now and then to ask
+good-natured questions of the "p'tit Anglais," and commend his knowledge
+of their tongue, and his remarkable skill in the management of a
+wheelbarrow. Well I remember wondering, with newly-aroused
+self-consciousness, at the intensity, the poignancy, the extremity of my
+bliss, and looking forward with happy confidence to an endless
+succession of such hours in the future.
+
+But next morning, though the weather was as fine, and the wheelbarrow
+and the brick-bats and the genial workmen were there, and all the scents
+and sights and sounds were the same, the first fine careless rapture was
+not to be caught again, and the glory and the freshness had departed.
+
+Thus did I, on the very dawning of life, reach at a single tide the
+high-water-mark of my earthly bliss--never to be reached again by me on
+this side of the ivory gate--and discover that to make the perfection of
+human happiness endure there must be something more than a sweet French
+garden, a small French wheelbarrow, and a nice little English boy who
+spoke French and had the love of approbation--a fourth dimension
+is required.
+
+I found it in due time.
+
+But if there were no more enchanted hours like the first, there were to
+be seven happy years that have the quality of enchantment as I look
+back on them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Oh, the beautiful garden! Roses, nasturtiums and convolvulus,
+wallflowers, sweet-pease and carnations, marigolds and sunflowers,
+dahlias and pansies and hollyhocks and poppies, and Heaven knows what
+besides! In my fond recollection they all bloom at once, irrespective of
+time and season.
+
+To see and smell and pick all these for the first time at the
+susceptible age of five! To inherit such a kingdom after five years of
+Gower Street and Bedford Square! For all things are relative, and
+everything depends upon the point of view. To the owner of Chatsworth
+(and to his gardeners) my beautiful French Garden would have seemed a
+small affair.
+
+[Illustration: LE P'TIT ANGLAIS.]
+
+And what a world of insects--Chatsworth could not beat _these_ (indeed,
+is no doubt sadly lacking in them)--beautiful, interesting, comic,
+grotesque, and terrible; from the proud humble-bee to the earwig and his
+cousin, the devil's coach-horse; and all those rampant, many footed
+things that pullulate in damp and darkness under big flat stones. To
+think that I have been friends with all these--roses and centipedes and
+all--and then to think that most of my outer life has been spent between
+bare whitewashed walls, with never even a flea or a spider to be friends
+with again!
+
+Our house (where, by-the-way, I had been born five years before), an old
+yellow house with green shutters and Mansard-roofs of slate, stood
+between this garden and the street--a long winding street, roughly
+flagged, with oil-lamps suspended across at long intervals; these lamps
+were let down with pulleys at dusk, replenished and lit, and then hauled
+up again to make darkness visible for a few hours on nights when the
+moon was away.
+
+Opposite to us was a boys' school--"Maison d'Education, Dirigee par M.
+Jules Saindou, Bachelier et Maitre es Lettres et es Sciences," and
+author of a treatise on geology, with such hauntingly terrific pictures
+of antediluvian reptiles battling in the primeval slime that I have
+never been able to forget them. My father, who was fond of science, made
+me a present of it on my sixth birthday. It cost me many a nightmare.
+
+From our windows we could see and hear the boys at play--at a proper
+distance French boys sound just like English ones, though they do not
+look so, on account of their blue blouses and dusky, cropped heads--and
+we could see the gymnastic fixtures in the play-ground, M. Saindou's
+pride. "Le portique! la poutre! le cheval! et les barres paralleles!"
+Thus they were described in M. Saindou's prospectus.
+
+On either side of the street (which was called "the Street of the
+Pump"), as far as eye could reach looking west, were dwelling-houses
+just like our own, only agreeably different; and garden walls overtopped
+with the foliage of horse-chestnut, sycamore, acacia, and lime; and here
+and there huge portals and iron gates defended by posts of stone gave
+ingress to mysterious abodes of brick and plaster and granite,
+many-shuttered, and embosomed in sun-shot greenery.
+
+Looking east one could see in the near distance unsophisticated shops
+with old-fashioned windows of many panes--Liard, the grocer; Corbin, the
+poulterer; the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker.
+
+And this delightful street, as it went on its winding way, led not to
+Bedford Square or the new University College Hospital, but to Paris
+through the Arc de Triomphe at one end, and to the river Seine at the
+other; or else, turning to the right, to St. Cloud through the Bois de
+Boulogne of Louis Philippe Premier, Roi des Francais--as different from
+the Paris and the Bois de Boulogne of to-day as a diligence from an
+express train.
+
+On one side of the beautiful garden was another beautiful garden,
+separated from ours by a high wall covered with peach and pear and plum
+and apricot trees; on the other, accessible to us through a small door
+in another lower wall clothed with jasmine, clematis, convolvulus, and
+nasturtium, was a long, straight avenue of almond-trees, acacia,
+laburnum, lilac, and may, so closely planted that the ivy-grown walls
+on either side could scarcely be seen. What lovely patches they made on
+the ground when the sun shone! One end of this abutted on "the Street of
+the Pump," from which it was fenced by tall, elaborately-carved iron
+gates between stone portals, and at the side was a "porte batarde,"
+guarded by le Pere et la Mere Francois, the old concierge and his old
+wife. Peace to their ashes, and Heaven rest their kindly, genial souls!
+
+The other end of the avenue, where there was also an iron gate, admitted
+to a large private park that seemed to belong to nobody, and of which we
+were free--a very wilderness of delight, a heaven, a terror of tangled
+thickets and not too dangerous chalk cliffs, disused old quarries and
+dark caverns, prairies of lush grass, sedgy pools, turnip fields,
+forests of pine, groves and avenues of horse-chestnut, dank valleys of
+walnut-trees and hawthorn, which summer made dark at noon; bare,
+wind-swept mountainous regions whence one could reconnoitre afar; all
+sorts of wild and fearsome places for savages and wild beasts to hide
+and small boys to roam quite safely in quest of perilous adventure.
+
+All this vast enclosure (full of strange singing, humming, whistling,
+buzzing, twittering, cooing, booming, croaking, flying, creeping,
+crawling, jumping, climbing, burrowing, splashing, diving things) had
+been neglected for ages--an Eden where one might gather and eat of the
+fruit of the tree of knowledge without fear, and learn lovingly the ways
+of life without losing one's innocence; a forest that had remade for
+itself a new virginity, and become primeval once more; where beautiful
+Nature had reasserted her own sweet will, and massed and tangled
+everything together as though a Beauty had been sleeping there
+undisturbed for close on a hundred years, and was only waiting for the
+charming Prince--or, as it turned out a few years later, alas! the
+speculative builder and the railway engineer--those princes of our day.
+
+My fond remembrance would tell me that this region was almost boundless,
+well as I remember its boundaries. My knowledge of physical geography,
+as applied to this particular suburb of Paris, bids me assign more
+modest limits to this earthly paradise, which again was separated by an
+easily surmounted fence from Louis Philippe's Bois de Boulogne; and to
+this I cannot find it in my heart to assign any limits whatever, except
+the pretty old town from which it takes its name, and whose principal
+street leads to that magical combination of river, bridge, palace,
+gardens, mountain, and forest, St. Cloud.
+
+What more could be wanted for a small boy fresh (if such be freshness)
+from the very heart of Bloomsbury?
+
+That not a single drop should be lacking to the full cup of that small
+boy's felicity, there was a pond on the way from Passy to St. Cloud--a
+memorable pond, called "La Mare d'Auteuil," the sole aquatic treasure
+that Louis Philippe's Bois de Boulogne could boast. For in those
+ingenuous days there existed no artificial lake fed by an artificial
+stream, no pre-Catelan, no Jardin d'Acclimatation. The wood was just a
+wood, and nothing more--a dense, wild wood, that covered many hundreds
+of acres, and sheltered many thousands of wild live things. Though
+mysteriously deep in the middle, this famous pond (which may have been
+centuries old, and still exists) was not large; you might almost fling a
+stone across it anywhere.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Bounded on three sides by the forest (now shorn away), it was just
+hidden from the dusty road by a fringe of trees; and one could have it
+all to one's self, except on Sunday and Thursday afternoons, when a few
+love-sick Parisians remembered its existence, and in its loveliness
+forgot their own.
+
+To be there at all was to be happy; for not only was it quite the most
+secluded, picturesque, and beautiful pond in all the habitable
+globe--that pond of ponds, the _only_ pond--but it teemed with a far
+greater number and variety of wonderful insects and reptiles than any
+other pond in the world. Such, at least, I believed must be the case,
+for they were endless.
+
+To watch these creatures, to learn their ways, to catch them (which we
+sometimes did), to take them home and be kind to them, and try to tame
+them, and teach them our ways (with never varying non-success, it is
+true, but in, oh, such jolly company!) became a hobby that lasted me, on
+and off, for seven years.
+
+La Mare d'Auteuil! The very name has a magic, from all the associations
+that gathered round it during that time, to cling forever.
+
+How I loved it! At night, snoozing in my warm bed, I would awesomely
+think of it, and how solemn it looked when I had reluctantly left it at
+dusk, an hour or two before; then I would picture it to myself, later,
+lying deep and cold and still under the stars, in the dark thicket, with
+all that weird, uncanny lite seething beneath its stagnant surface.
+
+Then gradually the water would sink, and the reeds, left naked, begin to
+move and rustle ominously, and from among their roots in the uncovered
+slush everything alive would make for the middle--hopping, gliding,
+writhing frantically....
+
+Down shrank the water; and soon in the slimy bottom, yards below, huge
+fat salamanders, long-lost and forgotten tadpoles as large as rats,
+gigantic toads, enormous flat beetles, all kinds of hairy, scaly, spiny,
+blear-eyed, bulbous, shapeless monsters without name, mud-colored
+offspring of the mire that had been sleeping there for hundreds of
+years, woke up, and crawled in and out, and wallowed and interwriggled,
+and devoured each other, like the great saurians and batrachians in my
+_Manuel de Geologie Elementaire_. Edition illustree a l'usage des
+enfants. Par Jules Saindou, Bachelier et Maitre es Lettres et
+es Sciences.
+
+Then would I wake up with a start, in a cold perspiration, an icy chill
+shooting through me that roughed my skin and stirred the roots of my
+hair, and ardently wish for to-morrow morning.
+
+In after-years, and far away among the cold fogs of Clerkenwell, when
+the frequent longing would come over me to revisit "the pretty place of
+my birth," it was for the Mare d'Auteuil I longed the most; _that_ was
+the loadstar, the very pole of my home-sick desires; always thither the
+wings of my hopeless fancy bore me first of all; it was, oh! to tread
+that sunlit grassy brink once more, and to watch the merry tadpoles
+swarm, and the green frog takes its header like a little man, and the
+water-rat swim to his hole among the roots of the willow, and the
+horse-leech thread his undulating way between the water-lily stems; and
+to dream fondly of the delightful, irrevocable past, on the very spot of
+all where I and mine were always happiest!
+
+     "...Qu'ils etaient beaux, les jours De France!"
+
+In the avenue I have mentioned (_the_ avenue, as it is still to me, and
+as I will always call it) there was on the right hand, half the way up,
+a _maison de sante_, or boarding-house, kept by one Madame Pele; and
+there among others came to board and lodge, a short while after our
+advent, four or five gentlemen who had tried to invade France, with a
+certain grim Pretender at their head, and a tame eagle as a symbol of
+empire to rally round.
+
+The expedition had failed; the Pretender had been consigned to a
+fortress; the eagle had found a home in the public slaughter-house of
+Boulogne-sur-Mer, which it adorned for many years, and where it fed as
+it had never probably fed before; and these, the faithful followers, le
+Colonel Voisil, le Major Duquesnois, le Capitaine Audenis, le Docteur
+Lombal (and one or two others whose names I have forgotten), were
+prisoners on parole at Madame Pele's, and did not seem to find their
+durance very vile.
+
+[Illustration: (no caption)]
+
+I grew to know and love them all, especially the Major Duquesnois, an
+almost literal translation into French of Colonel Newcome. He took to
+me at once, in spite of my Englishness, and drilled me, and taught me
+the exercise as it was performed in the Vieille Garden and told me a new
+fairy-tale, I verily believe, every afternoon for seven years.
+Scheherezade could do no more for a Sultan, and to save her own neck
+from the bowstring!
+
+Cher et bien ame "Vieux de la Vieille!" with his big iron-gray mustache,
+his black satin stock, his spotless linen, his long green frock-coat so
+baggy about the skirts, and the smart red ribbon in his button-hole! He
+little foresaw with what warm and affectionate regard his memory would
+be kept forever sweet and green in the heart of his hereditary foe and
+small English tyrant and companion!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Opposite Madame Pele's, and the only other dwelling besides hers and
+ours in the avenue, was a charming little white villa with a Grecian
+portico, on which were inscribed in letters of gold the words "Parva sed
+Apta"; but it was not tenanted till two or three years after
+our arrival.
+
+In the genial French fashion of those times we soon got on terms of
+intimacy with these and other neighbors, and saw much of each other at
+all times of the day.
+
+My tall and beautiful young mother (la belle Madame Pasquier, as she was
+gallantly called) was an Englishwoman who had been born and partly
+brought up in Paris.
+
+My gay and jovial father (le beau Pasquier, for he was also tall and
+comely to the eye) was a Frenchman, although an English subject, who had
+been born and partly brought up in London; for he was the child of
+emigres from France during the Reign of Terror.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+     "When in death I shall calm recline,
+        Oh take my heart to my mistress dear!
+      Tell her it lived upon smiles and wine
+       Of the brightest hue while it lingered here!"
+
+He was gifted with a magnificent, a phenomenal voice--a barytone and
+tenor rolled into one; a marvel of richness, sweetness, flexibility, and
+power--and had intended to sing at the opera; indeed, he had studied for
+three years at the Paris Conservatoire to that end; and there he had
+carried all before him, and given rise to the highest hopes. But his
+family, who were Catholics of the blackest and Legitimists of the
+whitest dye--and as poor as church rats had objected to such a godless
+and derogatory career; so the world lost a great singer, and the great
+singer a mine of wealth and fame.
+
+However, he had just enough to live upon, and had married a wife (a
+heretic!) who had just about as much, or as little; and he spent his
+time, and both his money and hers, in scientific inventions--to little
+purpose, for well as he had learned how to sing, he had not been to any
+conservatoire where they teach one how to invent.
+
+So that, as he waited "for his ship to come home," he sang only to amuse
+his wife, as they say the nightingale does; and to ease himself of
+superfluous energy, and to charm the servants, and le Pere et la Mere
+Francois, and the five followers of Napoleon, and all and everybody who
+cared to listen, and last and least (and most!), myself.
+
+For this great neglected gift of his, on which he set so little store,
+was already to me the most beautiful and mysterious thing in the world;
+and next to this, my mother's sweet playing on the harp and piano, for
+she was an admirable musician.
+
+It was her custom to play at night, leaving the door of my bedroom ajar,
+and also the drawing-room door, so that I could hear her till I fell
+asleep.
+
+Sometimes, when my father was at home, the spirit would move him to hum
+or sing the airs she played, as he paced up and down the room on the
+track of a new invention.
+
+And though he sang and hummed "pian-piano," the sweet, searching, manly
+tones seemed to fill all space.
+
+The hushed house became a sounding-board, the harp a mere subservient
+tinkle, and my small, excitable frame would thrill and vibrate under the
+waves of my unconscious father's voice; and oh, the charming airs
+he sang!
+
+His stock was inexhaustible, and so was hers; and thus an endless
+succession of lovely melodies went ringing through that happy period.
+
+And just as when a man is drowning, or falling from a height, his whole
+past life is said to be mapped out before his mental vision as in a
+single flash, so seven years of sweet, priceless home love--seven times
+four changing seasons of simple, genial, prae-imperial Frenchness; an
+ideal house, with all its pretty furniture, and shape, and color; a
+garden full of trees and flowers; a large park, and all the wild live
+things therein; a town and its inhabitants; a mile or two of historic
+river; a wood big enough to reach from the Arc de Triomphe to St. Cloud
+(and in it the pond of ponds); and every wind and weather that the
+changing seasons can bring--all lie embedded and embalmed for me in
+every single bar of at least a hundred different tunes, to be evoked at
+will for the small trouble and cost of just whistling or humming the
+same, or even playing it with one finger on the piano--when I had a
+piano within reach.
+
+Enough to last me for a lifetime--with proper economy, of course--it
+will not do to exhaust, by too frequent experiment, the strange capacity
+of a melodic bar for preserving the essence of by-gone things, and days
+that are no more.
+
+Oh, Nightingale! whether thou singest thyself or, better still, if thy
+voice by not in thy throat, but in thy fiery heart and subtle brain, and
+thou makest songs for the singing of many others, blessed be thy name!
+The very sound of it is sweet in every clime and tongue: Nightingale,
+Rossignol, Usignuolo, Bulbul! Even Nachtigall does not sound amiss in
+the mouth of a fair English girl who has had a Hanoverian for a
+governess! and, indeed, it is in the Nachtigall's country that the best
+music is made!
+
+[Illustration: "OH, NIGHTINGALE!"]
+
+And oh, Nightingale! never, never grudge thy song to those who love
+it--nor waste it upon those who do not....
+
+Thus serenaded, I would close my eyes, and lapped in darkness and
+warmth and heavenly sound, be lulled asleep--perchance to dream!
+
+For my early childhood was often haunted by a dream, which at first I
+took for a reality--a transcendant dream of some interest and importance
+to mankind, as the patient reader will admit in time. But many years of
+my life passed away before I was able to explain and account for it.
+
+I had but to turn my face to the wall, and soon I found myself in
+company with a lady who had white hair and a young face--a very
+beautiful young face.
+
+Sometimes I walked with her, hand in hand--I being quite a small
+child--and together we fed innumerable pigeons who lived in a tower by a
+winding stream that ended in a water-mill. It was too lovely, and I
+would wake.
+
+Sometimes we went into a dark place, where there was a fiery furnace
+with many holes, and many people working and moving about--among them a
+man with white hair and a young face, like the lady, and beautiful red
+heels to his shoes. And under his guidance I would contrive to make in
+the furnace a charming little cocked hat of colored glass--a treasure!
+And the sheer joy thereof would wake me.
+
+Sometimes the white-haired lady and I would sit together at a square
+box from which she made lovely music, and she would sing my favorite
+song--a song that I adored. But I always woke before this song came to
+an end, on account of the too insupportably intense bliss I felt on
+hearing it; and all I could remember when awake were the words
+"triste--comment--sale." The air, which I knew so well in my dream, I
+could not recall.
+
+It seemed as though some innermost core of my being, some childish holy
+of holies, secreted a source of supersubtle reminiscence, which, under
+some stimulus that now and again became active during sleep, exhaled
+itself in this singular dream--shadowy and slight, but invariably
+accompanied by a sense of felicity so measureless and so penetrating
+that I would always wake in a mystic flutter of ecstasy, the bare
+remembrance of which was enough to bless and make happy many a
+succeeding hour.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Besides this happy family of three, close by (in the Street of the
+Tower) lived my grandmother Mrs. Biddulph, and my Aunt Plunket, a widow,
+with her two sons, Alfred and Charlie, and her daughter Madge. They also
+were fair to look at--extremely so--of the gold-haired, white-skinned,
+well-grown Anglo-Saxon type, with frank, open, jolly manners, and no
+beastly British pride.
+
+So that physically, at least, we reflected much credit on the English
+name, which was not in good odor just then at Passy-les-Paris, where
+Waterloo was unforgotten. In time, however, our nationality was condoned
+on account of our good looks--"non Angli sed angeli!" as M. Saindou was
+gallantly pleased to exclaim when he called (with a prospectus of his
+school) and found us all gathered together under the big apple-tree
+on our lawn.
+
+But English beauty in Passy was soon to receive a memorable addition to
+its ranks in the person of a certain Madame Seraskier, who came with an
+invalid little daughter to live in the house so modestly described in
+gold as "Parva sed Apta."
+
+She was the English, or rather the Irish, wife of a Hungarian patriot
+and man of science, Dr. Seraskier (son of the famous violinist); an
+extremely tall, thin man, almost gigantic, with a grave, benevolent
+face, and a head like a prophet's; who was, like my father, very much
+away from his family--conspiring perhaps--or perhaps only inventing
+(like my father), and looking out "for his ship to come home!"
+
+[Illustration: "SHE TOPPED MY TALL MOTHER."]
+
+This fair lady's advent was a sensation--to me a sensation that never
+palled or wore itself away; it was no longer now "la belle Madame
+Pasquier," but "la divine Madame Seraskier"--beauty-blind as the French
+are apt to be.
+
+She topped my tall mother by more than half a head; as was remarked by
+Madame Pele, whose similes were all of the kitchen and dining-room,
+"elle lui mangerait des petits pates sur la tete!" And height, that
+lends dignity to ugliness, magnifies beauty on a scale of geometrical
+progression--2, 4, 8, 16, 32--for every consecutive inch, between five
+feet five, let us say, and five feet ten or eleven (or thereabouts),
+which I take to have been Madame Seraskier's measurement.
+
+She had black hair and blue eyes--of the kind that turns violet in a
+novel--and a beautiful white skin, lovely hands and feet, a perfect
+figure, and features chiselled and finished and polished and turned out
+with such singular felicitousness that one gazed and gazed till the
+heart was full of a strange jealous resentment at any one else having
+the right to gaze on something so rare, so divinely, so sacredly
+fair--any one in the world but one's self!
+
+But a woman can be all this without being Madame Seraskier--she was much
+more.
+
+For the warmth and genial kindness of her nature shone through her eyes
+and rang in her voice. All was of a piece with her--her simplicity, her
+grace, her naturalness and absence of vanity; her courtesy, her
+sympathy, her mirthfulness.
+
+I do not know which was the most irresistible: she had a slight Irish
+accent when she spoke English, a less slight English accent when she
+spoke French!
+
+I made it my business to acquire both.
+
+Indeed, she was in heart and mind and body what we should _all_ be but
+for the lack of a little public spirit and self-denial (under proper
+guidance) during the last few hundred years on the part of a few
+thousand millions of our improvident fellow-creatures.
+
+There should be no available ugly frames for beautiful souls to be
+hurried into by carelessness or mistake, and no ugly souls should be
+suffered to creep, like hermit-crabs, into beautiful shells never
+intended for them. The outward and visible form should mark the inward
+and spiritual grace; that it seldom does so is a fact there is no
+gainsaying. Alas! such beauty is such an exception that its possessor,
+like a prince of the blood royal, is pampered and spoiled from the very
+cradle, and every good and generous and unselfish impulse is corroded by
+adulation--that spontaneous tribute so lightly won, so quickly paid, and
+accepted so royally as a due.
+
+So that only when by Heaven's grace the very beautiful are also very
+good, is it time for us to go down on our knees, and say our prayers in
+thankfulness and adoration; for the divine has been permitted to make
+itself manifest for a while in the perishable likeness of our
+poor humanity.
+
+A beautiful face! a beautiful tune! Earth holds nothing to beat these,
+and of such, for want of better materials, we have built for ourselves
+the kingdom of Heaven.
+
+     _"Plus oblige, et peut davantage
+       Un beau visage
+     Qu'un homme arme--
+       Et rien n'est meilleur que d'entendre
+     Air doux et tendre
+     Jadis aime!"_
+
+My mother soon became the passionately devoted friend of the divine
+Madame Seraskier; and I, what would I not have done--what danger would I
+not have faced--what death would I not have died for her!
+
+I did not die; I lived her protestant to be, for nearly fifty years. For
+nearly fifty years to recollect the rapture and the pain it was to look
+at her; that inexplicable longing ache, that dumb, delicious, complex,
+innocent distress, for which none but the greatest poets have ever found
+expression; and which, perhaps, they have not felt half so acutely,
+these glib and gifted ones, as _I_ did, at the susceptible age of seven,
+eight, nine, ten, eleven, and twelve.
+
+She had other slaves of my sex. The five Napoleonic heroes did homage
+each after his fashion: the good Major with a kind of sweet fatherly
+tenderness touching to behold; the others with perhaps less unselfish
+adoration; notably the brave Capitaine Audenis, of the fair waxed
+mustache and beautiful brown tail coat, so tightly buttoned with gilt
+buttons across his enormous chest, and imperceptible little feet so
+tightly imprisoned in shiny tipped female cloth boots, with buttons of
+mother-of-pearl; whose hobby was, I believe, to try and compensate
+himself for the misfortunes of war by more successful attempts in
+another direction. Anyhow he betrayed a warmth that made my small bosom
+a Gehenna, until she laughed and snubbed him into due propriety and
+shamefaced self-effacement.
+
+It soon became evident that she favored two, at least, out of all this
+little masculine world--the Major myself; and a strange trio we made.
+
+Her poor little daughter, the object of her passionate solicitude, a
+very clever and precocious child, was the reverse of beautiful, although
+she would have had fine eyes but for her red lashless lids. She wore her
+thick hair cropped short, like a boy, and was pasty and sallow in
+complexion, hollow-cheeked, thick-featured, and overgrown, with long
+thin hands and feet, and arms and legs of quite pathetic length and
+tenuity; a silent and melancholy little girl, who sucked her thumb
+perpetually, and kept her own counsel. She would have to lie in bed for
+days together, and when she got well enough to sit up, I (to please her
+mother) would read to her _Le Robinson Suisse_, _Sandford and Merton_,
+_Evenings at Home_, _Les Contes de Madame Perrault_, the shipwreck from
+"Don Juan," of which we never tired, and the "Giaour," the "Corsair,"
+and "Mazeppa"; and last, but not least, _Peter Parleys Natural History_,
+which we got to know by heart.
+
+And out of this latter volume I would often declaim for her benefit what
+has always been to me the most beautiful poem in the world, possibly
+because it was the first I read for myself, or else because it is so
+intimately associated with those happy days. Under an engraving of a
+wild duck (after Bewick, I believe) were quoted W.C. Bryant's lines "To
+a Water-fowl." They charmed me then and charm me now as nothing else has
+quite charmed me; I become a child again as I think of them, with a
+child's virgin subtlety of perception and magical susceptibility to
+vague suggestions of the Infinite.
+
+Poor little Mimsey Seraskier would listen with distended eyes and quick
+comprehension. She had a strange fancy that a pair of invisible beings,
+"La fee Tarapatapoum," and "Le Prince Charmant" (two favorite characters
+of M. le Major's) were always in attendance upon us--upon her and
+me--and were equally fond of us both; that is, "La fee Tarapatapoum" of
+me, and "Le Prince Charmant" of her--and watched over us and would
+protect us through life.
+
+"O! ils sont joliment bien ensemble, tous les deux--ils sont
+inseparables!" she would often exclaim, _apropos_ of these visionary
+beings; and _apropos_ of the water-fowl she would say--
+
+"Il aime beaucoup cet oiseau-la, le Prince Charmant! dis encore, quand
+il vole si haut, et qu'il fait froid, et qu'il est fatigue, et que la
+nuit vient, mais qu'il ne veut pas descendre!"
+
+And I would re-spout--
+
+        _"'All day thy wings have fanned,
+     At that far height, the cold, thin atmosphere,
+     Yet stoop not, weary, to the welcome land,
+           Though the dark night be near!'"_
+
+And poor, morbid, precocious, overwrought Mimsey's eyes would fill, and
+she would meditatively suck her thumb and think unutterable things.
+
+And then I would copy Bewick's wood-cuts for her, as she sat on the arm
+of my chair and patiently watched; and she would say: "La fee
+Tarapatapoum trouve que tu dessines dans la perfection!" and treasure up
+these little masterpieces--"pour l'album de la fee Tarapatapoum!"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+There was one drawing she prized above all others--a steel engraving
+in a volume of Byron, which represented two beautiful beings of either
+sex, walking hand in hand through a dark cavern. The man was in sailor's
+garb; the lady, who went barefoot and lightly clad, held a torch; and
+underneath was written--
+
+     _"And Neuha led her Torquil by the hand,
+     And waved along the vaults her flaming brand."_
+
+I spent hours in copying it for her, and she preferred the copy to the
+original, and would have it that the two figures were excellent
+portraits of her Prince and Fairy.
+
+Sometimes during these readings and sketchings under the apple-tree on
+the lawn, the sleeping Medor (a huge nondescript sort of dog, built up
+of every breed in France, with the virtues of all and the vices of none)
+would wag his three inches of tail, and utter soft whimperings of
+welcome in his dream; and she would say--
+
+"C'est le Prince Charmant qui lui dit; 'Medor donne la patte!'"
+
+Or our old tomcat would rise from his slumbers with his tail up, and rub
+an imaginary skirt; and it was--
+
+"Regarde Mistigris! La fee Tarapatapoum est en train de lui frotter les
+oreilles!'"
+
+We mostly spoke French, in spite of strict injunctions to the contrary
+from our fathers and mothers, who were much concerned lest we should
+forget our English altogether.
+
+In time we made a kind of ingenious compromise; for Mimsey, who was
+full of resource, invented a new language, or rather two, which we
+called Frankingle and Inglefrank, respectively. They consisted in
+anglicizing French nouns and verbs and then conjugating and pronouncing
+them Englishly, or _vice versa_.
+
+For instance, it was very cold, and the school-room window was open, so
+she would say in Frankingle--
+
+"Dispeach yourself to ferm the feneeter, Gogo. It geals to pier-fend! we
+shall be inrhumed!" or else, if I failed to immediately
+understand--"Gogo, il frise a splitter les stonnes--maque aste et chute
+le vindeau; mais chute--le donc vite! Je snize deja!" which was
+Inglefrank.
+
+With this contrivance we managed to puzzle and mystify the uninitiated,
+English and French alike. The intelligent reader, who sees it all in
+print, will not be so easily taken in.
+
+When Mimsey was well enough, she would come with my cousins and me into
+the park, where we always had a good time--lying in ambush for red
+Indians, rescuing Madge Plunket from a caitiff knight, or else hunting
+snakes and field-mice and lizards, and digging for lizard's eggs, which
+we would hatch at home--that happy refuge for all manner of beasts, as
+well as little boys and girls. For there were squirrels, hedgehogs, and
+guinea-pigs; an owl, a raven, a monkey, and white mice; little birds
+that had strayed from the maternal nest before they could fly (they
+always died!), the dog Medor, and any other dog who chose; not to
+mention a gigantic rocking-horse made out of a real stuffed pony--the
+smallest pony that had ever been!
+
+Often our united high spirits were too boisterous for Mimsey. Dreadful
+headaches would come on, and she would sit in a corner, nursing a
+hedgehog with one arm and holding her thumb in her mouth with the other.
+Only when we were alone together was she happy, and then, _moult
+tristement!_
+
+On summer evenings whole parties of us, grown-up and small, would walk
+through the park and the Bois de Boulogne to the "Mare d'Auteuil"; as we
+got near enough for Medor to scent the water, he would bark and grin and
+gyrate, and go mad with excitement, for he had the gift of diving after
+stones, and liked to show it off.
+
+There we would catch huge olive-colored water-beetles, yellow
+underneath; red-bellied newts; green frogs, with beautiful spots and a
+splendid parabolic leap; gold and silver fish, pied with purply brown. I
+mention them in the order of their attractiveness. The fish were too
+tame and easily caught, and their beauty of too civilized an order; the
+rare, flat, vicious dytiscus "took the cake."
+
+Sometimes, even, we would walk through Boulogne to St. Cloud, to see the
+new railway and the trains--an inexhaustible subject of wonder and
+delight--and eat ices at the "Tete Noire" (a hotel which had been the
+scene of a terrible murder, that led to a cause celebre); and we would
+come back through the scented night, while the glowworms were shining in
+the grass, and the distant frogs were croaking in the Mare d'Auteuil.
+Now and then a startled roebuck would gallop in short bounds across
+the path, from thicket to thicket, and Medor would go mad again and wake
+the echoes of the new Paris fortification, which were still in the
+course of construction.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+He had not the gift of catching roebucks!
+
+If my father were of the party, he would yodel Tyrolese melodies, and
+sing lovely songs of Boieldieu, Herold, and Gretry; or "Drink to me only
+with thine eyes," or else the "Bay of Dublin" for Madame Seraskier, who
+had the nostalgia of her beloved country whenever her beloved
+husband was away.
+
+Or else we would break out into a jolly chorus and march to the tune--
+
+          _"Marie, trempe ton pain,
+            Marie, trempe ton pain,
+     Marie, trempe ton pain dans la soupe;
+            Marie, trempe ton pain,
+            Marie, trempe ton pain,
+     Marie, trempe ton pain dans le vin!"_
+
+Or else--
+
+     _"La--soupe aux choux--se fait dans la marmite;
+     Dans--la marmite--se fait la soupe aux choux."_
+
+which would give us all the nostalgia of supper.
+
+Or else, again, if it were too hot to sing, or we were too tired, M. le
+Major, forsaking the realms of fairy-land, and uncovering his high bald
+head as he walked, would gravely and reverently tell us of his great
+master, of Brienne, of Marengo, and Austerlitz; of the farewells at
+Fontainebleau, and the Hundred Days--never of St. Helena; he would not
+trust himself to speak to us of that! And gradually working his way to
+Waterloo, he would put his hat on, and demonstrate to us, by A+B, how,
+virtually, the English had lost the day, and why and wherefore. And on
+all the little party a solemn, awe-struck stillness would fall as we
+listened, and on some of us the sweet nostalgia of bed!
+
+Oh, the good old time!
+
+The night was consecrated for me by the gleam and scent and rustle of
+Madame Seraskier's gown, as I walked by her side in the deepening dusk--a
+gleam of yellow, or pale blue, or white--a scent of sandalwood--a rustle
+that told of a light, vigorous tread on firm, narrow, high-arched feet,
+that were not easily tired; of an anxious, motherly wish to get back to
+Mimsey, who was not strong enough for these longer expeditions.
+
+On the shorter ones I used sometimes to carry Mimsey on my back most of
+the way home (to please her mother)--a frail burden, with her poor,
+long, thin arms round my neck, and her pale, cold cheek against my
+ear--she weighed nothing! And when I was tired M. le Major would relieve
+me, but not for long. She always wanted to be carried by Gogo (for so I
+was called, for no reason whatever, unless it was that my name
+was Peter).
+
+She would start at the pale birches that shone out against the gloom,
+and shiver if a bough scraped her, and tell me all about the
+Erl-king--"mais comme ils sont la tous les deux" (meaning the Prince and
+the Fairy) "il n'y a absolument rien a craindre."
+
+And Mimsey was _si bonne camarade_, in spite of her solemnity and poor
+health and many pains, so grateful for small kindnesses, so appreciative
+of small talents, so indulgent to small vanities (of which she seemed to
+have no more share than her mother), and so deeply humorous in spite of
+her eternal gravity--for she was a real tomboy at heart--that I soon
+carried her, not only to please her mother, but to please herself, and
+would have done anything for her.
+
+As for M. le Major, he gradually discovered that Mimsey was half a
+martyr and half a saint, and possessed all the virtues under the sun.
+
+"Ah, vous ne la comprenez pas, cette enfant; vous verrez un jour quand
+ca ira mieux! vous verrez! elle est comme sa mere ... elle a toutes les
+intelligences de la tete et du coeur!" and he would wish it had pleased
+Heaven that he should be her grandfather--on the maternal side.
+
+_L'art d'etre grandpere!_ This weather-beaten, war-battered old soldier
+had learned it, without ever having had either a son or a daughter of
+his own. He was a _born_ grandfather!
+
+Moreover, Mimsey and I had many tastes and passions in common--music,
+for instance, as well as Bewick's wood-cuts and Byron's poetry, and
+roast chestnuts and domestic pets; and above all, the Mare d'Auteuil,
+which she preferred in the autumn, when the brown and yellow leaves were
+eddying and scampering and chasing each other round its margin, or
+drifting on its troubled surface, and the cold wet wind piped through
+the dishevelled boughs of the forest, under the leaden sky.
+
+She said it was good to be there then, and think of home and the
+fireside; and better still, when home was reached at last, to think of
+the desolate pond we had left; and good, indeed, it was to trudge home
+by wood and park and avenue at dusk, when the bats were about, with
+Alfred and Charlie and Mimsey and Madge and Medor; swishing our way
+through the lush, dead leaves, scattering the beautiful, ripe
+horse-chestnut out of its split creamy case, or picking up acorns and
+beechnuts here and there as we went.
+
+And, once home, it was good, very good, to think how dark and lonesome
+and shivery it must be out there by the _mare_, as we squatted and
+chatted and roasted chestnuts by the wood fire in the school-room before
+the candles were lit--_entre chien et loup_, as was called the French
+gloaming--while Therese was laying the tea-things, and telling us the
+news, and cutting bread and butter; and my mother played the harp in the
+drawing-room above; till the last red streak died out of the wet west
+behind the swaying tree-tops, and the curtains were drawn, and there was
+light, and the appetites were let loose.
+
+I love to sit here, in my solitude and captivity, and recall every
+incident of that sweet epoch--to ache with the pangs of happy
+remembrance; than which, for the likes of me, great poets tell us there
+is no greater grief. This sorrow's crown of sorrow is my joy and my
+consolation, and ever has been; and I would not exchange it for youth,
+health, wealth, honor, and freedom; only for thrice happy childhood
+itself once more, over and over again, would I give up its thrice happy
+recollections.
+
+That it should not be all beer and skittles with us, and therefore apt
+to pall, my cousins and I had to work pretty hard. In the first place,
+my dear mother did all she could to make me an infant prodigy of
+learning. She tried to teach me Italian, which she spoke as fluently as
+English or French (for she had lived much in Italy), and I had to
+translate the "Gierusalemme Liberata" into both those latter
+languages--a task which has remained unfinished--and to render the
+"Allegro" and the "Penseroso" into Miltonian French prose, and "Le Cid"
+into Corneillian English. Then there were Pinnock's histories of Greece
+and Rome to master, and, of course, the Bible; and, every Sunday, the
+Collect, the Gospel, and the Epistle to get by heart. No, it was not all
+beer and skittles.
+
+It was her pleasure to teach, but, alas! not mine to learn; and we cost
+each other many a sigh, but loved each other all the more, perhaps.
+
+Then we went in the mornings, my cousins and I, to M. Saindou's,
+opposite, that we might learn French grammar and French-Latin and
+French-Greek. But on three afternoons out of the weekly six Mr. Slade, a
+Cambridge sizar stranded in Paris, came to anglicize (and neutralize)
+the Latin and Greek we had learned in the morning, and to show us what
+sorry stuff the French had made of them and of their quantities.
+
+Perhaps the Greek and Latin quantities are a luxury of English growth--a
+mere social test--a little pitfall of our own invention, like the letter
+_h_, for the tripping up of unwary pretenders; or else, French
+education being so deplorably cheap in those days, the school-masters
+there could not afford to take such fanciful superfluities into
+consideration; it was not to be done at the price.
+
+In France, be it remembered, the King and his greengrocer sent their
+sons to the same school (which did not happen to be M. Saindou's, by the
+way, where it was nearly all greengrocer and no King); and the fee for
+bed, board, and tuition, in all public schools alike, was something like
+thirty pounds a year.
+
+The Latin, in consequence, was without the distinction that comes of
+exclusiveness, and quite lacked that aristocratic flavor, so grateful
+and comforting to scholar and ignoramus alike, which the costly British
+public-school system (and the British accent) alone can impart to a dead
+language. When French is dead we shall lend it a grace it never had
+before; some of us even manage to do so already.
+
+That is (no doubt) why the best French writers so seldom point their
+morals and adorn their tales, as ours do, with the usual pretty,
+familiar, and appropriate lines out of Horace or Virgil; and why Latin
+is so little quoted in French talk, except here and there by a weary
+shop-walker, who sighs--
+
+"Varium et mutabile semper femina!" as he rolls up the unsold silk; or
+exclaims, "O rus! quando te aspiciam!" as he takes his railway ticket
+for Asnieres on the first fine Sunday morning in spring.
+
+But this is a digression, and we have wandered far away from Mr. Slade.
+
+Good old Slade!
+
+We used to sit on the tone posts outside the avenue gate and watch for
+his appearance at a certain distant corner of the winding street.
+
+With his green tail coat, his stiff shirt collar, his flat thumbs stuck
+in the armholes of his nankeen waistcoat, his long flat feet turned
+inward, his reddish mutton-chop whiskers his hat on the back of his
+head, and his clean, fresh, blooming, virtuous, English face--the sight of
+him was not sympathetic when he appeared at last.
+
+[Illustration: "GOOD OLD SLADE"]
+
+Occasionally, in the course of his tuition, illness or domestic affairs
+would, to his great regret, detain him from our midst, and the beatitude
+we would experience when the conviction gradually dawned upon us that
+we were watching for him in vain was too deep for either words or deeds
+or outward demonstration of any sort. It was enough to sit on our stone
+posts and let it steal over us by degrees.
+
+These beatitudes were few and far between. It would be infelicitous,
+perhaps, to compare the occasional absences of a highly respectable
+English tutor to an angel's visits, but so we felt them.
+
+And then he would make up for it next afternoon, that conscientious
+Englishman; which was fair enough to our parents, but not to us. And
+then what extra severity, as interest for the beggarly loan of half an
+afternoon! What rappings on ink-stained knuckles with a beastly, hard,
+round, polished, heavy-wooded, business-like English ruler!
+
+It was our way in those days to think that everything English was
+beastly--an expression our parents thought we were much too fond
+of using.
+
+But perhaps we were not without some excuse for this unpardonable
+sentiment. For there was _another_ English family in Passy--the
+Prendergasts, an older family than ours--that is, the parents (and
+uncles and aunts) were middle-aged, the grandmother dead, and the
+children grown up. We had not the honor of their acquaintance. But
+whether that was their misfortune and our fault (or _vice versa_) I
+cannot tell. Let us hope the former.
+
+They were of an opposite type to ours, and, though I say it, their type
+was a singularly unattractive one; perhaps it may have been the original
+of those caricatures of our compatriots by which French comic artists
+have sought to avenge Waterloo. It was stiff, haughty, contemptuous. It
+had prominent front teeth, a high nose, a long upper lip, a receding
+jaw; it had dull, cold, stupid, selfish green eyes, like a pike's, that
+swerved neither to right nor left, but looked steadily over peoples'
+heads as it stalked along in its pride of impeccable British
+self-righteousness.
+
+At the sudden sight of it (especially on Sundays) all the cardinal
+virtues became hateful on the spot and respectability a thing to run
+away from. Even that smooth, close-shaven cleanliness was so
+Puritanically aggressive as to make one abhor the very idea of soap.
+
+Its accent, when it spoke French (in shops), instead of being musical
+and sweet and sympathetic, like Madame Seraskier's, was barbarous and
+grotesque, with dreadful "ongs," and "angs," and "ows," and "ays"; and
+its manner overbearing, suspicious, and disdainful; and then we could
+hear its loud, insolent English asides; and though it was tall and
+straight and not outwardly deformed, it looked such a kill-joy skeleton
+at a feast, such a portentous carnival mask of solemn emptiness, such a
+dreary, doleful, unfunny figure of fun, that one felt Waterloo might
+some day be forgiven, even in Passy; but the Prendergasts, _never_!
+
+I have lived so long away from the world that, for all I know, this
+ancient British type, this "grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous
+bird of yore," may have become extinct, like another, but less
+unprepossessing bird--the dodo; whereby our state is the more gracious.
+
+But in those days, and generalizing somewhat hastily as young people
+are apt to do, we grew to think that England must be full of
+Prendergasts, and did not want to go there.
+
+To this universal English beastliness of things we made a few
+exceptions, it is true, but the list was not long: tea, mustard,
+pickles, gingerbread-nuts, and, of all things in the world, the English
+loaf of household bread that came to us once a week as a great treat and
+recompense for our virtues, and harmonized so well with Passy butter. It
+was too delicious! But there was always a difficulty, a dilemma--whether
+to eat it with butter alone, or with "cassonade" (French brown
+sugar) added.
+
+Mimsey knew her own mind, and loved it with French brown sugar, and if
+she were not there I would save for her half of my slices, and carefully
+cassonade them for her myself.
+
+On the other hand, we thought everything French the reverse of
+beastly--except all the French boys we knew, and at M. Saindou's there
+were about two hundred; then there were all the boys in Passy (whose
+name was legion, and who _did not_ go to M. Saindou's), and we knew all
+the boys in Passy. So that we were not utterly bereft of material for
+good, stodgy, crusty, patriotic English prejudice.
+
+Nor did the French boys fail to think us beastly in return, and
+sometimes to express the thought; especially the little vulgar boys,
+whose playground was the street--the _voyous de Passy_. They hated our
+white silk chimney-pot hats and large collars and Eton jackets, and
+called us "sacred godems," as their ancestors used to call ours in the
+days of Joan of Arc. Sometimes they would throw stones, and then there
+were collisions, and bleedings of impertinent little French noses, and
+runnings away of cowardly little French legs, and dreadful wails of "O
+la, la! O, la, la--maman!" when they were overtaken by English ones.
+
+Not but what _our_ noses were made to bleed now and then,
+unvictoriously, by a certain blacksmith--always the same young
+blacksmith--Boitard!
+
+It is always a young blacksmith who does these things--or a young
+butcher.
+
+Of course, for the honor of Great Britain, one of us finally licked him
+to such a tune that he has never been able to hold up his head since. It
+was about a cat. It came off at dusk, one Christmas Eve, on the "Isle of
+Swans," between Passy and Grenelle (too late to save the cat).
+
+I was the hero of this battle. "It's now or never," I thought, and saw
+scarlet, and went for my foe like a maniac. The ring was kept by Alfred
+and Charlie helped, oddly enough, by a couple of male Prendergasts, who
+so far forgot themselves as to take an interest in the proceedings.
+Madge and Mimsey looked on, terrified and charmed.
+
+It did not last long, and was worthy of being described by Homer, or
+even in _Bell's Life_. That is one of the reasons why I will not
+describe it. The two Prendergasts seemed to enjoy it very much while it
+lasted, and when it was over they remembered themselves again, and said
+nothing, and stalked away.
+
+As we grew older and wiser we had permission to extend our explorations
+to Meudon, Versailles, St. Germain, and other delightful places; to ride
+thither on hired horses, after having duly learned to ride at the famous
+"School of Equitation," in the Rue Duphot.
+
+[Illustration: "OMINOUS BIRDS OF YORE."]
+
+Also, we swam in those delightful summer baths in the Seine, that are so
+majestically called "Schools of Natation," and became past masters in
+"la coupe" (a stroke no other Englishman but ourselves has ever been
+quite able to manage), and in all the different delicate "nuances" of
+header-taking--"la coulante," "la hussarde," "la tete-beche," "la tout
+ce que vous voudrez."
+
+Also, we made ourselves at home in Paris, especially old Paris.
+
+For instance, there was the island of St. Louis, with its stately old
+mansions _entre cour et jardin,_ behind grim stone portals and high
+walls where great magistrates and lawyers dwelt in dignified
+seclusion--the nobles of the rove: but where once had dwelt, in days
+gone by, the greater nobles of the sword-crusaders, perhaps, and knights
+templars, like Brian de Bois Guilbert.
+
+And that other more famous island, la Cite, where Paris itself was born,
+where Notre Dame reared its twin towers above the melancholy, gray,
+leprous walls and dirty brown roofs of the Hotel-Dieu.
+
+Pathetic little tumble down old houses, all out of drawing and
+perspective, nestled like old spiders' webs between the buttresses of
+the great cathedral and on two sides of the little square in front (the
+Place du Parvis Notre Dame) stood ancient stone dwellings, with high
+slate roofs and elaborately wrought iron balconies. They seemed to have
+such romantic histories that I never tired of gazing at them, and
+wondering what the histories could be; and now I think of it, one of
+these very dwellings must have been the Hotel de Gondelaurier, where,
+according to the most veracious historian that ever was, poor Esmeralda
+once danced and played the tambourine to divert the fair damsel
+Fleur-de-Lys de Gondelaurier and her noble friends, all of whom she so
+transcended in beauty, purity, goodness, and breeding (although she was
+but an untaught, wandering gypsy girl, out of the gutter); and there,
+before them all and the gay archer, she was betrayed to her final
+undoing by her goat, whom she had so imprudently taught how to spell
+the beloved name of "Phebus."
+
+Close by was the Morgue, that grewsome building which the great etcher
+Meryon has managed to invest with some weird fascination akin to that it
+had for me in those days--and has now, as I see it with the charmed
+eyes of Memory.
+
+La Morgue! what a fatal twang there is about the very name!
+
+[Illustration: SETTLING AN OLD SCORE.]
+
+After gazing one's fill at the horrors within (as became a
+healthy-minded English boy) it was but a step to the equestrian statue
+of Henri Quatre, on the Pont-Neuf (the oldest bridge in Paris, by the
+way); there, astride his long-tailed charger, he smiled, _le roy vert et
+galant,_ just midway between either bank of the historic river, just
+where it was most historic; and turned his back on the Paris of the
+Bourgeois King with the pear-shaped face and the mutton-chop whiskers.
+
+And there one stood, spellbound in indecision, like the ass of Buridan
+between two sacks of oats; for on either side, north or south of the
+Pont-Neuf, were to be found enchanting slums, all more attractive the
+ones than the others, winding up and down hill and roundabout and in and
+out, like haunting illustrations by Gustave Dore to _Drolatick Tales_ by
+Balzac (not seen or read by me till many years later, I beg to say).
+
+Dark, narrow, silent, deserted streets that would turn up afterwards in
+many a nightmare--with the gutter in the middle and towerlets and stone
+posts all along the sides; and high fantastic walls (where it was
+_defendre d'afficher_), with bits of old battlement at the top, and
+overhanging boughs of sycamore and lime, and behind them gray old
+gardens that dated from the days of Louis le Hutin and beyond! And
+suggestive names printed in old rusty iron letters at the street
+corners--"Rue Videgousset," "Rue Coupe-gorge," "Rue de la Vieille
+Truanderie," "Impasse de la Tour de Nesle," etc., that appealed to the
+imagination like a chapter from Hugo or Dumas.
+
+And the way to these was by long, tortuous, busy thoroughfares, most
+irregularly flagged, and all alive with strange, delightful people in
+blue blouses, brown woollen tricots, wooden shoes, red and white cotton
+nightcaps, rags and patches; most graceful girls, with pretty,
+self-respecting feet, and flashing eyes, and no head-dress but their own
+hair; gay, fat hags, all smile; thin hags, with faces of appalling
+wickedness or misery; precociously witty little gutter-imps of either
+sex; and such cripples! jovial hunchbacks, lusty blind beggars, merry
+creeping paralytics, scrofulous wretches who joked and punned about
+their sores; light-hearted, genial, mendicant monsters without arms or
+legs, who went ramping through the mud on their bellies from one
+underground wine-shop to another; and blue-chinned priests and
+barefooted brown monks and demure Sisters of Charity, and here and there
+a jolly chiffonnier with his hook, and his knap-basket behind; or a
+cuirassier, or a gigantic carbineer, or gay little "Hunter of Africa,"
+or a couple of bold gendarmes riding abreast, with their towering black
+_bonnets a poil;_ or a pair of pathetic little red-legged soldiers,
+conscripts just fresh from the country, with innocent light eyes and
+straw-coloured hair and freckled brown faces, walking hand in hand, and
+staring at all the pork-butchers' shops--and sometimes at the
+pork-butcher's wife!
+
+Then a proletarian wedding procession--headed by the bride and
+bridegroom, an ungainly pair in their Sunday best--all singing noisily
+together. Then a pauper funeral, or a covered stretcher, followed by
+sympathetic eyes on its way to the Hotel-Dieu; or the last sacrament,
+with bell and candle, bound for the bedside of some humble agonizer _in
+extremis_--and we all uncovered as it went by.
+
+And then, for a running accompaniment of sound the clanging chimes, the
+itinerant street cries, the tinkle of the _marchand de coco,_ the drum,
+the _cor de chasse,_ the organ of Barbary, the ubiquitous pet parrot,
+the knife-grinder, the bawling fried-potato monger, and, most amusing of
+all, the poodle-clipper and his son, strophe and antistrophe, for every
+minute the little boy would yell out in his shrill treble that "his
+father clipped poodles for thirty sous, and was competent also to
+undertake the management of refractory tomcats," upon which the father
+would growl in his solemn bass, "My son speaks the truth"--_L'enfant
+dit vrai!_
+
+And rising above the general cacophony the din of the eternally cracking
+whip, of the heavy carwheel jolting over the uneven stones, the stamp
+and neigh of the spirited little French cart-horse and the music of his
+many bells, and the cursing and swearing and _hue! dia!_ of his driver!
+It was all entrancing.
+
+Thence home--to quite, innocent, suburban Passy--by the quays, walking
+on the top of the stone parapet all the way, so as to miss nothing (till
+a gendarme was in sight), or else by the Boulevards, the Rue de Rivoli,
+the Champs Elysees, the Avenue de St. Cloud, and the Chaussee de la
+Muette. What a beautiful walk! Is there another like it anywhere as it
+was then, in the sweet early forties of this worn-out old century, and
+before this poor scribe had reached his teens?
+
+Ah! it is something to have known that Paris, which lay at one's feet as
+one gazed from the heights of Passy, with all its pinnacles and spires
+and gorgeously-gilded domes, its Arch of Triumph, its Elysian Fields,
+its Field of Mars, its Towers of our Lady, its far-off Column of July,
+its Invalids, and Vale of Grace, and Magdalen, and Place of the Concord,
+where the obelisk reared its exotic peak by the beautiful unforgettable
+fountains.
+
+There flowed the many-bridged winding river, always the same way, unlike
+our tidal Thames, and always full; just beyond it was spread that
+stately, exclusive suburb, the despair of the newly rich and recently
+ennobled, where almost every other house bore a name which read like a
+page of French history; and farther still the merry, wicked Latin
+quarter and the grave Sorbonne, the Pantheon, the Garden of Plants; on
+the hither side, in the middle distance, the Louvre, where the kings of
+France had dwelt for centuries; the Tuileries, where "the King of the
+French" dwelt then, and just for a little while yet.
+
+Well I knew and loved it all; and most of all I loved it when the sun
+was setting at my back, and innumerable distant windows reflected the
+blood-red western flame. It seemed as though half Paris were on fire,
+with the cold blue east for a background.
+
+Dear Paris!
+
+Yes, it is something to have roamed over it as a small boy--a small
+English boy (that is, a small boy unattended by his mother or his
+nurse), curious, inquisitive, and indefatigable; full of imagination;
+all his senses keen with the keenness that belongs to the morning of
+life: the sight of a hawk, the hearing of a bat, almost the scent of
+a hound.
+
+Indeed, it required a nose both subtle and unprejudiced to understand
+and appreciate and thoroughly enjoy that Paris--not the Paris of M. le
+Baron Haussmann, lighted by gas and electricity, and flushed and drained
+by modern science; but the "good old Paris" of Balzac and Eugene Sue and
+_Les Mysteres_--the Paris of dim oil-lanterns suspended from iron
+gibbets (where once aristocrats had been hung); of water-carriers who
+sold water from their hand-carts, and delivered it at your door (_au
+cinqueme_) for a penny a pail--to drink of, and wash in, and cook
+with, and all.
+
+There were whole streets--and these by no means the least fascinating
+and romantic--where the unwritten domestic records of every house were
+afloat in the air outside it--records not all savory or sweet, but
+always full of interest and charm!
+
+One knew at a sniff as one passed the _porte cochere_ what kind of
+people lived behind and above; what they ate and what they drank, and
+what their trade was; whether they did their washing at home, and burned
+tallow or wax, and mixed chicory with their coffee, and were over-fond
+of Gruyere cheese--the biggest, cheapest, plainest, and most formidable
+cheese in the world; whether they fried with oil or butter, and liked
+their omelets overdone and garlic in their salad, and sipped
+black-currant brandy or anisette as a liqueur; and were overrun with
+mice, and used cats or mouse-traps to get rid of them, or neither; and
+bought violets, or pinks, or gillyflowers in season, and kept them too
+long; and fasted on Friday with red or white beans, or lentils, or had a
+dispensation from the Pope--or, haply, even dispensed with the Pope's
+dispensation.
+
+For of such a telltale kind were the overtones in that complex, odorous
+clang.
+
+I will not define its fundamental note--ever there, ever the same; big
+with a warning of quick-coming woe to many households; whose unheeded
+waves, slow but sure, and ominous as those that rolled on great
+occasions from le Bourdon de Notre Dame (the Big Ben of Paris), drove
+all over the gay city and beyond, night and day--penetrating every
+corner, overflowing the most secret recesses, drowning the very incense
+by the altar-steps.
+
+     "_Le pauvre en sa cabane ou le chaume le couvre
+         Est sujet a ses lois;
+     Et la garde qui veille aux barrieres du Louvre
+         N'en defend point nos rois_."
+
+And here, as I write, the faint, scarcely perceptible, ghost-like
+suspicion of a scent--a mere nostalgic fancy, compound, generic,
+synthetic and all-embracing--an abstract olfactory symbol of the "Tout
+Paris" of fifty years ago, comes back to me out of the past; and fain
+would I inhale it in all its pristine fulness and vigour. For scents,
+like musical sounds, are rare sublimaters of the essence of memory (this
+is a prodigious fine phrase--I hope it means something), and scents
+need not be seductive in themselves to recall the seductions of scenes
+and days gone by.
+
+Alas! scents cannot be revived at will, like an
+
+     "_Air doux et tendre
+         Jadis aime_!"
+
+Oh, that I could hum or whistle an old French smell! I could evoke all
+Paris, sweet, prae-imperial Paris, in a single whiff!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In such fashion did we three small boys, like the three musketeers (the
+fame of whose exploits was then filling all France), gather and pile up
+sweet memories, to chew the cud thereof in after years, when far away
+and apart.
+
+Of all that _bande joyeuse_--old and young and middle-aged, from M. le
+Major to Mimsey Seraskier--all are now dead but me--all except dear
+Madge, who was so pretty and light-hearted; and I have never seen
+her since.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thus have I tried, with as much haste as I could command (being one of
+the plodding sort) to sketch that happy time, which came to an end
+suddenly and most tragically when I was twelve years old.
+
+My dear and jovial happy-go-lucky father was killed in a minute by the
+explosion of a safety lamp of his own invention, which was to have
+superseded Sir Humphry Davy's, and made our fortune! What a brutal
+irony of fate.
+
+So sanguine was he of success, so confident that his ship had come home
+at last, that he had been in treaty for a nice little old manor in Anjou
+(with a nice little old castle to match), called la Mariere, which had
+belonged to his ancestors, and from which we took our name (for we were
+Pasquier de la Mariere, of quite a good old family); and there we were
+to live on our own land, as _gentilshommes campagnards_, and be French
+for evermore, under a paternal, pear-faced bourgeois king as a temporary
+_pis-aller_ until Henri Cinq, Comte de Chambord, should come to his own
+again, and make us counts and barons and peers of France--Heaven
+knows what for!
+
+My mother, who was beside herself with grief, went over to London, where
+this miserable accident had occurred, and had barely arrived there when
+she was delivered of a still-born child, and died almost immediately;
+and I became an orphan in less than a week, and a penniless one. For it
+turned out that my father had by this time spent every penny of his own
+and my mother's capital, and had, moreover, died deeply in debt. I was
+too young and too grief-stricken to feel anything but the terrible
+bereavement, but it soon became patent to me that an immense alteration
+was to be made in my mode of life.
+
+A relative of my mother's, Colonel Ibbetson (who was well off) came to
+Passy to do his best for me, and pay what debts had been incurred in the
+neighborhood, and settle my miserable affairs.
+
+After a while it was decided by him and the rest of the family that I
+should go back with him to London, there to be disposed of for the
+best, according to his lights.
+
+And on a beautiful June Morning, redolent of lilac and syringa, gay with
+dragon-flies and butterflies and bumblebees, my happy childhood ended as
+it had begun. My farewells were heartrending (to me), but showed that I
+could inspire affection as well as feel it, and that was some
+compensation for my woe.
+
+"Adieu, cher Monsieur Gogo. Bonne chance, et le Bon Dieu vous benisse,"
+said le Pere et la Mere Francois. Tears trickled down the Major's hooked
+nose on to his mustache, now nearly white.
+
+Madame Seraskier strained me to her kind heart, and blessed and kissed
+me again and again, and rained her warm tears on my face; and hers was
+the last figure I saw as our fly turned into the Rue de la Tour on our
+way to London, Colonel Ibbetson exclaiming--
+
+"Gad! who's the lovely young giantess that seems so fond of you, you
+little rascal, hey? By George! you young Don Giovanni, I'd have given
+something to be in your place! And who's that nice old man with the long
+green coat and the red ribbon? A _vieille moustache_, I suppose: almost
+like a gentleman. Precious few Frenchmen can do that!"
+
+Such was Colonel Ibbetson.
+
+And then and there, even as he spoke, a little drop of sullen, chill
+dislike to my guardian and benefactor, distilled from his voice, his
+aspect, the expression of his face, and his way of saying things,
+suddenly trickled into my consciousness--never to be whiped away!
+
+As for so poor Mimsey, her grief was so overwhelming that she could not
+come out and wish me goodbye like the others; and it led, as I
+afterwards heard, to a long illness, the worst she ever had; and when
+she recovered it was to find that her beautiful mother was no more.
+
+[Illustration:]
+
+Madame Seraskier died of the cholera, and so did le Pere et la Mere
+Francois, and Madame Pele, and one of the Napoleonic prisoners (not M.
+le Major), and several other people we had known, including a servant of
+our own, Therese, the devoted Therese, to whom we were all devoted in
+return. That malodorous tocsin, which I have compared to the big bell of
+Notre Dame, had warned, and warned, and warned in vain.
+
+The _maison de sante_ was broken up. M. le Major and his friends went
+and roosted on parole elsewhere, until a good time arrived for them,
+when their lost leader came back and remained--first as President of the
+French Republic, then as Emperor of the French themselves. No more
+parole was needed after that.
+
+My grandmother and Aunt Plunket and her children fled in terror to
+Tours, and Mimsey went to Russia with her father.
+
+Thus miserably ended that too happy septennate, and so no more at
+present of
+
+     "_Le joli lieu de ma naissance_!"
+
+
+
+
+Part Two
+
+
+The next decade of my outer life is so uninteresting, even to myself,
+that I will hurry through it as fast as I can. It will prove dull
+reading, I fear.
+
+[Illustration:]
+
+My Uncle Ibbetson (as I now called him) took to me and arranged to
+educate and start me in life, and make "a gentleman" of me--an "English
+gentleman." But I had to change my name and adopt his; for some reason I
+did not know, he seemed to hate my father's very name. Perhaps it was
+because he had injured my father through life in many ways, and my
+father had always forgiven him; a very good reason! Perhaps it was
+because he had proposed to my mother three times when she was a girl,
+and had been thrice refused! (After the third time, he went to India for
+seven years, and just before his departure my father and mother were
+married, and a year after that I was born.)
+
+So Pierre Pasquier de la Mariere, _alias_ Monsieur Gogo, became Master
+Peter Ibbetson, and went to Bluefriars, the gray-coat school, where he
+spent six years--an important slice out of a man's life, especially
+at that age.
+
+I hated the garb, I hated the surroundings--the big hospital at the
+back, and that reek of cruelty, drunkenness, and filth, the
+cattle-market--where every other building was either a slaughter-house,
+a gin-palace, or a pawnbroker's shop, more than all I hated the gloomy
+jail opposite, where they sometimes hanged a man in public on a Monday
+morning. This dismal prison haunted my dreams when I wanted to dream of
+Passy, of my dear dead father and mother and Madame Seraskier.
+
+For the first term or two they were ever in my thoughts, and I was
+always trying to draw their profiles on desks and slates and copybooks,
+till at last all resemblance seemed to fade out of them; and then I drew
+M. le Major till his side face became quite demoralized and impossible,
+and ceased to be like anything in life. Then I fell back on others: le
+Pere Francois, with his eternal _bonnet de colon_ and sabots stuffed
+with straw; the dog Medor, the rocking-horse, and all the rest of the
+menagerie; the diligence that brought me away from Paris; the heavily
+jack-booted couriers in shiny hats and pigtails, and white breeches, and
+short-tailed blue coats covered with silver buttons, who used to ride
+through Passy, on their way to and fro between the Tuileries and St.
+Cloud, on little, neighing, gray stallions with bells round their necks
+and tucked-up tails, and beautiful heads like the horses' heads in the
+Elgin Marbles.
+
+In my sketches they always looked and walked and trotted the same way:
+to the left, or westward as it would be on the map. M. le Major, Madame
+Seraskier, Medor, the diligences and couriers, were all bound westward
+by common consent--all going to London, I suppose, to look after me, who
+was so dotingly fond of them.
+
+Some of the boys used to admire these sketches and preserve them--some
+of the bigger boys would value my idealized (!) profiles of Madame
+Seraskier, with eyelashes quite an inch in length, and an eye three
+times the size of her mouth; and thus I made myself an artistic
+reputation for a while. But it did not last long, for my vein was
+limited; and soon another boy came to the school, who surpassed me in
+variety and interest of subject, and could draw profiles looking either
+way with equal ease; he is now a famous Academician, and seems to have
+preserved much of his old facility.[A]
+
+[Footnote A: _Note_.--I have here omitted several pages, containing a
+description in detail of my cousin's life "at Bluefriars"; and also the
+portraits (not always flattering) which he has written of masters and
+boys, many of whom are still alive, and some of whom have risen to
+distinction; but these sketches would be without special interest unless
+the names were given as well, and that would be unadvisable for many
+reasons. Moreover, there is not much in what I have left out that has
+any bearing on his subsequent life, or the development of his character.
+MADGE PLUNKET.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thus, on the whole, my school career was neither happy nor unhappy, nor
+did I distinguish myself in any way, nor (though I think I was rather
+liked than otherwise) make any great or lasting friendships; on the
+other hand. I did not in any way disgrace myself, nor make a single
+enemy that I knew of. Except that I grew our of the common tall and
+very strong, a more commonplace boy than I must have seemed (after my
+artistic vein gad run itself dry) never went to a public school. So much
+for my outer life at Bluefriars.
+
+[Illustration: A DREAM OF CHIVALRY]
+
+But I had an inner world of my own, whose capital was Passy, whose fauna
+and flora were not to be surpassed by anything in Regent's Park or the
+Zoological Gardens.
+
+It was good to think of it by day, to dream of it by night, _although I
+had not yet learned how to dream!_
+
+There were soon other and less exclusive regions, however, which I
+shared with other boys of that bygone day. Regions of freedom and
+delight, where I heard the ominous crack of Deerslayer's rifle, and was
+friends with Chingachgook and his noble son--the last, alas! of the
+Mohicans: where Robin Hood and Friar Tuck made merry, and exchanged
+buffets with Lion-hearted Richard under the green-wood tree: where
+Quentin Durward, happy squire of dames, rode midnightly by their side
+through the gibbet-and-gipsy-haunted forests of Touraine.... Ah! I had
+my dream of chivalry!
+
+Happy times and climes! One must be a gray-coated school-boy, in the
+heart of foggy London, to know that nostalgia.
+
+Not, indeed, but what London has its merits. Sam Weller lived there, and
+Charley Bates, and the irresistible Artful Dodger--and Dick Swiveller,
+and his adorable Marchioness, who divided my allegiance with Rebecca of
+York and sweet Diana Vernon.
+
+It was good to be an English boy in those days, and care for such
+friends as these! But it was good to be a French boy also; to have known
+Paris, to possess the true French feel of things--and the language.
+
+Indeed, bilingual boys--boys double-tongued from their very birth
+(especially in French and English)--enjoy certain rare privileges. It is
+not a bad thing for a school-boy (since a school-boy he must be) to hail
+from two mother-countries if he can, and revel now and then in the
+sweets of homesickness for that of his two mother-countries in which he
+does not happen to be; and read _Les Trois Mousquetaires_ in the
+cloisters of Bluefriars, or _Ivanhoe_ in the dull, dusty prison-yard
+that serves for a playground in so many a French _lycee_!
+
+Without listening, he hears all round him the stodgy language of every
+day, and the blatant shouts of his school-fellows, in the voices he
+knows so painfully well--those shrill trebles, those cracked barytones
+and frog-like early basses! There they go, bleating and croaking and
+yelling; Dick, Tom, and Harry, or Jules, Hector, and Alphonse! How
+vaguely tiresome and trivial and commonplace they are--those too
+familiar sounds; yet what an additional charm they lend to that so
+utterly different but equally familiar word-stream that comes silently
+flowing into his consciousness through his rapt eyes! The luxurious
+sense of mental exclusiveness and self-sequestration is made doubly
+complete by the contrast!
+
+And for this strange enchantment to be well and thoroughly felt, both
+his languages must be native; not acquired, however perfectly. Every
+single word must have its roots deep down in a personal past so remote
+for him as to be almost unremembered; the very sound and printed aspect
+of each must be rich in childish memories of home; in all the countless,
+nameless, priceless associations that make it sweet and fresh and
+strong, and racy of the soil.
+
+Oh! Porthos, Athos, and D'Artagnan--how I loved you, and your immortal
+squires, Planchet, Grimaud, Mousqueton! How well and wittily you spoke
+the language I adored--better even than good Monsieur Lallemand, the
+French master at Bluefriars, who could wield the most irregular
+subjunctives as if they had been mere feathers--trifles light as air.
+
+Then came the Count of Monte-Cristo, who taught me (only too well) his
+terrible lesson of hatred and revenge; and _Les Mysteres de Paris, Le
+Juif Errant_, and others.
+
+But no words that I can think of in either mother-tongue can express
+what I felt when first, through these tear-dimmed eyes of mine, and deep
+into my harrowed soul, came silently flowing the never-to-be-forgotten
+history of poor Esmeralda,[A] my first love! whose cruel fate filled
+with pity, sorrow, and indignation the last term of my life at school.
+It was the most important, the most solemn, the most epoch-making event
+of my school life. I read it, reread it, and read it again. I have not
+been able to read it since; it is rather long! but how well I remember
+it, and how short it seemed then! and oh! how short those
+well-spent hours!
+
+[Footnote A: Notre Dame de Paris, par Victor Hugo.]
+
+That mystic word [Greek: Anagkae]! I wrote it on the flyleaf of all my
+books. I carved it on my desk. I intoned it in the echoing cloisters! I
+vowed I would make a pilgrimage to Notre Dame some day, that I might
+hunt for it in every hole and corner there, and read it with my own
+eyes, and feel it with my own forefinger.
+
+And then that terrible prophetic song the old hag sings in the dark
+slum--how it haunted me, too! I could not shake it out of my troubled
+consciousness for months:
+
+     _Grouille, greve, greve, grouille,
+     File, File, ma quenouille:_
+
+     _File sa corde au bourreau
+     Qui siffle dans le preau.
+
+     [Greek:"'Anagkae!'Anagkae!'Anagkae_!"]
+
+Yes; it was worth while having been a little French boy just for a few
+years.
+
+I especially found it so during the holidays, which I regularly spent at
+Bluefriars; for there was a French circulating library in Holborn, close
+by--a paradise. It was kept by a delightful old French lady who had seen
+better days, and was very kind to me, and did not lend me all the books
+I asked for!
+
+Thus irresistibly beguiled by these light wizards of our degenerate age,
+I dreamed away most of my school life, utterly deaf to the voices of the
+older enchanters--Homer, Horace, Virgil--whom I was sent to school on
+purpose to make friends with; a deafness I lived to deplore, like other
+dunces, when it was too late.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And I was not only given to dream by day--I dreamed by night; my sleep
+was full of dreams--terrible nightmares, exquisite visions, strange
+scenes full of inexplicable reminiscence; all vague and incoherent, like
+all men's dreams that have hitherto been; _for I had not yet learned how
+to dream_.
+
+A vast world, a dread and beautiful chaos, an ever-changing kaleidoscope
+of life, too shadowy and dim to leave any lasting impression on the
+busy, waking mind; with here and there more vivid images of terror or
+delight, that one remembered for a few hours with a strange wonder and
+questioning, as Coleridge remembered his Abyssinian maid who played
+upon the dulcimer (a charming and most original combination).
+
+The whole cosmos is in a man's brains--as much of it, at least, as a
+man's brains will hold; perhaps it is nowhere else. And when sleep
+relaxes the will, and there are no earthly surroundings to distract
+attention--no duty, pain, or pleasure to compel it--riderless Fancy
+takes the bit in its teeth, and the whole cosmos goes mad and has its
+wild will of us.
+
+[Illustration: "NOTRE DAME DE PARIS."]
+
+Ineffable false joys, unspeakable false terror and distress, strange
+phantoms only seen as in a glass darkly, chase each other without rhyme
+or reason, and play hide-and-seek across the twilit field and through
+the dark recesses of our clouded and imperfect consciousness.
+
+And the false terrors and distress, however unspeakable, are no worse
+than such real terrors and distress as are only too often the waking lot
+of man, or even so bad; but the ineffable false joys transcend all
+possible human felicity while they last, and a little while it is! We
+wake, and wonder, and recall the slight foundation on which such
+ultra-human bliss has seemed to rest. What matters the foundation if but
+the bliss be there, and the brain has nerves to feel it?
+
+Poor human nature, so richly endowed with nerves of anguish, so
+splendidly organized for pain and sorrow, is but slenderly equipped
+for joy.
+
+What hells have we not invented for the afterlife! Indeed, what hells we
+have often made of this, both for ourselves and others, and at really
+such a very small cost of ingenuity, after all!
+
+Perhaps the biggest and most benighted fools have been the best
+hell-makers.
+
+Whereas the best of our heavens is but a poor perfunctory conception,
+for all that the highest and cleverest among us have done their very
+utmost to decorate and embellish it, and make life there seem worth
+living. So impossible it is to imagine or invent beyond the sphere of
+our experience.
+
+Now, these dreams of mine (common to many) of the false but ineffable
+joys, are they not a proof that there exist in the human brain hidden
+capacities, dormant potentialities of bliss, unsuspected hitherto, to
+be developed some day, perhaps, and placed within the reach of all,
+wakers and sleepers alike?
+
+A sense of ineffable joy, attainable at will, and equal in intensity and
+duration to (let us say) an attack of sciatica, would go far to equalize
+the sorrowful, one-sided conditions under which we live.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But there is one thing which, as a school-boy, I never dreamed--namely,
+that I, and one other holding a torch, should one day, by common
+consent, find our happiness in exploring these mysterious caverns of the
+brain; and should lay the foundations of order where only misrule had
+been before: and out of all those unreal, waste, and transitory realms
+of illusion, evolve a real, stable, and habitable world, which all who
+run may reach.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At last I left school for good, and paid a visit to my Uncle Ibbetson in
+Hopshire, where he was building himself a lordly new pleasure-house on
+his own land, as the old one he had inherited a year or two ago was no
+longer good enough for him.
+
+It was an uninteresting coast on the German Ocean, without a rock, or a
+cliff, or a pier, or a tree; even without cold gray stones for the sea
+to break on--nothing but sand!--a bourgeois kind of sea, charmless in
+its best moods, and not very terrible in its wrath, except to a few
+stray fishermen whom it employed, and did not seem to reward very
+munificently.
+
+Inland it was much the same. One always thought of the country as gray,
+until one looked and found that it was green; and then, if one were old
+and wise, one thought no more about it, and turned one's gaze inward.
+Moreover, it seemed to rain incessantly.
+
+But it was the country and the sea, after Bluefriars and the
+cloisters--after Newgate, St. Bartholomew, and Smithfield.
+
+And one could fish and bathe in the sea after all, and ride in the
+country, and even follow the hounds, a little later; which would have
+been a joy beyond compare if one had not been blessed with an uncle who
+thought one rode like a French tailor, and told one so, and mimicked
+one, in the presence of charming young ladies who rode in perfection.
+
+In fact, it was heaven itself by comparison, and would have remained so
+longer but for Colonel Ibbetson's efforts to make a gentleman of me--an
+English gentleman.
+
+What is a gentleman? It is a grand old name; but what does it mean?
+
+At one time, to say of a man that he is a gentleman, is to confer on him
+the highest title of distinction we can think of; even if we are
+speaking of a prince.
+
+At another, to say of a man that he is _not_ a gentleman is almost to
+stigmatize him as a social outcast, unfit for the company of his
+kind--even if it is only one haberdasher speaking of another.
+
+_Who_ is a gentleman, and yet who _is not_?
+
+The Prince of Darkness was one, and so was Mr. John Halifax, if we are
+to believe those who knew them best; and so was one "Pelham," according
+to the late Sir Edward Bulwer, Earl of Lytton, etc.; and it certainly
+seemed as if _he_ ought to know.
+
+And I was to be another, according to Roger Ibbetson, Esquire, of
+Ibbetson Hall, late Colonel of the--, and it certainly seemed as if
+he ought to know too! The word was as constantly on his lips (when
+talking to _me_) as though, instead of having borne her Majesty's
+commission, he were a hairdresser's assistant who had just come into an
+independent fortune.
+
+This course of tuition began pleasantly enough, before I left London, by
+his sending me to his tailors, who made me several beautiful suits;
+especially an evening suit, which has lasted me for life, alas; and
+these, after the uniform of the gray-coat school, were like an
+initiation to the splendors of freedom and manhood.
+
+Colonel Ibbetson--or Uncle Ibbetson, as I used to call him--was my
+mother's first cousin; my grandmother, Mrs. Biddulph, was the sister of
+his father, the late Archdeacon Ibbetson, a very pious, learned, and
+exemplary divine, of good family.
+
+But his mother (the Archdeacon's second wife) had been the only child
+and heiress of an immensely rich pawnbroker, by name Mendoza; a
+Portuguese Jew, with a dash of colored blood in his veins besides, it
+was said; and, indeed, this remote African strain still showed itself in
+Uncle Ibbetson's thick lips, wide open nostrils, and big black eyes with
+yellow whites--and especially in his long, splay, lark-heeled feet,
+which gave both himself and the best bootmaker in London a great deal
+of trouble.
+
+Otherwise, and in spite of his ugly face, he was not without a certain
+soldier-like air of distinction, being very tall and powerfully built.
+He wore stays, and an excellent wig, for he was prematurely bald; and he
+carried his hat on one side, which (in my untutored eyes) made him look
+very much like a "_swell_," but not quite like a _gentleman_.
+
+To wear your hat jauntily cocked over one eye, and yet "look like a
+gentleman!"
+
+It can be done, I am told; and has been, and is even still! It is not,
+perhaps, a very lofty achievement--but such as it is, it requires a
+somewhat rare combination of social and physical gifts in the wearer;
+and the possession of either Semitic or African blood does not seem to
+be one of these.
+
+[Illustration: "PORTRAIT CHARMANT, PORTRAIT DE MON AMIE ..."]
+
+Colonel Ibbetson could do a little of everything--sketch (especially a
+steam-boat on a smooth sea, with beautiful thick smoke reflected in the
+water), play the guitar, sing chansonnettes and canzonets, write society
+verses, quote De Musset--
+
+     _"Avez-vous vu dans Barcelone
+     Une Andalouse au sein bruni?"_
+
+He would speak French whenever he could, even to an English ostler, and
+then recollect himself suddenly, and apologize for his thoughtlessness;
+and even when he spoke English, he would embroider it with little
+two-penny French tags and idioms: "Pour tout potage"; "Nous avons change
+tout cela"; "Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galere?" etc.; or
+Italian, "Chi lo sa?" "Pazienza!" "Ahime!" or even Latin, "Eheu
+fugaces," and "Vidi tantum!" for he had been an Eton boy. It must have
+been very cheap Latin, for I could always understand it myself! He drew
+the line at German and Greek; fortunately, for so do I. He was a
+bachelor, and his domestic arrangements had been irregular, and I will
+not dwell upon them; but his house, as far as it went, seemed to promise
+better things.
+
+His architect, Mr. Lintot, an extraordinary little man, full of genius
+and quite self-made, became my friend and taught me to smoke, and drink
+gin and water.
+
+He did his work well; but of an evening he used to drink more than was
+good for him, and rave about Shelley, his only poet. He would recite
+"The Skylark" (his only poem) with uncertain _h_'s, and a rather
+cockney accent--
+
+     "'_Ail to thee blythe sperrit!
+     Bird thou never wert,
+     That from 'eaven, or near it
+     Po'rest thy full 'eart
+     In profuse strains of hunpremeditated hart_."
+
+As the evening wore on his recitations became "low comic," and quite
+admirable for accent and humour. He could imitate all the actors in
+London (none of which I had seen) so well as to transport me with
+delight and wonder; and all this with nobody but me for an audience, as
+we sat smoking and drinking together in his room at the "Ibbetson Arms."
+
+I felt grateful to adoration.
+
+Later still, he would become sentimental again; and dilate to me on the
+joys of his wedded life, on the extraordinary of intellect and beauty of
+Mrs. Lintot. First he would describe to me the beauties of her mind, and
+compare her to "L.E.L." and Felicia Hemans. Then he would fall back on
+her physical perfections; there was nobody worthy to be compared to her
+in these--but I draw the veil.
+
+He was very egotistical. Whatever he did, whatever he liked, whatever
+belonged to him, was better than anything else in world; and he was
+cleverer than any one else, except Mrs. Lintot, to whom he yielded the
+palm; and then he would cheer up and become funny again.
+
+In fact his self-satisfaction was quite extraordinary; and what is more
+extraordinary still, it was not a bit offensive--at least, to me;
+perhaps because he was such a tiny little man; or because much of this
+vanity of his seemed to have no very solid foundation, for it was not of
+the gifts I most admired in him that he was vainest; or because it came
+out most when he was most tipsy, and genial tipsiness redeems so much;
+or else because he was most vain about things I should never have been
+vain about myself; and the most unpardonable vanity in others is that
+which is secretly our own, whether we are conscious of it or not.
+
+[Illustration: "I FELT GRATEFUL TO ADORATION."]
+
+And then he was the first funny man I had ever met. What a gift it is!
+He was always funny when he tried to be, whether one laughed with him or
+at him, and I loved him for it. Nothing on earth is more pathetically
+pitiable than the funny man when he still tries and succeeds no longer.
+
+The moment Lintot's vein was exhausted, he had the sense to leave off
+and begin to cry, which was still funny; and then I would jump out of
+his clothes and into his bed and be asleep in a second, with the tears
+still trickling down his little nose--and even that was funny!
+
+But next morning he was stern and alert and indefatiguable, as though
+gin and poetry and conjugal love had never been, and fun were a
+capital crime.
+
+Uncle Ibbetson thought highly of him as an architect, but not otherwise;
+he simply made use of him.
+
+"He's a terrible little snob, of course, and hasn't got an _h_ in his
+head" (as if _that_ were a capital crime); "but he's very clever--look
+at that campanile--and then he's cheap, my boy, cheap."
+
+There were several fine houses in fine parks not very far from Ibbetson
+Hall; but although Uncle Ibbetson appeared in name and wealth and social
+position to be on a par with their owners, he was not on terms of
+intimacy with any of them, or even of acquaintance, as far as I know,
+and spoke of them with contempt, as barbarians--people with whom he had
+nothing in common. Perhaps they, too, had found out this
+incompatibility, especially the ladies; for, school-boy as I was, I was
+not long in discovering that his manner towards those of the other sex
+was not always such as to please either of them or their husbands or
+fathers or brothers. The way he looked at them was enough. Indeed, most
+of his lady-friends and acquaintances through life had belonged to the
+_corps de ballet_, the _demi-monde_, etc.--not, I should imagine, the
+best school of manners in the world.
+
+On the other hand, he was very friendly with some families in the town;
+the doctor's, the rector's, his own agent's (a broken-down brother
+officer and bosom friend, who had ceased to love him since he received
+his pay); and he used to take Mr. Lintot and me to parties there; and he
+was the life of those parties.
+
+He sang little French songs, with no voice, but quite a good French
+accent, and told little anecdotes with no particular point, but in
+French and Italian (so that the point was never missed); and we all
+laughed and admired without quite knowing why, except that he was the
+lord of the manor.
+
+On these festive occasions poor Lintot's confidence and power of amusing
+seemed to desert him altogether; he sat glum in a corner.
+
+Though a radical and a sceptic, and a peace-at-any-price man, he was
+much impressed by the social status of the army and the church.
+
+Of the doctor, a very clever and accomplished person, and the best
+educated man for miles around, he thought little; but the rector, the
+colonel, the poor captain, even, now a mere land-steward, seemed to fill
+him with respectful awe. And for his pains he was cruelly snubbed by
+Mrs. Captain and Mrs. Rector and their plain daughters, who little
+guessed what talents he concealed, and thought him quite a common little
+man, hardly fit to turn over the leaves of their music.
+
+It soon became pretty evident that Ibbetson was very much smitten with
+a Mrs. Deane, the widow of a brewer, a very handsome woman indeed, in
+her own estimation and mine, and everybody else's, except Mr. Lintot's,
+who said, "Pooh, you should see my wife!"
+
+Her mother, Mrs. Glyn, excelled us all in her admiration of Colonel
+Ibbetson.
+
+For instance, Mrs. Deane would play some common little waltz of the
+cheap kind that is never either remembered or forgotten, and Mrs. Glyn
+would exclaim, "_Is_ not that _lovely_?"
+
+And Ibbetson would say: "Charming! charming! Whose is it? Rossini's?
+Mozart's?"
+
+"Why, no, my dear colonel. Don't you remember? _It's your own_!"
+
+"Ah, so it is! I had quite forgotten." And general laughter and applause
+would burst forth at such a natural mistake on the part of our
+great man.
+
+Well, I could neither play nor sing, and found it far easier by this
+time to speak English than French, especially to English people who were
+ignorant of any language but their own. Yet sometimes Colonel Ibbetson
+would seem quite proud of me.
+
+"Deux metres, bien sonnes!" he would say, alluding to my stature, "et le
+profil d'Antinoues!" which he would pronounce without the two little dots
+on the _u_.
+
+And afterwards, if he had felt his evening a pleasant one, if he had
+sung all he knew, if Mrs. Deane had been more than usually loving and
+self-surrendering, and I had distinguished myself by skilfully turning
+over the leaves when her mother had played the piano, he would tell me,
+as we walked home together, that I "did credit to his name, and that I
+would make an excellent figure in the world as soon as I had _decrasse_
+myself; that I must get another dress-suit from his tailor, just an
+eighth of an inch longer in the tails; that I should have a commission
+in his old regiment (the Eleventeenth Royal Bounders), a deuced crack
+cavalry regiment; and see the world and break a few hearts (it is not
+for nothing that our friends have pretty wives and sisters); and finally
+marry some beautiful young heiress of title, and make a home for him
+when he was a poor solitary old fellow. Very little would do for him: a
+crust of bread, a glass of wine and water, and a clean napkin, a couple
+of rooms, and an old piano and a few good books. For, of course,
+Ibbetson Hall would be mine and every penny he possessed in the world."
+
+[Illustration:]
+
+All this in confidential French--lest the very clouds should hear
+us--and with the familiar thee and thou of blood-relationship, which I
+did not care to return.
+
+It did not seem to bode very serious intentions towards Mrs. Deane, and
+would scarcely have pleased her mother.
+
+Or else, if something had crossed him, and Mrs. Deane had flirted
+outrageously with somebody else, and he had not been asked to sing (or
+somebody else had), he would assure me in good round English that I was
+the most infernal lout that ever disgraced a drawing-room, or ate a man
+out of house and home, and that he was sick and ashamed of me. "Why
+can't you sing, you d--d French milksop? The d--d roulade-monger of a
+father of yours could sing fast enough, if he could do nothing else,
+confound him! Why can't you talk French, you infernal British booby? Why
+can't you hand round the tea and muffins, confound you! Why, twice Mrs.
+Glyn dropped her pocket-handkerchief and had to pick it up herself!
+What, 'at the other end of the room,' were you? Well, you should have
+skipped _across_ the room, and picked it up, and handed it to her with a
+pretty speech, like a gentleman! When I was your age I was _always_ on
+the lookout for ladies' pocket-handkerchiefs to drop--or their fans! I
+never missed _one_!"
+
+Then he would take me out to shoot with him (for it was quite essential
+that an English gentleman should be a sportsman)--a terrible ordeal to
+both of us.
+
+A snipe that I did not want to kill in the least would sometimes rise
+and fly right and left like a flash of lightning, and I would miss
+it--always; and he would d--n me for a son of a confounded French
+Micawber, and miss the next himself, and get into a rage and thrash his
+dog, a pointer that I was very fond of. Once he thrashed her so cruelly
+that I saw scarlet, and nearly yielded to the impulse of emptying both
+my barrels in his broad back. If I had done so it would have passed for
+a mere mishap, after all, and saved many future complications.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One day he pointed out to me a small bird pecking in a field--an
+extremely pretty bird--I think it was a skylark--and whispered to me in
+his most sarcastic manner--
+
+"Look here, you Peter without any salt, do you think, if you were to
+kneel down and rest your gun comfortably on this gate without making a
+noise, and take a careful aim, you could manage to shoot that bird
+_sitting_? I've heard of some Frenchmen who would be equal to _that_!"
+
+I said I would try, and, resting my gun as he told me, I carefully aimed
+a couple of yards above the bird's head, and mentally ejaculating,
+
+     "'_All to thee blythe sperrit_!"
+
+I fired both barrels (for fear of any after-mishap to Ibbetson), and the
+bird naturally flew away.
+
+After this he never took me out shooting with him again; and, indeed, I
+had discovered to my discomfiture that I, the friend and admirer and
+would-be emulator of Natty Bumppo the Deerslayer, I, the familiar of the
+last of the Mohicans and his scalp-lifting father, could not bear the
+sight of blood--least of all, of blood shed by myself, and for my own
+amusement.
+
+The only beast that ever fell to my gun during those shootings with
+Uncle Ibbetson was a young rabbit, and that more by accident than
+design, although I did not tell Uncle Ibbetson so.
+
+As I picked it off the ground, and felt its poor little warm narrow
+chest, and the last beats of its heart under its weak ribs, and saw the
+blood on its fur, I was smitten with pity, shame, and remorse; and
+settled with myself that I would find some other road to English
+gentlemanhood than the slaying of innocent wild things whose happy life
+seems so well worth living.
+
+[Illustration: "'AIL TO THEE BLYTHE SPERRIT!"]
+
+I must eat them, I suppose, but I would never shoot them any more; my
+hands, at least, should be clean of blood henceforward.
+
+Alas, the irony of fate!
+
+The upshot of all this was that he confided to Mrs. Deane the task of
+licking his cub of a nephew into shape. She took me in hand with right
+good-will, began by teaching me how to dance, that I might dance with
+her at the coming hunt ball; and I did so nearly all night, to my
+infinite joy and triumph, and to the disgust of Colonel Ibbetson, who
+could dance much better than I--to the disgust, indeed, of many smart
+men in red coats and black, for she was considered the belle of
+the evening.
+
+[Illustration: THE DANCING LESSON.]
+
+Of course I fell, or fancied I fell, in love with her. To her mother's
+extreme distress, she gave me every encouragement, partly for fun,
+partly to annoy Colonel Ibbetson, whom she had apparently grown to hate.
+And, indeed, from the way he spoke of her to me (this trainer of English
+gentlemen), he well deserved that she should hate him. He never had the
+slightest intention of marrying her--that is certain; and yet he had
+made her the talk of the place.
+
+And here I may state that Ibbetson was one of those singular men who go
+through life afflicted with the mania that they are fatally
+irresistible to women.
+
+He was never weary of pursuing them--not through any special love of
+gallantry for its own sake, I believe, but from the mere wish to appear
+as a Don Giovanni in the eyes of others. Nothing made him happier than
+to be seen whispering mysteriously in corners with the prettiest woman
+in the room. He did not seem to perceive that for one woman silly or
+vain or vulgar enough to be flattered by his idiotic persecution, a
+dozen would loathe the very sight of him, and show it plainly enough.
+
+This vanity had increased with years and assumed a very dangerous form.
+He became indiscreet, and, more disastrous still, he told lies! The very
+dead--the honored and irreproachable dead--were not even safe in their
+graves. It was his revenge for unforgotten slights.
+
+He who kisses and tells, he who tells even though he has not
+kissed--what can be said for him, what should be done to him?
+
+Ibbetson one day expiated this miserable craze with his life, and the
+man who took it--more by accident than design, it is true--has not yet
+found it in his heart to feel either compunction or regret.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So there was a great row between Ibbetson and myself. He d----d and
+confounded and abused me in every way, and my father before me, and
+finally struck me; and I had sufficient self-command not to strike him
+back, but left him then and there with as much dignity as I
+could muster.
+
+Thus unsuccessfully ended my brief experience of English country life--a
+little hunting and shooting and fishing, a little dancing and flirting;
+just enough of each to show me I was unfit for all.
+
+A bitter-sweet remembrance, full of humiliation, but not altogether
+without charm. There was the beauty of sea and open sky and changing
+country weather; and the beauty of Mrs. Deane, who made a fool of me to
+revenge herself on Colonel Ibbetson for trying to make a fool of her,
+whereby he became the laughing-stock of the neighborhood for at least
+nine days.
+
+And I revenged myself on both--heroically, as I thought; though where
+the heroism comes in, and where the revenge, does not appear
+quite patent.
+
+For I ran away to London, and enlisted in her Majesty's Household
+Cavalry, where I remained a twelvemonth, and was happy enough, and
+learned a great deal more good than harm.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Then I was bought out and articled to Mr. Lintot, architect and
+surveyor: a conclave of my relatives agreeing to allow me ninety pounds
+a year for three years; then all hands were to be washed of me
+altogether.[A]
+
+[Footnote A: _Note_.--I have thought it better to leave out, in its
+entirety, my cousin's account of his short career as a private soldier.
+It consists principally of personal descriptions that are not altogether
+unprejudiced; he seems never to have quite liked those who were placed
+in authority above him, either at school or in the army. MADGE PLUNKET.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So I took a small lodging in Pentonville, to be near Mr. Lintot, and
+worked hard at my new profession for three years, during which nothing
+of importance occurred in my outer life. After this Lintot employed me
+as a salaried clerk, and I do not think he had any reason to complain of
+me, nor did he make any complaint. I was worth my hire, I think, and
+something over; which I never got and never asked for.
+
+Nor did I complain of him; for with all his little foibles of vanity,
+irascibility, and egotism, and a certain close-fistedness, he was a good
+fellow and a very clever one.
+
+His paragon of a wife was by no means the beautiful person he had made
+her out to be, nor did anybody but he seem to think her so.
+
+She was a little older than himself; very large and massive, with stern
+but not irregular features, and a very high forehead; she had a slight
+tendency to baldness, and colorless hair that she wore in an austere
+curl on each side of her face, and a menacing little topknot on her
+occiput. She had been a Unitarian and a governess, was fond of good long
+words, like Dr. Johnson, and very censorious.
+
+But one of my husband's intimate friends, General----, who was cornet in
+the Life Guards in my poor cousin's time, writes me that "he remembers
+him well, as far and away the tallest and handsomest lad in the whole
+regiment, of immense physical strength, unimpeachable good conduct, and
+a thorough gentleman from top to toe."
+
+Her husband's occasional derelictions in the matter of grammar and
+accent must have been very trying to her!
+
+[Illustration: PENTONVILLE.]
+
+She knew her own mind about everything under the sun, and expected that
+other people should know it, too, and be of the same mind as herself.
+And yet she was not proud; indeed, she was a very dragon of humility,
+and had raised injured meekness to the rank of a militant virtue. And
+well she knew how to be master and mistress in her own house!
+
+But with all this she was an excellent wife to Mr. Lintot and a devoted
+mother to his children, who were very plain and subdued (and adored
+their father); so that Lintot, who thought her Venus and Diana and
+Minerva in one, was the happiest man in all Pentonville.
+
+And, on the whole, she was kind and considerate to me, and I always did
+my best to please her.
+
+Moreover (a gift for which I could never be too grateful), she presented
+me with an old square piano, which had belonged to her mother, and had
+done duty in her school-room, till Lintot gave her a new one (for she
+was a highly cultivated musician of the severest classical type). It
+became the principal ornament of my small sitting-room, which it nearly
+filled, and on it I tried to learn my notes, and would pick out with one
+finger the old beloved melodies my father used to sing, and my mother
+play on the harp.
+
+To sing myself was, it seems, out of the question; my voice (which I
+trust was not too disagreeable when I was content merely to speak)
+became as that of a bull-frog under a blanket whenever I strove to
+express myself in song; my larynx refused to produce the notes I held so
+accurately in my mind, and the result was disaster.
+
+On the other hand, in my mind I could sing most beautifully. Once on a
+rainy day, inside an Islington omnibus, I mentally sang "Adelaida" with
+the voice of Mr. Sims Reeves--an unpardonable liberty to take; and
+although it is not for me to say so, I sang it even better than he, for
+I made myself shed tears--so much so that a kind old gentleman sitting
+opposite seemed to feel for me very much.
+
+I also had the faculty of remembering any tune I once heard, and would
+whistle it correctly ever after--even one of Uncle Ibbetson's waltzes!
+
+As an instance of this, worth recalling, one night I found myself in
+Guildford Street, walking in the same direction as another belated
+individual (only on the other side of the road), who, just as the moon
+came out of a cloud, was moved to whistle.
+
+He whistled exquisitely, and, what was more, he whistled quite the most
+beautiful tune I had ever heard. I felt all its changes and modulations,
+its majors and minors, just as if a whole band had been there to play
+the accompaniment, so cunning and expressive a whistler was he.
+
+And so entranced was I that I made up my mind to cross over and ask him
+what it was--"Your melody or your life!" But he suddenly stopped at No.
+48, and let himself in with his key before I could prefer my
+humble request.
+
+Well, I went whistling that tune all next day, and for many days after,
+without ever finding out what it was; till one evening, happening to be
+at the Lintots. I asked Mrs. Lintot (who happened to be at the piano) if
+she knew it, and began to whistle it once more. To my delight and
+surprise she straightway accompanied it all through (a wonderful
+condescension in so severe a purist), and I did not make a single
+wrong note.
+
+"Yes," said Mrs. Lintot, "it's a pretty, catchy little tune--of a kind
+to achieve immediate popularity."
+
+Now, I apologize humbly to the reader for this digression; but if he be
+musical he will forgive me, for that tune was the "Serenade" of
+Schubert, and I had never even heard Schubert's name!
+
+And having thus duly apologized, I will venture to transgress and
+digress anew, and mention here a kind of melodic malady, a singular
+obsession to which I am subject, and which I will call unconscious
+musical cerebration.
+
+I am never without some tune running in my head--never for a moment; not
+that I am always aware of it; existence would be insupportable if I
+were. What part of my brain sings it, or rather in what part of my brain
+it sings itself, I cannot imagine--probably in some useless corner full
+of cobwebs and lumber that is fit for nothing else.
+
+But it never leaves off; now it is one tune, now another; now a song
+_without_ words, now _with_; sometimes it is near the surface, so to
+speak, and I am vaguely conscious of it as I read or work, or talk or
+think; sometimes to make sure it is there I have to dive for it deep
+into myself, and I never fail to find it after a while, and bring it up
+to the top. It is the "Carnival of Venice," let us say; then I let it
+sink again, and it changes without my knowing; so that when I take
+another dive the "Carnival of Venice" has become "Il Mio Tesoro," or the
+"Marseillaise," or "Pretty Little Polly Perkins of Paddington Green."
+And Heaven knows what tunes, unheard and unperceived, this internal
+barrel-organ has been grinding meanwhile.
+
+Sometimes it intrudes itself so persistently as to become a nuisance,
+and the only way to get rid of it is to whistle or sing myself. For
+instance, I may be mentally reciting for my solace and delectation some
+beloved lyric like "The Waterfowl," or "Tears, Idle Tears," or "Break,
+Break, Break"; and all the while, between the lines, this fiend of a
+subcerebral vocalist, like a wandering minstrel in a distant square,
+insists on singing, "Cheer, Boys, Cheer," or, "Tommy, make room for
+your uncle" (tunes I cannot abide), with words, accompaniment, and all,
+complete, and not quite so refined an accent as I could wish; so that I
+have to leave off my recitation and whistle "J'ai du Bon Tabac" in quite
+a different key to exorcise it.
+
+But this, at least, I will say for this never still small voice of mine:
+its intonation is always perfect; it keeps ideal time, and its quality,
+though rather thin and somewhat nasal and quite peculiar, is not
+unsympathetic. Sometimes, indeed (as in that Islington omnibus), I can
+compel it to imitate, _a s'y meprendre_, the tones of some singer I have
+recently heard, and thus make for myself a ghostly music which is not to
+be despised.
+
+Occasionally, too, and quite unbidden, it would warble little impromptu
+inward melodies of my own composition, which often seemed to me
+extremely pretty, old-fashioned, and quaint; but one is not a fair judge
+of one's own productions, especially during the heat of inspiration; and
+I had not the means of recording them, as I had never learned the
+musical notes. What the world has lost!
+
+Now whose this small voice was I did not find out till many years later,
+_for it was not mine_!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In spite of such rare accomplishments and resources within myself, I was
+not a happy or contented young man; nor had my discontent in it anything
+of the divine.
+
+I disliked my profession, for which I felt no particular aptitude, and
+would fain have followed another--poetry, science, literature, music,
+painting, sculpture; for all of which I most unblushingly thought myself
+better fitted by the gift of nature.
+
+I disliked Pentonville, which, although clean, virtuous, and
+respectable, left much to be desired on the score of shape, color,
+romantic tradition, and local charm; and I would sooner have lived
+anywhere else: in the Champs-Elysees, let us say--yes, indeed, even on
+the fifth branch of the third tree on the left-hand side as you leave
+the Arc de Triomphe, like one of those classical heroes in Henri
+Murger's _Vie de Boheme_.
+
+I disliked my brother apprentices, and did not get on well with them,
+especially a certain very clever but vicious and deformed youth called
+Judkins, who seemed to have conceived an aversion for me from the first;
+he is now an associate of the Royal Academy. They thought I gave myself
+airs because I did not share in their dissipations; such dissipations as
+I could have afforded would have been cheap and nasty indeed.
+
+Yet such pothouse dissipation seemed to satisfy them, since they took
+not only a pleasure in it, but a pride.
+
+They even took a pride in a sick headache, and liked it, if it were the
+result of a debauch on the previous night; and were as pompously
+mock-modest about a black eye, got in a squabble at the Argyll Rooms, as
+if it had been the Victoria Cross. To pass the night in a police cell
+was such glory that it was worth while pretending they had done so when
+it was untrue.
+
+They looked upon me as a muff, a milksop, and a prig, and felt the
+greatest contempt for me; and if they did not openly show it, it was
+only because they were not quite so fond of black eyes as they made out.
+
+So I left them to their inexpensive joys, and betook myself to pursuits
+of my own, among others to the cultivation of my body, after methods I
+had learned in the Life Guards. I belonged to a gymnastic and fencing
+and boxing club, of which I was a most assiduous frequenter; a more
+persevering dumb-beller and Indian-clubber never was, and I became in
+time an all-round athlete, as wiry and lean as a greyhound, just under
+fifteen stone, and four inches over six feet in height, which was
+considered very tall thirty years ago; especially in Pentonville, where
+the distinction often brought me more contumely than respect.
+
+Altogether a most formidable person; but that I was of a timid nature,
+afraid to hurt, and the peacefulest creature in the world.
+
+My old love for slums revived, and I found out and haunted the worst in
+London. They were very good slums, but they were not the slums of
+Paris--they manage these things better in France.
+
+Even Cow Cross (where the Metropolitan Railway now runs between King's
+Cross and Farringdon Street)--Cow Cross, that whilom labyrinth of
+slaughter-houses, gin-shops, and thieves' dens, with the famous Fleet
+Ditch running underneath it all the while, lacked the fascination and
+mystery of mediaeval romance. There were no memories of such charming
+people as Le roi des Truands and Gringoire and Esmeralda; with a sigh
+one had to fall back on visions of Fagin and Bill Sykes and Nancy.
+
+_Quelle degringolade_!
+
+And as to the actual denizens! One gazed with a dull, wondering pity at
+the poor, pale, rickety children; the slatternly, coarse women who never
+smiled (except when drunk); the dull, morose, miserable men. How they
+lacked the grace of French deformity, the ease and lightness of French
+depravity, the sympathetic distinction of French grotesqueness. How
+unterrible they were, who preferred the fist to the noiseless and
+insidious knife! who fought with their hands instead of their feet,
+quite loyally; and reserved the kicks of their hobnailed boots for their
+recalcitrant wives!
+
+And then there was no Morgue; one missed one's Morgue badly.
+
+And Smithfield! It would split me truly to the heart (as M. le Major
+used to say) to watch the poor beasts that came on certain days to make
+a short station in that hideous cattle-market, on their way to the
+slaughter-house.
+
+What bludgeons have I seen descend on beautiful, bewildered, dazed, meek
+eyes, so thickly fringed against the country sun; on soft, moist, tender
+nostrils that clouded the poisonous reek with a fragrance of the far-off
+fields! What torture of silly sheep and genially cynical pigs!
+
+The very dogs seemed demoralized, and brutal as their masters. And there
+one day I had an adventure, a dirty bout at fisticuffs, most humiliating
+in the end for me and which showed that chivalry is often its own
+reward, like virtue, even when the chivalrous are young and big and
+strong, and have learned to box.
+
+A brutal young drover wantonly kicked a sheep, and, as I thought, broke
+her hind-leg, and in my indignation I took him by the ear and flung him
+round onto a heap of mud and filth. He rose and squared at me in a most
+plucky fashion; he hardly came up to my chin, and I refused to fight
+him. A crowd collected round us, and as I tried to explain to the
+by-standers the cause of our quarrel, he managed to hit me in the face
+with a very muddy fist.
+
+"Bravo, little 'un!" shouted the crowd, and he squared up again. I felt
+wretchedly ashamed and warded off all his blows, telling him that I
+could not hit him or I should kill him.
+
+"Yah!" shouted the crowd again; "go it, little un! Let 'im 'ave it! The
+long un's showing the white feather," etc., and finally I gave him a
+slight backhander that made his nose bleed and seemed to demoralize him
+completely. "Yah!" shouted the crowd; "'it one yer own size!"
+
+I looked round in despair and rage, and picking out the biggest man I
+could see, said, "Are _you_ big enough?" The crowd roared with laughter.
+
+"Well, guv'ner, I dessay I might do at a pinch," he replied; and I tried
+to slap his face, but missed it, and received such a tremendous box on
+the ear that I was giddy for a second or two, and when I recovered I
+found him still grinning at me. I tried to hit him again and again, but
+always missed; and at last, without doing me any particular damage, he
+laid me flat three times running onto the very heap where I had flung
+the drover, the crowd applauding madly. Dazed, hatless, and panting, and
+covered with filth, I stared at him in hopeless impotence. He put out
+his hand, and said, "You're all right, ain't yer, guv'ner? I 'ope I
+'aven't 'urt yer! My name's Tom Sayers. If you'd a 'it me, I should 'a'
+gone down like a ninepin, and I ain't so sure as I should ever 'ave got
+up again."
+
+He was to become the most famous fighting-man in England!
+
+I wrung his hand and thanked him, and offered him a sovereign, which he
+refused; and then he led me into a room in a public-house close by,
+where he washed and brushed me down, and insisted on treating me to a
+glass of brandy-and-water.
+
+I have had a fondness for fighting-men ever since, and a respect for the
+noble science I had never felt before. He was many inches shorter than
+I, and did not look at all the Hercules he was.
+
+He told me I was the strongest built man for a youngster that he had
+ever seen, barring that I was "rather leggy." I do not know if he was
+sincere or not, but no possible compliment could have pleased me more.
+Such is the vanity of youth.
+
+And here, although it savors somewhat of vaingloriousness, I cannot
+resist the temptation of relating another adventure of the same kind,
+but in which I showed to greater advantage.
+
+It was on a boxing-day (oddly enough), and I was returning with Lintot
+and one of his boys from a walk in the Highgate Fields. As we plodded our
+dirty way homeward through the Caledonian Road we were stopped by a
+crowd outside a public-house. A gigantic drayman (they always seem
+bigger than they really are) was squaring up to a poor drunken lout of a
+navvy not half his size, who had been put up to fight him, and who was
+quite incapable of even an attempt it self-defence; he could scarcely
+lift his arms, I thought at first it was only horse-play; and as little
+Joe Lintot wanted to see, I put him up on my shoulder, just as the
+drayman, who had been drinking, but was not drunk, and had a most
+fiendishly brutal face, struck the poor tipsy wretch with all his might
+between the eyes, and felled him (it was like pole-axing a bullock), to
+the delight of the crowd.
+
+Little Joe, a very gentle and sensitive boy, began to cry; and his
+father, who had the pluck of a bull-terrier, wanted to interfere, in
+spite of his diminutive stature. I was also beside myself with
+indignation, and pulling off my coat and hat, which I gave to Lintot,
+made my way to the drayman, who was offering to fight any three men in
+the crowd, an offer that met with no response.
+
+"Now, then, you cowardly skunk!" I said, tucking up my shirt-sleeves;
+"stand up, and I will knock every tooth down your ugly throat."
+
+His face went the colors of a mottled Stilton cheese, and he asked what
+I meddled with him for. A ring formed itself, and I felt the sympathy of
+the crowd _with_ me this time--a very agreeable sensation!
+
+"Now, then, up with your arms! I'm going to kill you!"
+
+"I ain't going to fight you, mister; I ain't going to fight _nobody_.
+Just you let me alone!"
+
+[Illustration:]
+
+"Oh yes, you are, or you're going on your marrow-bones to be pardon for
+being a brutal, cowardly skunk"; and I gave him a slap on the face that
+rang like a pistol-shot--a most finished, satisfactory, and successful
+slap this time. My finger-tips tingle at the bare remembrance.
+
+He tried to escape, but was held opposite to me. He began to snivel and
+whimper, and said he had never meddled with me, and asked what should I
+meddle with him for?
+
+"Then down on your knees--quick--this instant!" and I made as if I were
+going to begin serious business at once, and no mistake.
+
+So down he plumped on his knees, and there he actually fainted from
+sheer excess of emotion.
+
+As I was helped on with my coat, I tasted, for once in my life the
+sweets of popularity, and knew what it was to be the idol of a mob.
+
+Little Joey Lintot and his brothers and sisters, who had never held me
+in any particular regard before that I knew of, worshipped me from that
+day forward.
+
+And I should be insincere if I did not confess that on that one occasion
+I was rather pleased with myself, although the very moment I stood
+opposite the huge, hulking, beer-sodden brute (who had looked so
+formidable from afar) I felt, with a not unpleasant sense of relief,
+that he did not stand a chance. He was only big, and even at that I
+beat him.
+
+The real honors of the day belonged to Lintot, who, I am convinced, was
+ready to act the David to that Goliath. He had the real stomach for
+fighting, which I lacked, as very tall men are often said to do.
+
+And that, perhaps, is why I have made so much of my not very wonderful
+prowess on that occasion; not, indeed, that I am physically a coward--at
+least, I do not think so. If I thought I were I should avow it with no
+more shame than I should avow that I had a bad digestion, or a weak
+heart, which makes cowards of us all.
+
+It is that I hate a row, and violence, and bloodshed, even from a
+nose--any nose, either my own or my neighbor's.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There are slums at the east end of London that many fashionable people
+know something of by this time; I got to know them by heart. In addition
+to the charm of the mere slum, there was the eternal fascination of the
+seafaring element; of Jack ashore--a lovable creature who touches
+nothing but what he adorns it in his own peculiar fashion.
+
+I constantly haunted the docks, where the smell of tar and the sight of
+ropes and masts filled me with unutterable longings for the sea--for
+distant lands--for anywhere but where it was my fate to be.
+
+I talked to ship captains and mates and sailors, and heard many
+marvellous tales, as the reader may well believe, and framed for myself
+visions of cloudless skies, and sapphire seas, and coral reefs, and
+groves of spice, and dusky youths in painted plumage roving, and
+friendly isles where a lovely half-clad, barefooted Neuha would wave her
+torch, and lead me, her Torquil, by the hand through caverns of bliss!
+
+Especially did I haunt a wharf by London Bridge, from whence two
+steamers--the _Seine_ and the _Dolphin_, I believe--started on alternate
+days for Boulogne-sur-Mer.
+
+I used to watch the happy passengers bound for France, some of them, in
+their holiday spirits, already fraternizing together on the sunny deck,
+and fussing with camp-stools and magazines and novels and bottles
+of bitter beer, or retiring before the funnel to smoke the pipe of
+peace.
+
+[Illustration: THE BOULOGNE STEAMER.]
+
+The sound of the boiler getting up steam--what delicious music it was!
+Would it ever get up steam for me? The very smell of the cabin, the very
+feel of the brass gangway and the brass-bound, oil-clothed steps were
+delightful; and down-stairs, on the snowy cloth, were the cold beef and
+ham, the beautiful fresh mustard, the bottles of pale ale and stout. Oh,
+happy travellers, who could afford all this, and France into
+the bargain!
+
+Soon would a large white awning make the after-deck a paradise, from
+which, by-and-by, to watch the quickly gliding panorama of the Thames.
+The bell would sound for non-passengers like me to go ashore--"Que
+diable allait-il faire dans cette galere!" as Uncle Ibbetson would have
+said. The steamer, disengaging itself from the wharf with a pleasant
+yoho-ing of manly throats and a slow, intermittent plashing of the
+paddle-wheels, would carefully pick its sunny, eastward way among the
+small craft of the river, while a few handkerchiefs were waved in a
+friendly, make-believe farewell--_auf wiedersehen_!
+
+Oh, to stand by that unseasonably sou'-westered man at the wheel, and
+watch St. Paul's and London Bridge and the Tower of London fade out of
+sight--never, never to see them again. No _auf wiedersehen_ for me!
+
+Sometimes I would turn my footsteps westward and fill my hungry, jealous
+eyes with a sight of the gay summer procession in Hyde Park, or listen
+to the band in Kensington Gardens, and see beautiful, welldressed
+women, and hear their sweet, refined voices and happy laughter; and a
+longing would come into my heart more passionate than my longing for the
+sea and France and distant lands, and quite as unutterable. I would even
+forget Neuha and her torch.
+
+After this it was a dreary downfall to go and dine for tenpence all by
+myself, and finish up with a book at my solitary lodgings in
+Pentonville. The book would not let itself be read; it sulked and had to
+be laid down, for "beautiful woman! beautiful girl!" spelled themselves
+between me and the printed page. Translate me those words into French, O
+ye who can even render Shakespeare into French Alexandrines--"Belle
+femme? Belle fille?" Ha! ha!
+
+If you want to get as near it as you can, you will have to write, "Belle
+Anglaise," or "Belle Americaine;" only then will you be understood, even
+in France!
+
+Ah! elle etait bien belle, Madame Seraskier!
+
+At other times, more happily inspired, I would slake my thirst for
+nature by long walks into the country. Hampstead was my Passy--the
+Leg-of-Mutton Pond my Mare d'Auteuil; Richmond was my St. Cloud, with
+Kew Gardens for a Bois de Boulogne; and Hampton Court made a very fair
+Versailles--how incomparably fairer, even a pupil of Lintot's
+should know.
+
+And after such healthy fatigue and fragrant impressions the tenpenny
+dinner had a better taste, the little front parlor in Pentonville was
+more like a home, the book more like a friend.
+
+For I read all I could get in English or French.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Novels, travels, history, poetry, science--everything came as grist to
+that most melancholy mill, my mind.
+
+I tried to write; I tried to draw; I tried to make myself an inner life
+apart from the sordid, commonplace ugliness of my outer one--a private
+oasis of my own; and to raise myself a little, if only mentally, above
+the circumstances in which it had pleased the Fates to place me.[A]
+
+[Footnote A: _Note_--It Is with great reluctance that I now come to my
+cousin's account of deplorable opinions he held, at that period of his
+life, on the most important subject that can ever engross the mind of
+man. I have left out _much_, but I feel that in suppressing it
+altogether, I should rob his sad story of all its moral significance;
+for it cannot be doubted that most of his unhappiness is attributable to
+the defective religious training of his childhood, and that his parents
+(otherwise the best and kindest people I have ever known) incurred a
+terrible responsibility when they determined to leave him "unbiased," as
+he calls it, at that tender and susceptible age when the mind is
+     "Wax to receive, marble to retain."
+                                 Madge Plunket.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It goes without saying that, like many thoughtful youths of a melancholy
+temperament, impecunious and discontented with their lot, and much given
+to the smoking of strong tobacco (on an empty stomach), I continuously
+brooded on the problems of existence--free-will and determinism, the
+whence and why and whither of man, the origin of evil, the immortality
+of the soul, the futility of life, etc., and made myself very miserable
+over such questions.
+
+Often the inquisitive passer-by, had he peeped through the blinds of
+No.--Wharton Street, Pentonville, late at night, would have been
+rewarded by the touching spectacle of a huge, rawboned ex-private in her
+Majesty's Life Guards, with his head bowed over the black and yellow
+key-board of a venerable square piano-forte (on which he could not
+play), dropping the bitter tear of loneliness and _Weltschmertz_ combined.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+It never once occurred to me to seek relief in the bosom of any Church.
+
+Some types are born and not made. I was a born "infidel;" if ever there
+was a congenital agnostic, one agnostically constituted from his very
+birth, it was I. Not that I had ever heard such an expression as
+agnosticism; it is an invention of late years....
+
+     "_J'avais fait de la prose toute ma vie sans le savoir!_"
+
+But almost the first conscious dislike I can remember was for the black
+figure of the priest, and there were several of these figures in Passy.
+
+Monsieur le Major called them _maitres corbeaux_, and seemed to hold
+them in light esteem. Dr. Seraskier hated them; his gentle Catholic wife
+had grown to distrust them. My loving, heretic mother loved them not; my
+father, a Catholic born and bred, had an equal aversion. They had
+persecuted his gods--the thinkers, philosophers, and scientific
+discoverers--Galileo, Bruno, Copernicus; and brought to his mind the
+cruelties of the Holy Inquisition, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew; and
+I always pictured them as burning little heretics alive if they had
+their will--Eton jackets, white chimney-pot hats, and all!
+
+I have no doubt they were in reality the best and kindest of men.
+
+The parson (and parsons were not lacking in Pentonville) was not so
+insidiously repellent as the blue-cheeked, blue-chinned Passy priest;
+but he was by no means to me a picturesque or sympathetic apparition,
+with his weddedness, his whiskers, his black trousers, his frock-coat,
+his tall hat, his little white tie, his consciousness of being a
+"gentleman" by profession. Most unattractive, also, were the cheap,
+brand-new churches wherein he spoke the word to his dreary-looking,
+Sunday-clad flock, with scarcely one of whom his wife would have sat
+down to dinner--especially if she had been chosen from among them.
+
+[Illustration: SUNDAY IN PENTONVILLE.]
+
+To watch that flock pouring in of a Sunday morning, or afternoon, or
+evening, at the summons of those bells, and pouring out again after the
+long service, and banal, perfunctory sermon, was depressing. Weekdays,
+in Pentonville, were depressing enough; but Sundays were depressing
+beyond words, though nobody seemed to think so but myself. Early
+training had acclimatized them.
+
+I have outlived those physical antipathies of my salad days; even the
+sight of an Anglican bishop is no longer displeasing to me, on the
+contrary; and I could absolutely rejoice in the beauty of a cardinal.
+
+Indeed, I am now friends with both a parson and a priest, and do not
+know which of the two I love and respect the most. They ought to hate
+me, but they do not; they pity me too much, I suppose. I am too negative
+to rouse in either the deep theological hate; and all the little hate
+that the practice of love and charity has left in their kind hearts is
+reserved for each other--an unquenchable hate in which they seem to
+glory, and which rages all the more that it has to be concealed. It
+saddens me to think that I am a bone of contention between them.
+
+And yet, for all my unbelief, the Bible was my favorite book, and the
+Psalms my adoration; and most truly can I affirm that my mental attitude
+has ever been one of reverence and humility.
+
+But every argument that has ever been advanced against Christianity (and
+I think I know them all by this time) had risen spontaneously and
+unprompted within me, and they have all seemed to me unanswerable, and
+indeed, as yet, unanswered. Nor had any creed of which I ever heard
+appeared to me either credible or attractive or even sensible, but for
+the central figure of the Deity--a Deity that in no case could ever
+be mine.
+
+The awe-inspiring and unalterable conception that had wrought itself
+into my consciousness, whether I would or no, was that of a Being
+infinitely more abstract, remote, and inaccessible than any the genius
+of mankind has ever evolved after its own image and out of the needs of
+its own heart--inscrutable, unthinkable, unspeakable; above all human
+passions, beyond the reach of any human appeal; One upon whose
+attributes it was futile to speculate--One whose name was _It_,
+not _He_.
+
+The thought of total annihilation was uncongenial, but had no terror.
+
+Even as a child I had shrewdly suspected that hell was no more than a
+vulgar threat for naughty little boys and girls, and heaven than a
+vulgar bribe, from the casual way in which either was meted out to me as
+my probable portion, by servants and such people, according to the way I
+behaved. Such things were never mentioned to me by either my father or
+mother, or M. le Major, or the Seraskiers--the only people in whom
+I trusted.
+
+But for the bias against the priest, I was left unbiassed at that tender
+and susceptible age. I had learned my catechism and read my Bible, and
+used to say the Lord's Prayer as I went to bed, and "God bless papa and
+mamma" and the rest, in the usual perfunctory manner.
+
+Never a word against religion was said in my hearing by those few on
+whom I had pinned my childish faith; on the other hand, no such
+importance was attached to it, apparently, as was attached to the
+virtues of truthfulness, courage, generosity, self-denial, politeness,
+and especially consideration for others, high or low, human and
+animal alike.
+
+I imagine that my parents must have compromised the matter between them,
+and settled that I should work out all the graver problems of existence
+for myself, when I came to a thinking age, out of my own conscience,
+and such knowledge of life as I should acquire, and such help as they
+would no doubt have given me, according to their lights, had
+they survived.
+
+I did so, and made myself a code of morals to live by, in which religion
+had but a small part.
+
+For me there was but one sin, and that was cruelty, because I hated it;
+though Nature, for inscrutable purposes of her own, almost teaches it as
+a virtue. All sins that did not include cruelty were merely sins against
+health, or taste, or common-sense, or public expediency.
+
+Free-will was impossible. We could only _seem_ to will freely, and that
+only within the limits of a small triangle, whose sides were heredity,
+education, and circumstance--a little geometrical arrangement of my own,
+of which I felt not a little proud, although it does not quite go on
+all-fours--perhaps because it is only a triangle.
+
+That is, we could will fast enough--_too_ fast; but could not will _how_
+to will--fortunately, for we were not fit as yet, and for a long time to
+come, to be trusted, constituted as we are!
+
+Even the characters of a novel must act according to the nature,
+training, and motives their creator the novelist has supplied them with,
+or we put the novel down and read something else; for human nature must
+be consistent with itself in fiction as well as in fact. Even in its
+madness there must be a method, so how could the will be free?
+
+To pray for any personal boon or remission of evil--to bend the knee, or
+lift one's voice in praise or thanksgiving for any earthly good that had
+befallen one, either through inheritance, or chance, or one's own
+successful endeavor--was in my eyes simply futile; but, putting its
+futility aside, it was an act of servile presumption, of wheedling
+impertinence, not without suspicion of a lively sense of favors to come.
+
+It seemed to me as though the Jews--a superstitious and business-like
+people, who know what they want and do not care how they get it--must
+have taught us to pray like that.
+
+It was not the sweet, simple child innocently beseeching that to-morrow
+might be fine for its holiday, or that Santa Claus would be generous; it
+was the cunning trader, fawning, flattering, propitiating, bribing with
+fulsome, sycophantic praise (an insult in itself), as well as
+burnt-offerings, working for his own success here and hereafter, and his
+enemy's confounding.
+
+It was the grovelling of the dog, without the dog's single-hearted love,
+stronger than even its fear or its sense of self-interest.
+
+What an attitude for one whom God had made after His own image--even
+towards his Maker!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The only permissible prayer was a prayer for courage or resignation; for
+that was a prayer turned inward, an appeal to what is best in
+ourselves--our honor, our stoicism, our self-respect.
+
+And for a small detail, grace before and after meals seemed to me
+especially self-complacent and iniquitous, when there were so many with
+scarcely ever a meal to say grace for. The only decent and proper grace
+was to give half of one's meal away--not, indeed, that I was in the
+habit of doing so! But at least I had the grace to reproach myself for
+my want of charity, and that was my only grace.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Fortunately, since we had no free-will of our own, the tendency that
+impelled us was upward, like the sparks, and bore us with it
+willy-nilly--the good and the bad, and the worst and the best.
+
+By seeing this clearly, and laying it well to heart, the motive was
+supplied to us for doing all we could in furtherance of that upward
+tendency--_pour aider le bon Dieu_--that we might rise the faster and
+reach Him the sooner, if He were! And when once the human will has been
+set going, like a rocket or a clock or a steam-engine, and in the right
+direction, what can it not achieve?
+
+We should in time control circumstance instead of being controlled
+thereby; education would day by day become more adapted to one
+consistent end; and, finally, conscience-stricken, we should guide
+heredity with our own hands instead of leaving it to blind chance;
+unless, indeed, a well-instructed paternal government wisely took the
+reins, and only sanctioned the union of people who were thoroughly in
+love with each other, after due and careful elimination of the unfit.
+
+Thus, cruelty should at least be put into harness, and none of its
+valuable energy wasted on wanton experiments, as it is by Nature.
+
+And thus, as the boy is father to the man, should the human race one
+day be father to--what?
+
+That is just where my speculations would arrest themselves; that was the
+X of a sum in rule of three, not to be worked out by Peter Ibbetson,
+Architect and Surveyor, Wharton Street, Pentonville.
+
+As the orang-outang is to Shakespeare, so is Shakespeare to ... X?
+
+As the female chimpanzee is to the Venus of Milo, so is the Venus of
+Milo to ... X?
+
+Finally, multiply these two X's by each other, and try to conceive the
+result!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Such was, crudely, the simple creed I held at this time; and, such as it
+was, I had worked it all out for myself, with no help from outside--a
+poor thing, but mine own; or, as I expressed it in the words of De
+Musset, "Mon verre n'est pas grand--mais je bois dans mon verre."
+
+For though such ideas were in the air, like wholesome clouds, they had
+not yet condensed themselves into printed words for the million. People
+did not dare to write about these things, as they do at present, in
+popular novels and cheap magazines, that all who run may read, and learn
+to think a little for themselves, and honestly say what they think,
+without having to dread a howl of execration, clerical and lay.
+
+And it was not only that I thought like this and could not think
+otherwise; it was that I felt like this and could not feel otherwise;
+and I should have appeared to myself as wicked, weak, and base had I
+ever even _desired_ to think or feel otherwise, however personally
+despairing of this life--a traitor to what I jealously guarded as my
+best instincts.
+
+And yet to me the faith of others, if but unaggressive, humble, and
+sincere, had often seemed touching and pathetic, and sometimes even
+beautiful, as childish things seem sometimes beautiful, even in those
+who are no longer children, and should have put them away. It had caused
+many heroic lives, and rendered many obscure lives blameless and happy;
+and then its fervor and passion seemed to burn with a lasting flame.
+
+At brief moments now and then, and especially in the young, unfaith can
+be as fervent and as passionate as faith, and just as narrow and
+unreasonable, as _I_ found; but alas! its flame was intermittent, and
+its light was not a kindly light.
+
+It had no food for babes; it could not comfort the sick or sorry, nor
+resolve into submissive harmony the inner discords of the soul; nor
+compensate us for our own failures and shortcomings, nor make up to us
+in any way for the success and prosperity of others who did not choose
+to think as we did.
+
+It was without balm for wounded pride, or stay for weak despondency, or
+consolation for bereavement; its steep and rugged thoroughfares led to
+no promised land of beatitude, and there were no soft resting-places
+by the way.
+
+Its only weapon was steadfastness; its only shield, endurance; its
+earthly hope, the common weal; its earthly prize, the opening of all
+roads to knowledge, and the release from a craven inheritance of fear;
+its final guerdon--sleep? Who knows?
+
+Sleep was not bad.
+
+So that simple, sincere, humble, devout, earnest, fervent, passionate,
+and over-conscientious young unbelievers like myself had to be very
+strong and brave and self-reliant (which I was not), and very much in
+love with what they conceived to be the naked Truth (a figure of
+doubtful personal attractions at first sight), to tread the ways of life
+with that unvarying cheerfulness, confidence, and serenity which the
+believer claims as his own special and particular appanage.
+
+So much for my profession of unfaith, shared (had I but known it) by
+many much older and wiser and better educated than I, and only reached
+by them after great sacrifice of long-cherished illusions, and terrible
+pangs of soul-questioning--a struggle and a wrench that I was spared
+through my kind parents' thoughtfulness when I was a little boy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It thus behooved me to make the most of this life; since, for all I
+knew, or believed, or even hoped to the contrary, to-morrow we must die.
+
+Not, indeed, that I might eat and drink and be merry; heredity and
+education had not inclined me that way, I suppose, and circumstances did
+not allow it; but that I might try and live up to the best ideal I could
+frame out of my own conscience and the past teaching of mankind. And
+man, whose conception of the Infinite and divine has been so inadequate,
+has furnished us with such human examples (ancient and modern, Hebrew,
+Pagan, Buddhist, Christian, Agnostic, and what not) as the best of us
+can only hope to follow at a distance.
+
+I would sometimes go to my morning's work, my heart elate with lofty
+hope and high resolve.
+
+How easy and simple it seemed to lead a life without fear, or reproach,
+or self-seeking, or any sordid hope of personal reward, either here or
+hereafter!--a life of stoical endurance, invincible patience and
+meekness, indomitable cheerfulness and self-denial!
+
+After all, it was only for another forty or fifty years at the most, and
+what was that? And after that--_que scais-je?_
+
+The thought was inspiring indeed!
+
+By luncheon-time (and luncheon consisted of an Abernethy biscuit and a
+glass of water, and several pipes of shag tobacco, cheap and rank) some
+subtle change would come over the spirit of my dream.
+
+Other people did not have high resolves. Some people had very bad
+tempers, and rubbed one very much the wrong way.
+
+What a hideous place was Pentonville to slave away one's life in! ...
+
+What a grind it was to be forever making designs for little new shops in
+Rosoman Street, and not making them well, it seemed! ...
+
+Why should a squinting, pock-marked, bowlegged, hunch-backed little
+Judkins (a sight to make a recruiting-sergeant shudder) forever taunt
+one with having enlisted as a private soldier? ...
+
+And then why should one be sneeringly told to "hit a fellow one's own
+size," merely because, provoked beyond endurance, one just grabbed him
+by the slack of his trousers and gently shook him out of them onto the
+floor, terrified but quite unhurt? ...
+
+And so on, and so on; constant little pin-pricks, sordid humiliations,
+ugliness, meannesses, and dirt, that called forth in resistance all that
+was lowest and least commendable in one's self.
+
+One has attuned one's nerves to the leading of a forlorn hope, and a
+gnat gets into one's eye, or a little cinder grit, and there it sticks;
+and there is no question of leading any forlorn hope, after all, and
+never will be; all _that_ was in the imagination only: it is always
+gnats and cinder grits, gnats and cinder grits.
+
+By the evening I had ignominiously broken down, and was plunged in the
+depths of an exasperated pessimism too deep even for tears, and would
+have believed myself the meanest and most miserable of mankind, but that
+everybody else, without exception, was even meaner and miserabler
+than myself.
+
+They could still eat and drink and be merry. I could not, and did not
+even want to.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And so on, day after day, week after week, for months and years....
+
+Thus I grew weary in time of my palling individuality, ever the same
+through all these uncontrollable variations of mood.
+
+Oh, that alternate ebb and flow of the spirits! It is a disease, and,
+what is most distressing, it is no real change; it is more sickeningly
+monotonous than absolute stagnation itself. And from that dreary seesaw
+I could never escape, except through the gates of dreamless sleep, the
+death in life; for even in our dreams we are still ourselves. There
+was no rest!
+
+I loathed the very sight of myself in the shop-windows as I went by; and
+yet I always looked for it there, in the forlorn hope of at least
+finding some alteration, even for the worse. I passionately longed to be
+somebody else; and yet I never met anybody else I could have borne to be
+for a moment.
+
+And then the loneliness of us!
+
+Each separate unit of our helpless race is inexorably bounded by the
+inner surface of his own mental periphery, a jointless armor in which
+there is no weak place, never a fault, never a single gap of egress for
+ourselves, of ingress for the nearest and dearest of our fellow-units.
+At only five points can we just touch each other, and all that is--and
+that only by the function of our poor senses--from the outside. In vain
+we rack them that we may get a little closer to the best beloved and
+most implicitly trusted; ever in vain, from the cradle to the grave.
+
+Why should so fantastic a thought have persecuted me so cruelly? I knew
+nobody with whom I should have felt such a transfusion of soul even
+tolerable for a second. I cannot tell! But it was like a gadfly which
+drove me to fatigue my body that I should have by day the stolid peace
+of mind that comes of healthy physical exhaustion; that I should sleep
+at night the dreamless sleep--the death in life!
+
+"Of such materials wretched men are made!" Especially wretched young
+men; and the wretcheder one is, the more one smokes; and the more one
+smokes, the wretcheder one gets--a vicious circle!
+
+Such was my case. I grew to long for the hour of my release (as I
+expressed it pathetically to myself), and caressed the idea of suicide.
+I even composed for myself a little rhymed epitaph in French which I
+thought very neat--
+
+     Je n'etais point. Je fus.
+         Je ne suis plus.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Oh, to perish in some noble cause--to die saving another's life, even
+another's worthless life, to which he clung!
+
+I remember formulating this wish, in all sincerity, one moonlit night as
+I walked up Frith Street, Soho. I came upon a little group of excited
+people gathered together at the foot of a house built over a shop. From
+a broken window-pane on the second floor an ominous cloud of smoke rose
+like a column into the windless sky. An ordinary ladder was placed
+against the house, which, they said, was densely inhabited; but no
+fire-engine or fire-escape had arrived as yet, and it appeared useless
+to try and rouse the inmates by kicking and beating at the door
+any longer.
+
+A brave man was wanted--a very brave man, who would climb the ladder,
+and make his way into the house through the broken window. Here was a
+forlorn hope to lead at last!
+
+Such a man was found. To my lasting shame and contrition, it was not I.
+
+He was short and thick and middle-aged, and had a very jolly red face
+and immense whiskers--quite a common sort of man, who seemed by no means
+tired of life.
+
+His heroism was wasted, as it happened; for the house was an empty one,
+as we all heard, to our immense relief, before he had managed to force a
+passage into the burning room. His whiskers were not even singed!
+
+Nevertheless, I slunk home, and gave up all thoughts of
+self-destruction--even in a noble cause; and there, in penance, I
+somewhat hastily committed to flame the plodding labor of many
+midnights--an elaborate copy in pen and ink, line for line, of Retel's
+immortal wood-engraving "Der Tod als Freund," which Mrs. Lintot had been
+kind enough to lend me--and under which I had written, in beautiful
+black Gothic letters and red capitals (and without the slightest sense
+of either humor or irreverence), the following poem, which had cost me
+infinite pains:
+
+               I.
+
+        _F, i, fi--n, i, ni!
+     Bon dieu Pere, j'ai fini...
+     Vous qui m'avez lant puni,
+       Dans ma triste vie,
+     Pour tant d'horribles forfaits
+     Que je ne commis jamais
+     Laissez-moi jouir en paix
+       De mon agonie!_
+
+               II.
+
+     _Les faveurs que je Vous dois,
+     Je les compte sur mes doigts:_
+     _Tout infirme que je sois,
+        Ca se fait bien vite!
+     Prenez patience, et comptez
+     Tous mes maux--puis computez
+     Toutes Vos severites--
+       Vous me tiendrez quitte!_
+
+               III.
+
+     _Ne pour souffrir, et souffrant--
+     Bas, honni, bete, ignorant,
+     Vieux, laid, chetif--et mourant
+        Dans mon trou sans plainte,
+     Je suis aussi sans desir
+     Autre que d'en bien finir--
+     Sans regret, sans repentir--
+        Sans espoir ni crainte!_
+
+               IV.
+
+     _Pere inflexible et jaloux,
+     Votre Fils est mort pour nous!
+     Aussi, je reste envers Vous
+         Si bien sans rancune,
+     Que je voudrais, sans facon,
+     Faire, au seuil de ma prison,
+     Quelque petite oraison ...
+         Je n'en sais pas une!_
+
+               V.
+
+     _J'entends sonner l'Angelus
+     Qui rassemble Vos Elus:
+     Pour moi, du bercail exclus.
+         C'est la mort qui sonne!
+     Prier ne profite rien ...
+     Pardonner est le seul bien:_
+     _C'est le Votre, et c'est le mien:
+        Moi, je Vous pardonne!_
+
+               VI.
+
+     _Soyez d'un egard pareil!
+     S'il est quelque vrai sommeil
+     Sans ni reve, ni reveil,
+        Ouvrez-m'en la porte--
+     Faites que l'immense Oubli
+     Couvre, sous un dernier pli,
+     Dans mon corps enseveli,
+        Ma conscience morte!_
+
+Oh me duffer! What a hopeless failure was I in all things, little and
+big.
+
+
+
+
+Part Three
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+I had no friends but the Lintots and their friends. "Les amis de nos
+amis sont nos amis!"
+
+My cousin Alfred had gone into the army, like his father before him. My
+cousin Charlie had gone into the Church, and we had drifted completely
+apart. My grandmother was dead. My Aunt Plunket, a great invalid, lived
+in Florence. Her daughter, Madge, was in India, happily married to a
+young soldier who is now a most distinguished general.
+
+The Lintots held their heads high as representatives of a liberal
+profession, and an old Pentonville family. People were generally
+exclusive in those days--an exclusiveness that was chiefly kept up by
+the ladies. There were charmed circles even in Pentonville.
+
+Among the most exclusive were the Lintots. Let us hope, in common
+justice, that those they excluded were at least able to exclude others.
+
+I have eaten their bread and salt, and it would ill become me to deny
+that their circle was charming as well as charmed. But I had no gift for
+making friends, although I was often attracted by people the very
+opposite of myself; especially by little, clever, quick, but not too
+familiar men; but even if they were disposed to make advances, a
+miserable shyness and stiffness of manner on my part, that I could not
+help, would raise a barrier of ice between us.
+
+They were most hospitable people, these good Lintots, and had many
+friends, and gave many parties, which my miserable shyness prevented me
+from enjoying to the full. They were both too stiff and too free.
+
+In the drawing-room, Mrs. Lintot and one or two other ladies, severely
+dressed, would play the severest music in a manner that did not mitigate
+its severity. They were merciless! It was nearly always Bach, or Hummel,
+or Scarlatti, each of whom, they would say, could write both like an
+artist and a gentleman--a very rare but indispensable combination,
+it seemed.
+
+Other ladies, young and middle-aged, and a few dumb-struck youths like
+myself, would be suffered to listen, but never to retaliate--never to
+play or sing back again.
+
+If one ventured to ask for a song without words by Mendelssohn--or a
+song with words, even by Schubert, even with German words--one was
+rebuked and made to blush for the crime of musical frivolity.
+
+Meanwhile, in Lintot's office (built by himself in the back garden),
+grave men and true, pending the supper hour, would smoke and sip
+spirits-and-water, and talk shop; formally at first, and with much
+politeness. But gradually, feeling their way, as it were, they would
+relax into social unbuttonment, and drop the "Mister" before each
+other's names (to be resumed next morning), and indulge in lively
+professional chaff, which would soon become personal and free and
+boisterous--a good-humored kind of warfare in which I did not shine, for
+lack of quickness and repartee. For instance, they would ask one whether
+one would rather be a bigger fool than one looked, or look a bigger fool
+than one was; and whichever way one answered the question, the retort
+would be that "that was impossible!" amid roars of laughter from all
+but one.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+So that I would take a middle course, and spend most of the evening on
+the stairs and in the hall, and study (with an absorbing interest much
+too well feigned to look natural) the photographs of famous cathedrals
+and public buildings till supper came; when, by assiduously attending on
+the ladies, I would cause my miserable existence to be remembered, and
+forgiven; and soon forgotten again, I fear.
+
+I hope I shall not be considered an overweening coxcomb for saying that,
+on the whole, I found more favor with the ladies than with the
+gentlemen; especially at supper-time.
+
+After supper there would be a change--for the better, some thought.
+Lintot, emboldened by good-cheer and good-fellowship, would become
+unduly, immensely, uproariously funny, in spite of his wife. He had a
+genuine gift of buffoonery. His friends would whisper to each other
+that Lintot was "on," and encourage him. Bach and Hummel and Scarlatti
+were put on the shelf, and the young people would have a good time.
+There were comic songs and negro melodies, with a chorus all round.
+Lintot would sing "Vilikins and his Dinah," in the manner of Mr. Robson,
+so well that even Mrs. Lintot's stern mask would relax into indulgent
+smiles. It was irresistible. And when the party broke up, we could all
+(thanks to our host) honestly thank our hostess "for a very pleasant
+evening," and cheerfully, yet almost regretfully, wish her good-night.
+
+It is good to laugh sometimes--wisely if one can; if not, _quocumque
+modo_! There are seasons when even "the crackling of thorns under a pot"
+has its uses. It seems to warm the pot--all the pots--and all the
+emptiness thereof, if they be empty.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Once, indeed, I actually made a friend, but he did not last me very
+long.
+
+It happened thus: Mrs. Lintot gave a grander party than usual. One of
+the invited was Mr. Moses Lyon, the great picture-dealer--a client of
+Lintot's; and he brought with him young Raphael Merridew, the already
+famous painter, the most attractive youth I had ever seen. Small and
+slight, but beautifully made, and dressed in the extreme of fashion,
+with a handsome face, bright and polite manners, and an irresistible
+voice, he became his laurels well; he would have been sufficiently
+dazzling without them. Never had those hospitable doors in Myddelton
+Square been opened to so brilliant a guest.
+
+I was introduced to him, and he discovered that the bridge of my nose
+was just suited for the face of the sun-god in his picture of "The
+Sun-god and the Dawn-maiden," and begged I would favor him with a
+sitting or two.
+
+Proud indeed was I to accede to such a request, and I gave him many
+sittings. I used to rise at dawn to sit, before my work at Lintot's
+began; and to sit again as soon as I could be spared.
+
+It seems I not only had the nose and brow of a sun-god (who is not
+supposed to be a very intellectual person), but also his arms and his
+torso; and sat for these, too. I have been vain of myself ever since.
+
+During these sittings, which he made delightful, I grew to love him as
+David loved Jonathan.
+
+We settled that we would go to the Derby together in a hansom. I engaged
+the smartest hansom in London days beforehand. On the great Wednesday
+morning I was punctual with it at his door in Charlotte Street. There
+was another hansom there already--a smarter hansom still than mine, for
+it was a private one--and he came down and told me he had altered his
+mind, and was going with Lyon, who had asked him the evening before.
+
+"One of the first picture-dealers in London, my dear fellow. Hang it
+all, you know, I couldn't refuse--awfully sorry!"
+
+So I drove to the Derby in solitary splendor, but the bright weather,
+the humors of the road, all the gay scenes were thrown away upon me,
+such was the bitterness of my heart.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+In the early afternoon I saw Merridew lunching on the top of a drag,
+among some men of smart and aristocratic appearance. He seemed to be the
+life of the party, and gave me a good-humored nod as I passed. I soon
+found Lyon sitting disconsolate in his hansom, scowling and solitary; he
+invited me to lunch with him, and disembosomed himself of a load of
+bitterness as intense as mine (which I kept to myself). The shrewd
+Hebrew tradesman was sunk in the warm-hearted, injured friend. Merridew
+had left Lyon for the Earl of Chiselhurst, just as he had left me
+for Lyon.
+
+That was a dull Derby for us both!
+
+A few days later I met Merridew, radiant as ever. All he said was:
+
+"Awful shame of me to drop old Lyon for Chiselhurst, eh? But an earl, my
+dear fellow! Hang it all, you know! Poor old Mo had to get back in his
+hansom all by himself, but he's bought the 'Sun-god' all the same."
+
+Merridew soon dropped me altogether, to my great sorrow, for I forgave
+him his Derby desertion as quickly as Lyon did, and would have forgiven
+him anything. He was one of those for whom allowances are always being
+made, and with a good grace.
+
+He died before he was thirty, poor boy! but his fame will never die. The
+"Sun-god" (even with the bridge of that nose which had been so wofully
+put out of joint) is enough by itself to place him among the immortals.
+Lyon sold it to Lord Chiselhurst for three thousand pounds--it had cost
+him five hundred. It is now in the National Gallery.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Poetical justice was satisfied!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Nor was I more fortunate in love than in friendship.
+
+All the exclusiveness in the world cannot exclude good and beautiful
+maidens, and these were not lacking, even in Pentonville.
+
+There is always one maiden much more beautiful and good than all the
+others--like Esmeralda among the ladies of the Hotel de Gondelaurier.
+There was such a maiden in Pentonville, or rather Clerkenwell, close by.
+But her station was so humble (like Esmeralda's) that even the least
+exclusive would have drawn the line at _her!_ She was one of a large
+family, and they sold tripe and pig's feet, and food for cats and dogs,
+in a very small shop opposite the western wall of the Middlesex House of
+Detention. She was the eldest, and the busy, responsible one at this
+poor counter. She was one of Nature's ladies, one of Nature's
+goddesses--a queen! Of that I felt sure every time I passed her shop,
+and shyly met her kind, frank, uncoquettish gaze. A time was approaching
+when I should have to overcome my shyness, and tell her that she of all
+women was the woman for me, and that it was indispensable, absolutely
+indispensable, that we two should be made one--immediately! at
+once! forever!
+
+But before I could bring myself to this she married somebody else, and
+we had never exchanged a single word!
+
+If she is alive now she is an old woman--a good and beautiful old woman,
+I feel sure, wherever she is, and whatever her rank in life. If she
+should read this book, which is not very likely, may she accept this
+small tribute from an unknown admirer; for whom, so many years ago, she
+beautified and made poetical the hideous street that still bounds the
+Middlesex House of Detention on its western side; and may she try to
+think not the less of it because since then its writer has been on the
+wrong side of that long, blank wall, of that dreary portal where the
+agonized stone face looks down on the desolate slum:
+
+     "_Per me si va tra la perduta gente_ ...!"
+
+After this disappointment I got myself a big dog (like Byron, Bismarck,
+and Wagner), but not in the spirit of emulation. Indeed, I had never
+heard of either Bismarck or Wagner in those days, or their dogs, and I
+had lost my passion for Byron and any wish to emulate him in any way; it
+was simply for the want of something to be fond of, and that would be
+sure to love me back again.
+
+He was not a big dog when I bought him, but just a little ball of
+orange-tawny fluff that I could carry with one arm. He cost me all the
+money I had saved up for a holiday trip to Passy. I had seen his father,
+a champion St. Bernard, at a dog-show, and felt that life would be well
+worth living with such a companion; but _his_ price was five hundred
+guineas. When I saw the irresistible son, just six weeks old, and heard
+that he was only one-fiftieth of his sire's value, I felt Passy must
+wait, and became his possessor.
+
+[Illustration: PORTHOS AND HIS ATTENDANT SQUIRE.]
+
+I gave him of the best that money could buy--real milk at fivepence a
+quart, three quarts a day, I combed his fluff every morning, and washed
+him three times a week, and killed all his fleas one by one--a labour of
+love. I weighed him every Saturday, and found he increased at the rate
+of six to nine weekly; and his power of affection increased as the
+square of his weight. I christened him Porthos, because he was so big
+and fat and jolly; but in his noble puppy face and his beautiful
+pathetic eyes I already foresaw for his middle age that distinguished
+and melancholy grandeur which characterized the sublime Athos, Comte
+de la Fere.
+
+He was a joy. It was good to go to sleep at night and know he would be
+there in the morning. Whenever we took our walks abroad, everybody
+turned round to look at him and admire, and to ask if he was
+good-tempered, and what his particular breed was, and what I fed him on.
+He became a monster in size--a beautiful, playful, gracefully
+galumphing, and most affectionate monster, and I, his happy
+Frankenstein, congratulated myself on the possession of a treasure that
+would last twelve years at least, or even fourteen, with the care I
+meant to take of him. But he died of distemper when he was eleven
+months old.
+
+I do not know if little dogs cause as large griefs when they die as big
+ones; but I settled there should be no more dogs--big or little--for me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After this I took to writing verses and sending them to magazines, where
+they never appeared. They were generally about my being reminded, by a
+tune, of things that had happened a long time ago: my poetic, like my
+artistic vein, was limited.
+
+Here are the last I made, thirty years back. My only excuse for giving
+them is that they are so _singularly prophetic_.
+
+The reminding tune (an old French chime which my father used to sing)
+is very simple and touching; and the old French words run thus:
+
+     _"Orleans, Beaugency!
+     Notre Dame de Clery!
+       Vendome! Vendome!
+     Quel chagrin, quel ennui
+     De compter toute la nuit
+       Les heures--Les heures!"_
+
+That is all. They are supposed to be sung by a mediaeval prisoner who
+cannot sleep; and who, to beguile the tediousness of his insomnia, sets
+any words that come into his head to the tune of the chime which marks
+the hours from a neighboring belfry. I tried to fancy that his name was
+Pasquier de la Mariere, and that he was my ancestor.
+
+     THE CHIME.
+
+       _There is an old French air,
+     A little song of loneliness and grief--
+     Simple as nature, sweet beyond compare--
+       And sad--past all belief!
+
+       Nameless is he that wrote
+     The melody--but this I opine:
+     Whoever made the words was some remote
+       French ancestor of mine.
+
+       I know the dungeion deep
+     Where long he lay--and why he lay therein;
+     And all his anguish, that he could not sleep
+       For conscience of a sin._
+
+       I see his cold, hard bed;
+     I hear the chimes that jingled in his ears
+     As he pressed nightly, with that wakeful head,
+       A pillow wet with tears.
+
+       Oh, restless little chime!
+     It never changed--but rang its roundelay
+     For each dark hour of that unhappy time
+       That sighed itself away.
+
+       And ever, more and more,
+     Its burden grew of his lost self a part--
+     And mingled with his memories, and wore
+       Its way into his heart.
+
+       And there it wove the name
+     Of many a town he loved, for one dear sake,
+     Into its web of music; thus he came
+       His little song to make.
+
+       Of all that ever heard
+     And loved it for its sweetness, none but I
+     Divined the clew that, as a hidden word,
+       The notes doth underlie.
+
+       That wail from lips long dead
+     Has found its echo in this breast alone!
+     Only to me, by blood-remembrance led,
+       Is that wild story known!
+
+       And though 'tis mine, by right
+     Of treasure-trove, to rifle and lay bare--
+     A heritage of sorrow and delight
+       The world would gladly share--
+
+       Yet must I not unfold
+     For evermore, nor whisper late or soon,
+     The secret that a few slight bars thus hold
+       Imprisoned in a tune.
+
+       For when that little song
+     Goes ringing in my head, I know that he,
+     My luckless lone forefather, dust so long,
+       Relives his life in me!
+
+I sent them to ----'s Magazine, with the six French lines on at the
+which they were founded at the top. ----'s _Magazine_ published only the
+six French lines--the only lines in my handwriting that ever got into
+print. And they date from the fifteenth century!
+
+Thus was my little song lost to the world, and for a time to me. But
+long, long afterwards, I found it again, where Mr. Longfellow once found
+a song of _his_: "in the heart of a friend"--surely the sweetest bourne
+that can ever be for any song!
+
+Little did I foresee that a day was not far off when real blood
+remembrance would carry me--but that is to come.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Poetry, friendship and love having failed, I sought for consolation in
+art, and frequented the National Gallery, Marlborough House (where the
+Vernon collection was), the British Museum, the Royal Academy, and other
+exhibitions.
+
+I prostrated myself before Titian, Rembrandt, Velasquez, Veronese, Da
+Vinci, Botticelli, Signorelli--the older the better; and tried my best
+to honestly feel the greatness I knew and know to be there; but for
+want of proper training I was unable to reach those heights, and, like
+most outsiders, admired them for the wrong things, for the very beauties
+they lack--such transcendent, ineffable beauties of feature, form, and
+expression as an outsider always looks for in an old master, and often
+persuades himself he finds there--and oftener still, _pretends_ he does!
+
+I was far more sincerely moved (although I did not dare to say so) by
+some works of our own time--for instance, by the "Vale of Rest," the
+"Autumn Leaves," "The Huguenot" of young Mr. Millais--just as I found
+such poems as _Maud_ and _In Memoriam_, by Mr. Alfred Tennyson,
+infinitely more precious and dear to me than Milton's _Paradise Lost_
+and Spenser's _Faerie Queene_.
+
+Indeed, I was hopelessly modern in those days--quite an every-day young
+man; the names I held in the warmest and deepest regard were those of
+then living men and women. Darwin, Browning, and George Eliot did not,
+it is true, exist for me as yet; but Tennyson, Thackeray, Dickens,
+Millais, John Leech, George Sand, Balzac, the old Dumas, Victor Hugo,
+and Alfred de Musset!
+
+I have never beheld them in the flesh; but, like all the world, I know
+their outer aspect well, and could stand a pretty stiff examination in
+most they have ever written, drawn, or painted.
+
+Other stars of magnitude have risen since, but of the old galaxy four at
+least still shine out of the past with their ancient lustre undimmed in
+my eyes--Thackeray; dear John Leech, who still has power to make me
+laugh as I like to laugh; and for the two others it is plain that the
+Queen, the world, and I are of a like mind as to their deserts, for one
+of them is now an ornament to the British peerage, the other a baronet
+and a millionaire; only I would have made dukes of them straight off,
+with precedence over the Archbishop of Canterbury, if they would care to
+have it so.
+
+It is with a full but humble heart that I thus venture to record my long
+indebtedness, and pay this poor tribute, still fresh from the days of my
+unquestioning hero-worship. It will serve, at least, to show my reader
+(should I ever have one sufficiently interested to care) in what mental
+latitudes and longitudes I dwelt, who was destined to such singular
+experience--a kind of reference, so to speak--that he may be able to
+place me at a glance, according to the estimation in which he holds
+these famous and perhaps deathless names.
+
+It will be admitted, at least, that my tastes were normal, and shared by
+a large majority--the tastes of an every-day young man at that
+particular period of the nineteenth century--one much given to athletics
+and cold tubs, and light reading and cheap tobacco, and endowed with the
+usual discontent; the last person for whom or from whom or by whom to
+expect anything out of the common.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But the splendor of the Elgin Marbles! I understood that at
+once--perhaps because there is not so much to understand. Mere
+physically beautiful people appeal to us all, whether they be in flesh
+or marble.
+
+By some strange intuition, or natural instinct, I _knew_ that people
+ought to be built like that, before I had ever seen a single statue in
+that wondrous room. I had divined them--so completely did they realize
+an aesthetic ideal I had always felt.
+
+I had often, as I walked the London streets, peopled an imaginary world
+of my own with a few hundreds of such beings, made flesh and blood, and
+pictured them as a kind of beneficent aristocracy seven feet high, with
+minds and manners to match their physique, and set above the rest of the
+world for its good; for I found it necessary (so that my dream should
+have a point) to provide them with a foil in the shape of millions of
+such people as we meet every day. I was egotistic and self-seeking
+enough, it is true, to enroll myself among the former, and had chosen
+for my particular use and wear just such a frame as that of the Theseus,
+with, of course, the nose and hands and feet (of which time has bereft
+him) restored, and all mutilations made good.
+
+And for my mistress and companion I had duly selected no less a person
+than the Venus of Milo (no longer armless), of which Lintot possessed a
+plaster-cast, and whose beauties I had foreseen before I ever beheld
+them with the bodily eye.
+
+"Monsieur n'est pas degoute!" as Ibbetson would have remarked.
+
+But most of all did I pant for the music which is divine.
+
+Alas, that concerts and operas and oratorios should not be as free to
+the impecunious as the National Gallery and the British Museum--a
+privilege which is not abused!
+
+Impecunious as I was, I sometimes had pence enough to satisfy this
+craving, and discovered in time such realms of joy as I had never
+dreamed of; such monarchs as Mozart, Handel, and Beethoven, and others,
+of whom my father knew apparently so little; and yet they were more
+potent enchanters than Gretry, Herold, and Boieldieu, whose music he
+sang so well.
+
+I discovered, moreover, that they could do more than charm--they could
+drive my weary self out of my weary soul, and for a space fill that
+weary soul with courage, resignation, and hope. No Titian, no
+Shakespeare, no Phidias could ever accomplish that--not even Mr. William
+Makepeace Thackeray or Mr. Alfred Tennyson.
+
+My sweetest recollections of this period of my life (indeed, the only
+sweet recollections) are of the music I heard, and the places where I
+heard it; it was an enchantment! With what vividness I can recall it
+all! The eager anticipation for days; the careful selection, beforehand,
+from such an _embarras de richesses_ as was duly advertised; then the
+long waiting in the street, at the doors reserved for those whose
+portion is to be the gallery. The hard-won seat aloft is reached at
+last, after a selfish but good-humored struggle up the long stone
+staircase (one is sorry for the weak, but a famished ear has no
+conscience). The gay and splendid house is crammed; the huge chandelier
+is a golden blaze; the delight of expectation is in the air, and also
+the scent of gas, and peppermint, and orange-peel, and music-loving
+humanity, whom I have discovered to be of sweeter fragrance than the
+common herd.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+The orchestra fills, one by one; instruments tune up--a familiar
+cacophony, sweet with seductive promise. The conductor takes his
+seat--applause--a hush--three taps--the baton waves once, twice,
+thrice--the eternal fountain of magic is let loose, and at the
+very first jet
+
+     "_The cares that infest the day
+     Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,
+     And as silently steal away_."
+
+Then lo! the curtain rises, and straightway we are in Seville--Seville,
+after Pentonville! Count Alma-viva, lordly, gallant, and gay beneath his
+disguise, twangs his guitar, and what sounds issue from it! For every
+instrument that was ever invented is in that guitar--the whole
+orchestra!
+
+"_Ecco ridente il cielo_....," so sings he (with the most beautiful male
+voice of his time) under Rosina's balcony; and soon Rosina's voice (the
+most beautiful female voice of hers) is heard behind her curtains--so
+girlish, so innocent, so young and light-hearted, that the eyes fill
+with involuntary tears.
+
+Thus encouraged, he warbles that his name is Lindoro, that he would fain
+espouse her; that he is not rich in the goods of this world, but gifted
+with an inordinate, inexhaustible capacity for love (just like Peter
+Ibbetson); and vows that he will always warble to her, in this wise,
+from dawn till when daylight sinks behind the mountain. But what matter
+the words?
+
+"Go on, my love, go on, _like this_!" warbles back Rosina--and no
+wonder--till the dull, despondent, commonplace heart of Peter Ibbetson
+has room for nothing else but sunny hope and love and joy! And yet it is
+all mere sound--impossible, unnatural, unreal nonsense!
+
+Or else, in a square building, decent and well-lighted enough, but not
+otherwise remarkable--the very chapel of music--four business-like
+gentlemen, in modern attire and spectacles, take their places on an
+unpretentious platform amid refined applause; and soon the still air
+vibrates to the trembling of sixteen strings--only that and
+nothing more!
+
+But in that is all Beethoven, or Schubert, or Schumann has got to say to
+us for the moment, and what a say it is! And with what consummate
+precision and perfection it is said--with what a mathematical certainty,
+and yet with what suavity, dignity, grace, and distinction!
+
+They are the four greatest players in the world, perhaps; but they
+forget themselves, and we forget them (as it is their wish we should),
+in the master whose work they interpret so reverently, that we may yearn
+with his mighty desire and thrill with his rapture and triumph, or ache
+with his heavenly pain and submit with his divine resignation.
+
+Not all the words in all the tongues that ever were--dovetail them,
+rhyme them, alliterate them, torture them as you will--can ever pierce
+to the uttermost depths of the soul of man, and let in a glimpse of the
+Infinite, as do the inarticulate tremblings of those sixteen strings.
+
+Ah, songs without words are the best!
+
+Then a gypsy-like little individual, wiry and unkempt, who looks as if
+he had spent his life listening to the voices of the night in Heaven
+knows what Lithuanian forests, with wolves and wild-boars for his
+familiars, and the wind in the trees for his teacher, seats himself at
+the great brass-bound oaken Broadwood piano-forte. And under his
+phenomenal fingers, a haunting, tender, world-sorrow, full of
+questionings--a dark mystery of moonless, starlit nature--exhales itself
+in nocturnes, in impromptus, in preludes--in mere waltzes and mazourkas
+even! But waltzes and mazourkas such as the most frivolous would never
+dream of dancing to. A capricious, charming sorrow--not too deep for
+tears, if one be at all inclined to shed them--so delicate, so fresh,
+and yet so distinguished, so ethereally civilized and worldly and
+well-bred that it has crystallized itself into a drawing-room ecstasy,
+to last forever. It seems as though what was death (or rather
+euthanasia) to him who felt it, is play for us--surely an immortal
+sorrow whose recital will never, never pall--the sorrow of Chopin.
+
+Though why Chopin should have been so sorry we cannot even guess; for
+mere sorrow's sake, perhaps; the very luxury of woe--the real sorrow
+which has no real cause (like mine in those days); and that is the best
+and cheapest kind of sorrow to make music of, after all!
+
+And this great little gypsy pianist, who plays his Chopin so well;
+evidently he has not spent his life in Lithuanian forests, but hard at
+the key-board, night and day; and he has had a better master than the
+wind in the trees--namely, Chopin himself (for it is printed in the
+programme). It was his father and mother before him, and theirs, who
+heard the voices of the night; but he remembers it all, and puts it all
+into his master's music, and makes us remember it, too.
+
+Or else behold the chorus, rising tier upon tier, and culminating in the
+giant organ. But their thunder is just hushed.
+
+Some Liliputian figure, male or female, as the case may be, rises on its
+little legs amid the great Liliputian throng, and through the sacred
+stillness there peals forth a perfect voice (by no means Liliputian). It
+bids us "Rest in the Lord," or else it tells us that "He was despised
+and rejected of men"; but, again, what matter the words? They are almost
+a hinderance, beautiful though they be.
+
+The hardened soul melts at the tones of the singer, at the unspeakable
+pathos of the sounds that cannot lie; one almost believes--one believes
+at least in the belief of others. At last one understands, and is purged
+of intolerance and cynical contempt, and would kneel with the rest, in
+sheer human sympathy!
+
+Oh, wretched outsider that one is (if it all be true)--one whose
+heart, so hopelessly impervious to the written word, so helplessly
+callous to the spoken message, can be reached only by the organized
+vibrations of a trained larynx, a metal pipe, a reed, a
+fiddle-string--by invisible, impalpable, incomprehensible little
+air-waves in mathematical combination, that beat against a tiny drum at
+the back of one's ear. And these mathematical combinations and the laws
+that govern them have existed forever, before Moses, before Pan, long
+before either a larynx or a tympanum had been evolved. They
+are absolute!
+
+Oh, mystery of mysteries!
+
+Euterpe, Muse of Muses, what a personage hast thou become since first
+thou sattest for thy likeness (with that ridiculous lyre in thy untaught
+hands) to some Greek who could carve so much better than thou
+couldst play!
+
+Four strings; but not the fingerable strings of Stradivarius. Nay, I beg
+thy pardon--five; for thy scale was pentatonic, I believe. Orpheus
+himself had no better, it is true. It was with just such an instrument
+that he all but charmed his Eurydice out of Hades. But, alas, she went
+back; on second thoughts, she liked Hades best!
+
+Couldst thou fire and madden and wring the heart, and then melt and
+console and charm it into the peace that passeth all understanding, with
+those poor five rudimentary notes, and naught between?
+
+Couldst thou, out of those five sounds of fixed, unalterable pitch,
+make, not a sixth sound, but a star?
+
+What were they, those five sounds? "Do, re, mi, fa, sol?" What must thy
+songs without words have been, if thou didst ever make any?
+
+Thou wast in very deed a bread-and-butter miss in those days, Euterpe,
+for all that thy eight twin sisters were already grown up, and out; and
+now thou toppest them all by half a head, at least. "Tu leur mangerais
+des petits pates sur la tete--comme Madame Seraskier!"
+
+And oh, how thou beatest them all for beauty! In _my_ estimation, at
+least--like--like Madame Seraskier again!
+
+And hast thou done growing at last?
+
+Nay, indeed; thou art not even yet a bread-and-butter miss--thou art but
+a sweet baby, one year old, and seven feet high, tottering midway
+between some blessed heaven thou hast only just left and the dull home
+of us poor mortals.
+
+The sweet one-year-old baby of our kin puts its hands upon our knees and
+looks up into our eyes with eyes full of unutterable meaning. It has so
+much to say! It can only say "ga-ga" and "ba-ba"; but with oh! how
+searching a voice, how touching a look--that is, if one is fond of
+babies! We are moved to the very core; we want to understand, for it
+concerns us all; we were once like that ourselves--the individual and
+the race--but for the life of us we cannot _remember_.
+
+And what canst _thou_ say to us yet, Euterpe, but thy "ga-ga" and thy
+"ba-ba," the inarticulate sweetness whereof we feel and cannot
+comprehend? But how beautiful it is--and what a look thou hast, and
+what a voice--that is, if one is fond of music!
+
+     "Je suis las des mois--je suis d'entendre
+        Ce qui peut mentir;
+      J'aime mieux les sons, qu'au lieu de comprendre
+        je n'ai qu'a sentir."
+
+Next day I would buy or beg or borrow the music that had filled me with
+such emotion and delight, and take it home to my little square piano,
+and try to finger it all out for myself. But I had begun too late
+in life.
+
+To sit, longing and helpless, before an instrument one cannot play, with
+a lovely score one cannot read! Even Tantalus was spared such an
+ordeal as that.
+
+It seemed hard that my dear father and mother, so accomplished in music
+themselves, should not even have taught me the musical notes, at an age
+when it was so easy to learn them; and thus have made me free of that
+wonder-world of sound in which I took such an extraordinary delight, and
+might have achieved distinction--perhaps.
+
+But no, my father had dedicated me to the Goddess of Science from before
+my very birth; that I might some day be better equipped than he for the
+pursuit, capture, and utilization of Nature's sterner secrets. There
+must be no dallying with light Muses. Alas! I have fallen between
+two stools!
+
+And thus, Euterpe absent, her enchantment would pass away; her
+handwriting was before me, but I had not learned how to decipher it, and
+my weary self would creep back into its old prison--my soul.
+
+[Illustration: (no caption)]
+
+Self-sickness-_selbstschmerz, le mal do soi!_ What a disease! It is not
+to be found in any dictionary, medical or otherwise.
+
+I ought to have been whipped for it, I know; but nobody was big enough,
+or kind enough, to whip me!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At length there came a day when that weary, weak, and most ridiculous
+self of mine was driven out--and exorcised for good--by a still more
+potent enchanter than even Handel or Beethoven or Schubert!
+
+There was a certain Lord Cray, for whom Lintot had built some laborers'
+cottages in Hertfordshire, and I sometimes went there to superintend the
+workmen. When the cottages were finished, Lord Cray and his wife (a very
+charming, middle-aged lady) came to see them, and were much pleased with
+all that had been done, and also seemed to be much interested in _me_,
+of all people in the world! and a few days later I received a card of
+invitation to their house in town for a concert.
+
+At first I felt much too shy to go; but Mr. Lintot insisted that it was
+my duty to do so, as it might lead to business; so that when the night
+came, I screwed up my courage to the sticking-place, and went.
+
+That evening was all enchantment, or would have been but for the
+somewhat painful feeling that I was such an outsider.
+
+But I was always well content to be the least observed of all observers,
+and felt happy in the security that here I should at least be left
+alone; that no perfect stranger would attempt to put me at my ease by
+making me the butt of his friendly and familiar banter; that no gartered
+duke, or belted earl (I have no doubt they were as plentiful there as
+blackberries, though they did not wear their insignia) would pat me on
+the back and ask me if I would sooner look a bigger fool than I was, or
+be a bigger fool than I looked. (I have not found a repartee for that
+insidious question yet; that is why it rankles so.)
+
+I had always heard that the English were a stiff people. There seemed to
+be no stiffness at Lady Cray's; nor was there any facetiousness; it put
+one at one's ease merely to look at them. They were mostly big, and
+strong, and healthy, and quiet, and good-humored, with soft and
+pleasantly-modulated voices. The large, well-lighted rooms were neither
+hot nor cold; there were beautiful pictures on the walls, and an
+exquisite scent of flowers came from an immense conservatory. I had
+never been to such a gathering before; all was new and a surprise, and
+very much to my taste, I confess. It was my first glimpse of "Society;"
+and last--but one!
+
+There were crowds of people--but no crowd; everybody seemed to know
+everybody else quite intimately, and to resume conversations begun an
+hour ago somewhere else.
+
+Presently these conversations were hushed, and Grisi and Mario sang! It
+was as much as I could do to restrain my enthusiasm and delight. I could
+have shouted out loud--I could almost have sung myself!
+
+In the midst of the applause that followed that heavenly duet, a lady
+and gentleman came into the room, and at the sight of that lady a new
+interest came into my life; and all the old half-forgotten sensations of
+mute pain and rapture that the beauty of Madame Seraskier used to make
+me feel as a child were revived once more; but with a depth and
+intensity, in comparison, that were as a strong man's barytone to a
+small boy's treble.
+
+It was the quick, sharp, cruel blow, the _coup de poignard_, that beauty
+of the most obvious, yet subtle, consummate, and highly-organized order
+can deal to a thoroughly prepared victim.
+
+And what a thoroughly prepared victim was I! A poor, shy,
+over-susceptible, virginal savage--Uncas, the son of Chingachgook,
+astray for the first time in a fashionable London drawing-room.
+
+A chaste mediaeval knight, born out of his due time, ascetic both from
+reverence and disgust, to whom woman in the abstract was the one
+religion; in the concrete, the cause of fifty disenchantments a day!
+
+A lusty, love-famished, warm-blooded pagan, stranded in the middle of
+the nineteenth century; in whom some strange inherited instinct had
+planted a definite, complete, and elaborately-finished conception of
+what the ever-beloved shape of woman should be--from the way the hair
+should grow on her brow and her temples and the nape of her neck, down
+to the very rhythm that should regulate the length and curve and
+position of every single individual toe! and who had found, to his pride
+and delight, that his preconceived ideal was as near to that of Phidias
+as if he had lived in the time of Pericles and Aspasia.
+
+For such was this poor scribe, and such he had been from a child, until
+this beautiful lady first swam into his ken.
+
+She was so tall that her eyes seemed almost on a level with mine, but
+she moved with the alert lightness and grace of a small person. Her
+thick, heavy hair was of a dark coppery brown, her complexion clear and
+pale, her eyebrows and eyelashes black, her eyes a light bluish gray.
+Her nose was short and sharp, and rather tilted at the tip, and her red
+mouth large and very mobile; and here, deviating from my preconceived
+ideal, she showed me how tame a preconceived ideal can be. Her perfect
+head was small, and round her long, thick throat two slight creases went
+parallel, to make what French sculptors call _le collier de Venus;_ the
+skin of her neck was like a white camellia, and slender and
+square-shouldered as she was, she did not show a bone. She was that
+beautiful type the French define as _la fausse maigre_, which does not
+mean a "false, thin woman."
+
+She seemed both thoughtful and mirthful at once, and genial as I had
+never seen any one genial before--a person to confide in, to tell all
+one's troubles to, without even an introduction! When she laughed she
+showed both top and bottom teeth, which were perfect, and her eyes
+nearly closed, so that they could no longer be seen for the thick lashes
+that fringed both upper and under eyelids; at which time the expression
+of her face was so keenly, cruelly sweet that it went through one like a
+knife. And then the laugh would suddenly cease, her full lips would
+meet, and her eyes beam out again like two mild gray suns, benevolently
+humorous and kindly inquisitive, and full of interest in everything and
+everybody around her. But there--I cannot describe her any more than one
+can describe a beautiful tune.
+
+Out of those magnificent orbs kindness, kindness, kindness was shed like
+a balm; and after a while, by chance, that balm was shed for a few
+moments on me, to my sweet but terrible confusion. Then I saw that she
+asked my hostess who I was, and received the answer; on which she shed
+her balm on me for one moment more, and dismissed me from her thoughts.
+
+Madame Grisi sang again--Desdemona's song from _Othello_--and the
+beautiful lady thanked the divine singer, whom she seemed to know quite
+intimately; and I thought her thanks--Italian thanks--even diviner than
+the song--not that I could quite understand them or even hear them
+well--I was too far; but she thanked with eyes and hands and shoulders--
+slight, happy movements--as well as words; surely the sweetest and
+sincerest words ever spoken.
+
+She was much surrounded and made up to--evidently a person of great
+importance; and I ventured to ask another shy man standing in my corner
+who she was, and he answered--
+
+"The Duchess of Towers."
+
+She did not stay long, and when she departed all turned dull and
+commonplace that had seemed so bright before she came; and seeing that
+it was not necessary to bid my hostess good-night and thank her for a
+pleasant evening, as we did in Pentonville, I got myself out of the
+house and walked back to my lodgings an altered man.
+
+I should probably never meet that lovely young duchess again, and
+certainly never know her; but her shaft had gone straight and true into
+my very heart, and I felt how well barbed it was, beyond all possibility
+of its ever being torn out of that blessed wound; might this never heal;
+might it bleed on forever!
+
+She would be an ideal in my lonely life, to live up to in thought and
+word and deed. An instinct which I felt to be infallible told me she was
+as good as she was fair--
+
+    _"Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, the love of
+    love."_
+
+[Illustration: THE DUCHESS OP TOWERS.]
+
+And just as Madame Seraskier's image was fading away, this new star had
+arisen to guide me by its light, though seen but for a moment; breaking
+once, through a parted cloud, I knew in which portion of the heavens it
+dwelt and shone apart, among the fairest constellations; and ever after
+turned my face that way. Nevermore in my life would I do or say or think
+a mean thing, or an impure, or an unkind one, if I could help it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Next day, as we walked to the Foundling Hospital for divine service,
+Mrs. Lintot severely deigned--under protest, as it were--to
+cross-examine me on the adventures of the evening.
+
+I did not mention the Duchess of Towers, nor was I able to describe the
+different ladies' dresses; but I described everything else in a manner I
+thought calculated to interest her deeply--the flowers, the splendid
+pictures and curtains and cabinets, the beautiful music, the many lords
+and ladies gay.
+
+She disapproved of them all.
+
+Existence on such an opulent scale was unconducive to any qualities of
+real sterling value, either moral or intellectual. Give _her_, for one,
+plain living and high thinking!
+
+"By-the-way," she asked, "what kind of supper did they give you?
+Something extremely _recherche_, I have no doubt. Ortolans,
+nightingales' tongues, pearls dissolved in wine?"
+
+Candor obliged me to confess there had been no supper, or that if there
+had I had managed to miss it. I suggested that perhaps everybody had
+dined late; and all the pearls, I told her, were on the ladies' necks
+and in their hair; and not feeling hungry, I could not wish them
+anywhere else; and the nightingales' tongues were in their throats to
+sing heavenly Italian duets with.
+
+"And they call that hospitality!" exclaimed Lintot, who loved his
+supper; and then, as he was fond of summing up and laying down the law
+when once his wife had given him the lead, he did so to the effect that
+though the great were all very well in their superficial way, and might
+possess many external charms for each other, and for all who were so
+deplorably weak as to fall within the sphere of their attraction, there
+was a gulf between the likes of them and the likes of us, which it would
+be better not to try and bridge if one wished to preserve one's
+independence and one's self-respect; unless, of course, it led to
+business; and this, he feared, it would never do with me.
+
+"They take you up one day and they drop you like a 'ot potato the next;
+and, moreover, my dear Peter," he concluded, affectionately linking his
+arm in mine, as was often his way when we walked together (although he
+was twelve good inches shorter than myself), "inequality of social
+condition is a bar to any real intimacy. It is something like disparity
+of physical stature. One can walk arm in arm only with a man of about
+one's own size."
+
+This summing up seemed so judicious, so incontrovertible, that feeling
+quite deplorably weak enough to fall within the sphere of Lady Cray's
+attraction if I saw much of her, and thereby losing my self-respect, I
+was deplorably weak enough not to leave a card on her after the happy
+evening I had spent at her house.
+
+Snob that I was, I dropped her--"like a 'ot potato" for fear of her
+dropping me.
+
+Besides which I had on my conscience a guilty, snobby feeling that in
+merely external charms at least these fine people were more to my taste
+than the charmed circle of my kind old friends the Lintots, however
+inferior they might be to these (for all that I knew) in sterling
+qualities of the heart and head--just as I found the outer aspect of
+Park Lane and Piccadilly more attractive than that of Pentonville,
+though possibly the latter may have been the more wholesome for such as
+I to live in.
+
+But people who can get Mario and Grisi to come and sing for them (and
+the Duchess of Towers to come and listen); people whose walls are
+covered with beautiful pictures; people for whom the smooth and
+harmonious ordering of all the little external things of social life has
+become a habit and a profession--such people are not to be dropped
+without a pang.
+
+So with a pang I went back to my usual round as though nothing had
+happened; but night and day the face of the Duchess of Towers was ever
+present to me, like a fixed idea that dominates a life.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On reading and rereading these past pages, I find that I have been
+unpardonably egotistic, unconscionably prolix and diffuse; and with such
+small beer to chronicle!
+
+And yet I feel that if I strike out this, I must also strike out that;
+which would lead to my striking out all, in sheer discouragement; and I
+have a tale to tell which is more than worth the telling!
+
+Once having got into the way of it, I suppose, I must have found the
+temptation to talk about myself irresistible.
+
+It is evidently a habit easy to acquire, even in old age--perhaps
+especially in old age, for it has never been my habit through life. I
+would sooner have talked to you about yourself, reader, or about you to
+somebody else--your friend, or even your enemy; or about them to you.
+
+But, indeed, at present, and until I die, I am without a soul to talk to
+about anybody or anything worth speaking of, so that most of my talking
+is done in pen and ink--a one-sided conversation, O patient reader, with
+yourself. I am the most lonely old man in the world, although perhaps
+the happiest.
+
+Still, it is not always amusing where I live, cheerfully awaiting my
+translation to another sphere.
+
+There is the good chaplain, it is true, and the good priest; who talk to
+me about myself a little too much, methinks; and the doctor, who talks
+to me about the priest and the chaplain, which is better. He does not
+seem to like them. He is a very witty man.
+
+But, my brother maniacs!
+
+They are lamentably _comme tout le monde_, after all. They are only
+interesting when the mad fit seizes them. When free from their awful
+complaint they are for the most part very common mortals: conventional
+Philistines, dull dogs like myself, and dull dogs do not like
+each other.
+
+Two of the most sensible (one a forger, the other a kleptomaniac on an
+important scale) are friends of mine. They are fairly well educated,
+respectable city men, clean, solemn, stodgy, punctilious, and resigned,
+but they are both unhappy; not because they are cursed with the double
+brand of madness and crime, and have forfeited their freedom in
+consequence; but because they find there are so few "ladies and
+gentlemen" in a criminal lunatic asylum, and they have always been used
+to "the society of ladies and gentlemen." Were it not for this, they
+would be well content to live here. And each is in the habit of
+confiding to me that he considers the other a very high-minded,
+trustworthy fellow, and all that, but not altogether "quite a
+gentleman." I do not know what they consider me; they probably confide
+that to each other.
+
+Can anything be less odd, less eccentric or interesting?
+
+Another, when quite sane, speaks English with a French accent and
+demonstrative French gestures, and laments the lost glories of the old
+French regime, and affects to forget the simplest English words. He
+doesn't know a word of French, however. But when his madness comes on,
+and he is put into a strait-waistcoat, all his English comes back, and
+very strong, fluent, idiomatic English it is, of the cockneyest kind,
+with all its "h's" duly transposed.
+
+Another (the most unpleasant and ugliest person here) has chosen me for
+the confidant of his past amours; he gives me the names and dates and
+all. The less I listen the more he confides. He makes me sick. What can
+I do to prevent his believing that I believe him? I am tired of killing
+people for lying about women. If I call him a liar and a cad, it may
+wake in him Heaven knows what dormant frenzy--for I am quite in the dark
+as to the nature of his mental infirmity.
+
+Another, a weak but amiable and well-intentioned youth, tries to think
+that he is passionately fond of music; but he is so exclusive, if you
+please, that he can only endure Bach and Beethoven, and when he hears
+Mendelssohn or Chopin, is obliged to leave the room. If I want to please
+him I whistle "Le Bon Roi Dagobert," and tell him it is the _motif_ of
+one of Bach's fugues; and to get rid of him I whistle it again and tell
+him it is one of Chopin's impromptus. What his madness is I can never be
+quite sure, for he is very close, but have heard that he is fond of
+roasting cats alive; and that the mere sight of a cat is enough to rouse
+his terrible propensity, and drive all wholesome, innocent, harmless,
+natural affectation out of his head.
+
+There is a painter here who (like others one has met outside) believes
+himself the one living painter worthy of the name. Indeed, he has
+forgotten the names of all the others, and can only despise and abuse
+them in the lump. He triumphantly shows you his own work, which consists
+of just the kind of crude, half-clever, irresponsible, impressionist
+daubs you would expect from an amateur who talks in that way; and you
+wonder why on earth he should be in a lunatic asylum, of all places in
+the world. And (just as would happen outside, again) some of his
+fellow-sufferers take him at his own valuation and believe him a great
+genius; some of them want to kick him for an impudent impostor (but that
+he is so small); and the majority do not care.
+
+His mania is arson, poor fellow; and when the terrible wish comes over
+him to set the place on fire he forgets his artistic conceit, and his
+mean, weak, silly face becomes almost grand.
+
+And with the female inmates it is just the same. There is a lady who has
+spent twenty years of her life here. Her father was a small country
+doctor, called Snogget; her husband an obscure, hard-working curate; and
+she is absolutely normal, common-place, and even vulgar. For her hobby
+is to discourse of well-born and titled people and county families, with
+whom (and with no others) it has always been her hope and desire to mix;
+and is still, though her hair is nearly white, and she is still here.
+She thinks and talks and cares about nothing else but "smart people,"
+and has conceived a very warm regard for me, on account of
+Lieutenant-colonel Ibbetson, of Ibbetson Hall, Hopshire; not because I
+killed him and was sentenced to be hanged for it, or because he was a
+greater criminal than I (all of which is interesting enough); but
+because he was my relative, and that through him I must be distantly
+connected, she thinks, with the Ibbetsons of Lechmere--whoever they may
+be, and whom neither she nor I have ever met (indeed, I had never heard
+of them), but whose family history she knows almost by heart. What can
+be tamer, duller, more prosaic, more sordidly humdrum, more hopelessly
+sane, more characteristic of common, under-bred, provincial
+feminine cackle?
+
+And yet this woman, in a fit of conjugal jealousy, murdered her own
+children; and her father went mad in consequence, and her husband cut
+his throat.
+
+In fact, during their lucid intervals it would never enter one's mind
+that they were mad at all, they are so absolutely like the people one
+meets every day in the world--such narrow-minded idiots, such deadly
+bores! One might as well be back in Pentonville or Hopshire again, or
+live in Passionate Brompton (as I am told it is called); or even in
+Belgravia, for that matter!
+
+For we have a young lord and a middle-aged baronet--a shocking pair, who
+should not be allowed to live; but for family influence they would be
+doing their twenty years' penal servitude in jail, instead of living
+comfortably sequestered here. Like Ouida's high-born heroes, they "stick
+to their order," and do not mingle with the rest of us. They ignore us
+so completely that we cannot help looking up to them in spite of their
+vices--just as we should do outside.
+
+And we, of the middle class, we stick to our order, too, and do not
+mingle with the small shop-keepers--who do not mingle with the laborers,
+artisans, and mechanics--who (alas, for them!) have nobody to look down
+upon but each other--but they do not; and are the best-bred people in
+the place.
+
+Such are we! It is only when our madness is upon us that we cease to be
+commonplace, and wax tragical and great, or else original and grotesque
+and humorous, with that true deep humor that compels both our laughter
+and our tears, and leaves us older, sadder, and wiser than it found us.
+
+"_Sunt lacrimae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt_."
+
+(So much, if little more, can I recall of the benign Virgil.)
+
+And now to my small beer again, which will have more of a head to it
+henceforward.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thus did I pursue my solitary way, like Bryant's Water-fowl, only with a
+less definite purpose before me--till at last there dawned for me an
+ever-memorable Saturday in June.
+
+I had again saved up enough money to carry my long longed-for journey to
+Paris into execution. The _Seine's_ boiler got up its steam, the
+_Seine's_ white awning was put up for me as well as others; and on a
+beautiful cloudless English morning I stood by the man at the wheel, and
+saw St. Paul's and London Bridge and the Tower fade out of sight; with
+what hope and joy I cannot describe. I almost forgot that I was me!
+
+And next morning (a beautiful French morning) how I exulted as I went up
+the Champs Elysees and passed under the familiar Arc de Triomphe on my
+way to the Rue de la Pompe, Passy, and heard all around the familiar
+tongue that I still knew so well, and rebreathed the long-lost and
+half-forgotten, but now keenly remembered, fragrance of the _genius
+loci_; that vague, light, indescribable, almost imperceptible scent of a
+place, that is so heavenly laden with the past for those who have lived
+there long ago--the most subtly intoxicating ether that can be!
+
+When I came to the meeting of the Rue de la Tour and the Rue de la
+Pompe, and, looking in at the grocer's shop at the corner, I recognized
+the handsome mustachioed groceress, Madame Liard (whose mustache twelve
+prosperous years had turned gray), I was almost faint with emotion. Had
+any youth been ever so moved by that face before?
+
+There, behind the window (which was now of plate-glass), and among
+splendid Napoleonic wares of a later day, were the same old India-rubber
+balls in colored net-work; the same quivering lumps of fresh paste in
+brown paper, that looked so cool and tempting; the same three-sou boxes
+of water-colors (now marked seventy-five centimes), of which I had
+consumed so many in the service of Mimsey Seraskier! I went in and
+bought one, and resmelt with delight the smell of all my by-gone
+dealings there, and received her familiar sounding--
+
+"Merci, monsieur! faudrait-il autre chose?" as if it had been a
+blessing; but I was too shy to throw myself into her arms and tell her
+that I was the "lone, wandering, but not lost" Gogo Pasquier. She might
+have said--
+
+"Eh bien, et apres?"
+
+The day had begun well.
+
+Like an epicure, I deliberated whether I should walk to the old gate in
+the Rue de la Pompe, and up the avenue and back to our old garden, or
+make my way round to the gap in the park hedge that we had worn of old
+by our frequent passage in and out, to and from the Bois de Boulogne.
+
+I chose the latter as, on the whole, the more promising in exquisite
+gradations of delight.
+
+The gap in the park hedge, indeed! The park hedge had disappeared, the
+very park itself was gone, cut up, demolished, all parcelled out into
+small gardens, with trim white villas, except where a railway ran
+through a deep cutting in the chalk. A train actually roared and panted
+by, and choked me with its filthy steam as I looked round in
+stupefaction on the ruins of my long-cherished hope.
+
+If that train had run over me and I had survived it, it could not have
+given me a greater shock; it all seemed too cruel and brutal an outrage.
+
+A winding carriage-road had been pierced through the very heart of the
+wilderness; and on this, neatly-paled little brand-new gardens abutted,
+and in these I would recognize, here and there, an old friend in the
+shape of some well-remembered tree that I had often climbed as a boy,
+and which had been left standing out of so many, but so changed by the
+loss of its old surroundings that it had a tame, caged, transplanted
+look--almost apologetic, and as if ashamed of being found out at last!
+
+Nothing else remained. Little hills and cliffs and valleys and
+chalk-pits that had once seemed big had been levelled up, or away, and I
+lost my bearings altogether, and felt a strange, creeping chill of
+blankness and bereavement.
+
+But how about the avenue and my old home? I hastened back to the Rue de
+la Pompe with the quick step of aroused anxiety. The avenue was
+gone--blocked within a dozen yards of the gate by a huge brick building
+covered with newly-painted trellis-work! My old house was no more, but
+in its place a much larger and smarter edifice of sculptured stone. The
+old gate at least had not disappeared, nor the porter's lodge; and I
+feasted my sorrowful eyes on these poor remains, that looked snubbed
+and shabby and out of place in the midst of all this new splendor.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Presently a smart concierge, with a beautiful pink ribboned cap, came
+out and stared at me for a while, and inquired if monsieur
+desired anything.
+
+I could not speak.
+
+"Est-ce que monsieur est indispose? Cette chaleur! Monsieur ne parle pas
+le Francais, peut-etre?"
+
+When I found my tongue I explained to her that I had once lived there in
+a modest house overlooking the street, but which had been replaced by
+this much more palatial abode.
+
+"O, oui, monsieur--on a balaye tout ca!" she replied.
+
+"Balaye!" What an expression for _me_ to hear!
+
+And she explained how the changes had taken place, and how valuable the
+property had become. She showed me a small plot of garden, a fragment of
+my old garden, that still remained, and where the old apple-tree might
+still have been, but that it had been sawed away. I saw the stump; that
+did duty for a rustic table.
+
+Presently, looking over a new wall, I saw another small garden,
+and in it the ruins of the old shed where I had found the toy
+wheelbarrow--soon to disappear, as they were building there too.
+
+I asked after all the people I could think of, beginning with those of
+least interest--the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker.
+
+Some were dead; some had retired and had left their "commerce" to their
+children and children-in-law. Three different school-masters had kept
+the school since I had left. Thank Heaven, there was still the
+school--much altered, it is true. I had forgotten to look for it.
+
+[Illustration: THE OLD APPLE-TREE.]
+
+She had no remembrance of my name, or the Seraskiers'--I asked, with a
+beating heart. We had left no trace. Twelve short years had effaced all
+memory of us! But she told me that a gentleman, _decore, mais tombe en
+enfance_, lived at a _maison de sante_ in the Chaussee de la Muette,
+close by, and that his name was le Major Duquesnois; and thither I
+went, after rewarding and warmly thanking her.
+
+I inquired for le Major Duquesnois, and I was told he was out for a
+walk, and I soon found him, much aged and bent, and leaning on the arm
+of a Sister of Charity. I was so touched that I had to pass him two or
+three times before I could speak. He was so small--so pathetically small!
+
+[Illustration: M. LE MAJOR.]
+
+It was a long time before I could give him an idea of who I was--Gogo
+Pasquier!
+
+Then after a while he seemed to recall the past a little.
+
+"Ha, ha! Gogo--gentil petit Gogo!--oui--oui--l'exercice? Portez ...
+arrrmes! arrmes ... bras? Et Mimse? bonne petite Mimse! toujours mal
+a la tete?"
+
+He could just remember Madame Seraskier; and repeated her name several
+times and said, "Ah! elle etait bien belle, Madame Seraskier!"
+
+In the old days of fairy-tale telling, when he used to get tired and I
+still wanted him to go on, he had arranged that if, in the course of the
+story, he suddenly brought in the word "Cric," and I failed to
+immediately answer "Crac," the story would be put off till our next walk
+(to be continued in our next!) and he was so ingenious in the way he
+brought in the terrible word that I often fell into the trap, and had to
+forego my delight for that afternoon.
+
+I suddenly thought of saying "Cric!" and he immediately said "Crac!" and
+laughed in a touching, senile way--"Cric!--Crac! c'est bien ca!" and
+then he became quite serious and said--
+
+"Et la suite au prochain numero!"
+
+After this he began to cough, and the good Sister said--
+
+"Je crains que monsieur ne le fatigue un peu!"
+
+So I had to bid him good-bye; and after I had squeezed and kissed his
+hand, he made me a most courtly bow, as though I had been a
+complete stranger.
+
+I rushed away, tossing up my arms like a madman in my pity and sorrow
+for my dear old friend, and my general regret and disenchantment. I
+made for the Bois de Boulogne, there to find, instead of the old
+rabbit-and-roebuck-haunted thickets and ferneries and impenetrable
+growth, a huge artificial lake, with row-boats and skiffs, and a rockery
+that would have held its own in Rosherville gardens. And on the way
+thither, near the iron gates in the fortifications, whom should I meet
+but one of my friends the couriers, on his way from St. Cloud to the
+Tuileries! There he rode with his arms jogging up and down, and his low
+glazed hat, and his immense jack-boots, just the same as ever, never
+rising in his stirrups, as his horse trotted to the jingle of the sweet
+little chime round its neck.
+
+[Illustration: GREEN AND GOLD]
+
+Alas! his coat was no longer the innocent, unsophisticated blue and
+silver livery of the bourgeois king, but the hateful green and gold of
+another regime.
+
+Farther on the Mare d'Auteuil itself had suffered change and become
+respectable--imperially respectable. No more frogs or newts or
+water-beetles, I felt sure; but gold and silver fish in vulgar
+Napoleonic profusion.
+
+No words that I can find would give any idea of the sadness and longing
+that filled me as I trod once more that sunlit grassy brink--the goal of
+my fond ambition for twelve long years.
+
+It was Sunday, and many people were about--many children, in their best
+Sunday clothes and on their best behavior, discreetly throwing crumbs to
+the fish. A new generation, much quieter and better dressed than my
+cousins and I, who had once so filled the solitude with the splashing of
+our nets, and the excited din of our English voices.
+
+As I sat down on a bench by the old willow (where the rat lived), and
+gazed and gazed, it almost surprised me that the very intensity of my
+desire did not of itself suffice to call up the old familiar faces and
+forms, and conjure away these modern intruders. The power to do this
+seemed almost within my reach; I willed and willed and willed with all
+my might, but in vain; I could not cheat my sight or hearing for a
+moment. There they remained, unconscious and undisturbed, those happy,
+well-mannered, well-appointed little French people, and fed the gold and
+silver fish; and there, with an aching heart, I left them.
+
+Oh, surely, surely, I cried to myself, we ought to find some means of
+possessing the past more fully and completely than we do. Life is not
+worth living for many of us if a want so desperate and yet so natural
+can never be satisfied. Memory is but a poor, rudimentary thing that we
+had better be without, if it can only lead us to the verge of
+consummation like this, and madden us with a desire it cannot slake. The
+touch of a vanished hand, the sound of a voice that is still, the tender
+grace of a day that is dead, should be ours forever, at out beck and
+call, by some exquisite and quite conceivable illusion of the senses.
+
+Alas! alas! I have hardly the hope of ever meeting my beloved ones again
+in another life. Oh, to meet their too dimly remembered forms in _this_,
+just as they once were, by some trick of my own brain! To see them with
+the eye, and hear them with the ear, and tread with them the old
+obliterated ways as in a waking dream! It would be well worth going mad
+to become such a self-conjurer as that.
+
+Thus musing sadly, I reached St. Cloud, and _that_, at least, and the
+Boulogne that led me to it, had not been very perceptibly altered, and
+looked as though I had only left them a week ago. The sweet aspect from
+the bridge, on either side and beyond, filled me with the old
+enchantment. There, at least, the glory had not departed.
+
+I hastened through the gilded gates and up the broad walk to the grand
+cascade. There, among the lovely wreathed urns and jars of geranium,
+still sat or reclined or gesticulated, the old, unalterable gods; there
+squatted the grimly genial monsters in granite and marble and bronze,
+still spouting their endless gallons for the delectation of hot Parisian
+eyes. Unchanged, and to all appearance unchangeable (save that they were
+not nearly so big as I had imagined), their cold, smooth, ironical
+patience shamed and braced me into better cheer. Beautiful, hideous,
+whatever you please, they seemed to revel in the very sense of their
+insensibility of their eternal stability--their stony scorn of time and
+wind and weather, and the peevish, weak-kneed, short-lived discontent of
+man. It was good to fondly pat them on the back once more--when one
+could reach them--and cling to them for a little while, after all the
+dust and drift and ruin I had been tramping through all day.
+
+Indeed, they woke in me a healthy craving for all but forgotten earthly
+joys--even for wretched meat and drink--so I went and ordered a
+sumptuous repast at the Tete Noire--a brand-new Tete Noire, alas! quite
+white, all in stone and stucco, and without a history!
+
+It was a beautiful sunset. Waiting for my dinner, I gazed out of the
+first-floor window, and found balm for my disappointed and regretful
+spirit in all that democratic joyousness of French Sunday life. I had
+seen it over and over again just like that in the old days; _this_, at
+least, was like coming back home to something I had known and loved.
+
+The cafes on the little "Place" between the bridge and the park were
+full to overflowing. People chatting over their _consommations_ sat
+right out, almost into the middle of the square, so thickly packed that
+there was scarcely room for the busy, lively, white-aproned waiters to
+move between them. The air was full of the scent of trodden grass and
+macaroons and French tobacco, blown from the park; of gay French
+laughter and the music of _mirlitons_; of a light dusty haze, shot with
+purple and gold by the setting sun. The river, alive with boats and
+canoes, repeated the glory of the sky, and the well-remembered,
+thickly-wooded hills rose before me, culminating in the Lanterne
+de Diogene.
+
+I could have threaded all that maze of trees blindfolded.
+
+Two Roman pifferari came on to the Place and began to play an
+extraordinary and most exciting melody that almost drew me out of the
+window; it seemed to have no particular form, no beginning or middle or
+end; it went soaring higher and higher, like the song of a lark, with
+never a pause for breath, to the time of a maddening jig--a tarantella,
+perhaps--always on the strain and stress, always getting nearer and
+nearer to some shrill climax of ecstasy quite high up and away, beyond
+the scope of earthly music; while the persistent drone kept buzzing of
+the earth and the impossibility to escape. All so gay, so sad, there is
+no name for it!
+
+Two little deformed and discarded-looking dwarfs, beggars, brother and
+sister, with large toothless gaps for mouths and no upper lip, began to
+dance; and the crowd laughed and applauded. Higher and higher, nearer
+and nearer to the impossible, rose the quick, piercing notes of the
+piffero. Heaven seemed almost within reach--the nirvana of music after
+its quick madness--the region of the ultra-treble that lies beyond
+the ken of ordinary human ears!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+A carriage and four, with postilions and "guides," came clattering
+royally down the road from the palace, and dispersed the crowd as it
+bowled on its way to the bridge. In it were two ladies and two
+gentlemen. One of the ladies was the young Empress of the French; the
+other looked up at my window--for a moment, as in a soft flash of summer
+lightning, her face seemed ablaze with friendly recognition--with a
+sweet glance of kindness and interest and surprise--a glance that
+pierced me like a sudden shaft of light from heaven.
+
+It was the Duchess of Towers!
+
+I felt as though the bagpipes had been leading up to this! In a moment
+more the carriage was out of sight, the sun had quite gone down, the
+pifferari had ceased to play and were walking round with the hat, and
+all was over.
+
+I dined, and made my way back to Paris on foot through the Bois de
+Boulogne, and by the Mare d'Auteuil, and saw my old friend the water-rat
+swim across it, trailing the gleam of his wake after him like a silver
+comet's tail.
+
+"Allons-nous-en, gens de la nous!
+Allons-nous-en chacun chez nous!"
+
+So sang a festive wedding-party as it went merrily
+arm in arm through the long high street of Passy,
+with a gleeful trust that would have filled the heart
+with envy but for sad experience of the vanity of
+human wishes.
+
+_Chacun chez nous!_ How charming it sounds!
+
+Was each so sure that when he reached his home
+he would find his heart's desire? Was the bridegroom
+himself so very sure?
+
+[Illustration: THE OLD WATER-RAT.]
+
+The heart's desire--the heart's regret! I flattered
+myself that I had pretty well sounded the uttermost
+depths of both on that eventful Sunday!
+
+
+
+
+Part Four
+
+[Illustration]
+
+I got back to my hotel in the Rue de la Michodiere.
+
+Prostrate with emotion and fatigue, the tarantella still jingling in my
+ears, and that haunting, beloved face, with its ineffable smile still
+printed on the retina of my closed eyes, I fell asleep.
+
+And then I dreamed a dream, and the first phase of my real, inner life
+began!
+
+All the events of the day, distorted and exaggerated and jumbled
+together after the usual manner of dreams, wove themselves into a kind
+of nightmare and oppression. I was on my way to my old abode: everything
+that I met or saw was grotesque and impossible, yet had now the strange,
+vague charm of association and reminiscence, now the distressing sense
+of change and loss and desolation.
+
+As I got near to the avenue gate, instead of the school on my left there
+was a prison; and at the door a little thick-set jailer, three feet high
+and much deformed, and a little deformed jaileress no bigger than
+himself, were cunningly watching me out of the corners of their eyes,
+and toothlessly smiling. Presently they began to waltz together to an
+old, familiar tune, with their enormous keys dangling at their sides;
+and they looked so funny that I laughed and applauded. But soon I
+perceived that their crooked faces were not really funny; indeed, they
+were fatal and terrible in the extreme, and I was soon conscious that
+these deadly dwarfs were trying to waltz between me and the avenue gate
+for which I was bound--to cut me off, that they might run me into the
+prison, where it was their custom to hang people of a Monday morning.
+
+In an agony of terror I made a rush for the avenue gate, and there stood
+the Duchess of Towers, with mild surprise in her eyes and a kind
+smile--a heavenly vision of strength and reality.
+
+"You are not dreaming true!" she said. "Don't be afraid--those little
+people don't exist! Give me your hand and come in here."
+
+And as I did so she waved the troglodytes away, and they vanished; and
+I felt that this was no longer a dream, but something else--some strange
+thing that had happened to me, some new life that I had woke up to.
+
+For at the touch of her hand my consciousness, my sense of being I,
+myself, which hitherto in my dream (as in all previous dreams up to
+then) had been only partial, intermittent, and vague, suddenly blazed
+into full, consistent, practical activity--just as it is in life, when
+one is well awake and much interested in what is going on--only with
+perceptions far keener and more alert.
+
+I knew perfectly who I was and what I was, and remembered all the events
+of the previous day. I was conscious that my real body, undressed and in
+bed, now lay fast asleep in a small room on the fourth floor of an
+_hotel garni_ in the Rue de la Michodiere. I knew this perfectly; and
+yet here was my body, too, just as substantial, with all my clothes on;
+my boots rather dusty, my shirt-collar damp with the heat, for it was
+hot. With my disengaged hand I felt in my trousers-pocket; there were my
+London latch-keys, my purse, my penknife; my handkerchief in the
+breastpocket of my coat, and in its tail-pockets my gloves and
+pipe-case, and the little water-color box I had bought that morning. I
+looked at my watch; it was going, and marked eleven. I pinched myself, I
+coughed, I did all one usually does under the pressure of some immense
+surprise, to assure myself that I was awake; and I _was_, and yet here I
+stood, actually hand in hand with a great lady to whom I had never been
+introduced (and who seemed much tickled at my confusion); and staring
+now at her, now at my old school.
+
+The prison had tumbled down like a house of cards, and loi! in its place
+was M. Saindou's _maison d'education_, just as it had been of old. I
+even recognized on the yellow wall the stamp of a hand in dry mud, made
+fifteen years ago by a day boy called Parisot, who had fallen down in
+the gutter close by, and thus left his mark on getting up again; and it
+had remained there for months, till it had been whitewashed away in the
+holidays. Here it was anew, after fifteen years.
+
+The swallows were flying and twittering. A yellow omnibus was drawn up
+to the gates of the school; the horses stamped and neighed, and bit each
+other, as French horses always did in those days. The driver swore at
+them perfunctorily.
+
+A crowd was looking on--le Pere et la Mere Francois, Madame Liard, the
+grocer's wife, and other people, whom I remembered at once with delight.
+Just in front of us a small boy and girl were looking on, like the rest,
+and I recognized the back and the cropped head and thin legs of Mimsey
+Seraskier.
+
+A barrel-organ was playing a pretty tune I knew quite well, and had
+forgotten.
+
+The school gates opened, and M. Saindou, proud and full of
+self-importance (as he always was), and half a dozen boys whose faces
+and names were quite familiar to me, in smart white trousers and shining
+boots, and silken white bands round their left arms, got into the
+omnibus, and were driven away in a glorified manner--as it seemed--to
+heaven in a golden chariot. It was beautiful to see and hear.
+
+I was still holding the duchess's hand, and felt the warmth of it
+through her glove; it stole up my arm like a magnetic current. I was in
+Elysium; a heavenly sense had come over me that at last my periphery had
+been victoriously invaded by a spirit other than mine--a most powerful
+and beneficent spirit. There was a blessed fault in my impenetrable
+armor of self, after all, and the genius of strength and charity and
+loving-kindness had found it out.
+
+"Now you're dreaming true," she said. "Where are those boys going?"
+
+"To church, to make their _premiere communion_," I replied.
+
+"That's right. You're dreaming true because I've got you by the hand. Do
+you know that tune?"
+
+I listened, and the words belonging to it came out of the past and I
+said them to her, and she laughed again, with her eyes screwed up
+deliciously.
+
+"Quite right--quite!" she exclaimed. "How odd that you should know them!
+How well you pronounce French for an Englishman! For you are Mr.
+Ibbetson, Lady Cray's architect?"
+
+I assented, and she let go my hand.
+
+The street was full of people--familiar forms and faces and voices,
+chatting together and looking down the road after the yellow omnibus;
+old attitudes, old tricks of gait and manner, old forgotten French ways
+of speech--all as it was long ago. Nobody noticed us, and we walked up
+the now deserted avenue.
+
+The happiness, the enchantment of it all! Could it be that I was dead,
+that I had died suddenly in my sleep, at the hotel in the Rue de la
+Michodiere! Could it be that the Duchess of Towers was dead too--had
+been killed by some accident on her way from St. Cloud to Paris? and
+that, both having died so near each other, we had begun our eternal
+afterlife in this heavenly fashion?
+
+That was too good to be true, I reflected; some instinct told me that
+this was not death, but transcendent earthly life--and also, alas! that
+it would not endure forever!
+
+I was deeply conscious of every feature in her face, every movement of
+her body, every detail of her dress--more so then I could have been in
+actual life--and said to myself, "Whatever this is, it is no dream." But
+I felt there was about me the unspeakable elation which can come to us
+only in our waking moments when we are at our very best; and then only
+feebly, in comparison with this, and to many of us never, ft never had
+to me, since that morning when I had found the little wheelbarrow.
+
+I was also conscious, however, that the avenue itself had a slight touch
+of the dream in it. It was no longer quite right, and was getting out of
+drawing and perspective, so to speak. I had lost my stay--the touch
+of her hand.
+
+"Are you still dreaming true, Mr. Ibbetson?"
+
+"I am afraid not quite," I replied.
+
+"You must try by yourself a little--try hard. Look at this house; what
+is written on the portico?"
+
+I saw written in gold letters the words, "Tete Noire," and said so.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+She rippled with laughter, and said, "No; try again"; and just touched
+me with the tip of her finger for a moment.
+
+I tried again and said, "Parvis Notre Dame."
+
+"That's rather better," she said, and touched me again; and I read,
+"Parva sed Apta," as I had so often read there before in old days.
+
+"And now look at that old house over there," pointing to my old home;
+"how many windows are there in the top story?"
+
+I said seven.
+
+"No; there are five. Look again!" and there were five; and the whole
+house was exactly, down to its minutest detail, as it had been once upon
+a time. I could see Therese through one of the windows, making my bed.
+
+"That's better," said the duchess; "you will soon do it--it's very
+easy--_ce n'est que le premier pas!_ My father taught me; you must
+always sleep on your back with your arms above your head, your hands
+clasped under it and your feet crossed, the right one over the left,
+unless you are left-handed; and you must never for a moment cease
+thinking of where you want to be in your dream till you are asleep and
+get there; and you must never forget in your dream where and what you
+were when awake. You must join the dream on to reality. Don't forget.
+And now I will say good-bye; but before I go give me both hands and look
+round everywhere as far as your eyes can see."
+
+It was hard to look away from her; her face drew my eyes, and through
+them all my heart; but I did as she told me, and took in the whole
+familiar scene, even to the distant woods of Ville d'Avray, a glimpse
+of which was visible through an opening in the trees; even to the smoke
+of a train making its way to Versailles, miles off; and the old
+telegraph, working its black arms on the top of Mont Valerien.
+
+[Illustration: "It was hard to look away from her."]
+
+"Is it all right?" she asked. "That's well. Henceforward, whenever you
+come here, you will be safe as far as your sight can reach--from this
+spot--all through my introduction. See what it is to have a friend at
+court! No more little dancing jailers! And then you can gradually get
+farther by yourself.
+
+"Out there, through that park, leads to the Bois de Boulogne--there's a
+gap in the hedge you can get through; but mind and make everything plain
+in front of you--_true_, before you go a step farther, or else you'll
+have to wake and begin it all over again. You have only to will it, and
+think of yourself as awake, and it will come--on condition, of course,
+that you have been there before. And mind, also, you must take care how
+you touch things or people--you may hear, and see, and smell; but you
+mustn't touch, nor pick flowers or leaves, nor move things about. It
+blurs the dream, like breathing on a window-pane. I don't know why, but
+it does. You must remember that everything here is dead and gone by.
+With you and me it is different; we're alive and real--that is, _I_ am;
+and there would seem to be no mistake about your being real too, Mr.
+Ibbetson, by the grasp of your hands. But you're _not_; and why you are
+here, and what business you have in this, my particular dream, I cannot
+understand; no living person has ever come into it before. I can't make
+it out. I suppose it's because I saw your reality this afternoon,
+looking out of the window at the 'Tete Noire,' and you are just a stray
+figment of my overtired brain--a very agreeable figment, I admit; but
+you don't exist here just now--you can't possibly; you are somewhere
+else, Mr. Ibbetson; dancing at Mabille, perhaps, or fast asleep
+somewhere, and dreaming of French churches and palaces, and public
+fountains, like a good young British architect--otherwise I shouldn't
+talk to you like this, you may be sure!
+
+"Never mind. I am very glad to dream that I have been of use to you, and
+you are very welcome here, if it amuses you to come--especially as you
+are only a false dream of mine, for what else _can_ you be? And now I
+must leave you, so good-bye."
+
+She disengaged her hands, and laughed her angelic laugh, and then
+turned towards the park. I watched her tall, straight figure and blowing
+skirts, and saw her follow some ladies and children into a thicket that
+I remembered well, and she was soon out of sight.
+
+I felt as if all warmth had gone out of my life; as if a joy had taken
+flight; as if a precious something had withdrawn itself from my
+possession, and the gap in my periphery had closed again.
+
+Long I stood in thought, with my eyes fixed on the spot where she had
+disappeared; and I felt inclined to follow, but then considered this
+would not have been discreet. For although she was only a false dream of
+mine, a mere recollection of the exciting and eventful day, a stray
+figment of my overtired and excited brain--a _more_ than agreeable
+figment (what else _could_ she be!)--she was also a great lady, and had
+treated me, a perfect stranger and a perfect nobody, with singular
+courtesy and kindness; which I repaid, it is true, with a love so deep
+and strong that my very life was hers, to do what she liked with, and
+always had been since I first saw her, and always would be as long as
+there was breath in my body! But this did not constitute an acquaintance
+without a proper introduction, even in France--even in a dream. Even in
+dreams one must be polite, even to stray figments of one's tired,
+sleeping brain.
+
+And then what business had _she_, in _this_, _my_ particular dream--as
+she herself had asked of me?
+
+But _was_ it a dream? I remembered my lodgings at Pentonville, that I
+had left yesterday morning. I remembered what I was--why I came to
+Paris; I remembered the very bedroom at the Paris hotel where I was now
+fast asleep, its loudly-ticking clock, and all the meagre furniture. And
+here was I, broad awake and conscious, in the middle of an old avenue
+that had long ceased to exist--that had been built over by a huge brick
+edifice covered with newly-painted trellis-work. I saw it, this edifice,
+myself, only twelve hours ago. And yet here was everything as it had
+been when I was a child; and all through the agency of this solid
+phantom of a lovely young English duchess, whose warm gloved hands I had
+only this minute been holding in mine! The scent of her gloves was still
+in my palm. I looked at my watch; it marked twenty-three minutes to
+twelve. All this had happened in less than three-quarters of an hour!
+
+Pondering over all this in hopeless bewilderment, I turned my steps
+towards my old home, and, to my surprise, was just able to look over the
+garden wall, which I had once thought about ten feet high.
+
+Under the old apple-tree in full bloom sat my mother, darning small
+socks; with her flaxen side-curls (as it was her fashion to wear them)
+half-concealing her face. My emotion and astonishment were immense. My
+heart beat fast. I felt its pulse in my temples, and my breath
+was short.
+
+At a little green table that I remembered well sat a small boy, rather
+quaintly dressed in a by-gone fashion, with a frill round his wide
+shirt-collar, and his golden hair cut quite close at the top, and rather
+long at the sides and back. It was Gogo Pasquier. He seemed a very nice
+little boy. He had pen and ink and copy-book before him, and a
+gilt-edged volume bound in red morocco. I knew it at a glance; it was
+_Elegant Extracts_. The dog Medor lay asleep in the shade. The bees
+were droning among the nasturtiums and convolvulus.
+
+A little girl ran up the avenue from the porter's lodge and pushed the
+garden gate, which rang the bell as it opened, and she went into the
+garden, and I followed her; but she took no notice of me, nor did the
+others. It was Mimsey Seraskier.
+
+I went out and sat at my mother's feet, and looked long in her face.
+
+I must not speak to her, nor touch her--not even touch her busy hand
+with my lips, or I should "blur the dream."
+
+I got up and looked over the boy Gogo's shoulder. He was translating
+Gray's _Elegy_ into French; he had not got very far, and seemed to be
+stumped by the line--
+
+_"And leaves the world to darkness and to me."_
+
+Mimsey was silently looking over his other shoulder, her thumb in her
+mouth, one arm on the back of his chair. She seemed to be stumped also:
+it was an awkward line to translate.
+
+I stooped and put my hand to Medor's nose, and felt his warm breath. He
+wagged his rudiment of a tail, and whimpered in his sleep. Mimsey said--
+
+"Regarde Medor, comme il remue la queue! _C'est le Prince Charmant qui
+lui chatouille le bout du nez._"
+
+Said my mother, who had not spoken hitherto: "Do speak English, Mimsey,
+please."
+
+Oh, my God! My mother's voice, so forgotten, yet so familiar, so
+unutterably dear! I rushed to her, and threw myself on my knees at her
+feet, and seized her hand and kissed it, crying, "Mother, mother!"
+
+A strange blur came over everything; the sense of reality was lost. All
+became as a dream--a beautiful dream--but only a dream; and I woke.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I woke in my small hotel bedroom, and saw all the furniture, and my hat
+and clothes, by the light of a lamp outside, and heard the ticking of
+the clock on the mantel-piece, and the rumbling of a cart and cracking
+of a whip in the street, and yet felt I was not a bit more awake than I
+had been a minute ago in my strange vision--not so much!
+
+I heard my watch ticking its little tick on the mantel-piece by the side
+of the clock, like a pony trotting by a big horse. The clock struck
+twelve, I got up and looked at my watch by the light of the gas-lit
+streets; it marked the same. My dream had lasted an hour--I had gone to
+bed at half-past ten.
+
+I tried to recall it all, and did so to the smallest particular--all
+except the tune the organ had played, and the words belonging to it;
+they were on the tip of my tongue, and refused to come further, I got up
+again and walked about the room, and felt that it had not been like a
+dream at all; it was more "recollectable" than all my real adventures of
+the previous day. It had ceased to be like a dream, and had become an
+actuality from the moment I first touched the duchess's hand to the
+moment I kissed my mother's, and the blur came. It was an entirely new
+and utterly bewildering experience that I had gone through.
+
+In a dream there are always breaks, inconsistencies, lapses,
+incoherence, breaches of continuity, many links missing in the chain;
+only at points is the impression vivid enough to stamp itself afterwards
+on the waking mind, and even then it is never so really vivid as the
+impression of real life, although it ought to have seemed so in the
+dream: One remembers it well on awaking, but soon it fades, and then it
+is only one's remembrance of it that one remembers.
+
+[Illustration: "MOTHER, MOTHER!"]
+
+There was nothing of this in my dream.
+
+It was something like the "camera-obscura" on Ramsgate pier: one goes
+in and finds one's self in total darkness; the eye is prepared; one is
+thoroughly expectant and wide-awake.
+
+Suddenly there flashes on the sight the moving picture of the port and
+all the life therein, and the houses and cliffs beyond; and farther
+still the green hills, the white clouds, and blue sky.
+
+Little green waves chase each other in the harbor, breaking into crisp
+white foam. Sea-gulls wheel and dash and dip behind masts and ropes and
+pulleys; shiny brass fittings on gangway and compass flash in the sun
+without dazzling the eye; gay Liliputians walk and talk, their white
+teeth, no bigger than a pin's point, gleam in laughter, with never a
+sound; a steamboat laden with excursionists comes in, its paddles
+churning the water, and you cannot hear them. Not a detail is
+missed--not a button on a sailor's jacket, not a hair on his face. All
+the light and color of sea and earth and sky, that serve for many a
+mile, are here concentrated within a few square feet. And what color it
+is! A painter's despair! It is light itself, more beautiful than that
+which streams through old church windows of stained glass. And all is
+framed in utter darkness, so that the fully dilated pupils can see their
+very utmost. It seems as though all had been painted life-size and then
+shrunk, like a Japanese picture on crape, to a millionth of its natural
+size, so as to intensify and mellow the effect.
+
+It is all over: you come out into the open sunshine, and all seems
+garish and bare and bald and commonplace. All magic has faded out of
+the scene; everything is too far away from everything else; everybody
+one meets seems coarse and Brobdingnagian and too near. And one has been
+looking at the like of it all one's life!
+
+Thus with my dream, compared to common, waking, every-day experience;
+only instead of being mere flat, silent little images moving on a dozen
+square feet of Bristol-board, and appealing to the eye alone, the things
+and people in my dream had the same roundness and relief as in life, and
+were life-size; one could move among them and behind them, and feel as
+if one could touch and clasp and embrace them if one dared. And the ear,
+as well as the eye, was made free of this dark chamber of the brain: one
+heard their speech and laughter as in life. And that was not all, for
+soft breezes fanned the cheek, the sparrows twittered, the sun gave out
+its warmth, and the scent of many flowers made the illusion complete.
+
+And then the Duchess of Towers! She had been not only visible and
+audible like the rest, but tangible as well, to the fullest extent of
+the sensibility that lay in my nerves of touch; when my hands held hers
+I felt as though I were drawing all her life into mine.
+
+With the exception of that one figure, all had evidently been as it
+_had_ been in _reality_ a few years ago, to the very droning of an
+insect, to the very fall of a blossom!
+
+Had I gone mad by any chance? I had possessed the past, as I had longed
+to do a few hours before.
+
+What are sight and hearing and touch and the rest?
+
+Five senses in all.
+
+The stars, worlds upon worlds, so many billions of miles away, what are
+they for us but mere shiny specks on a net-work of nerves behind the
+eye? How does one _feel_ them there?
+
+The sound of my friend's voice, what is it? The clasp of his hand, the
+pleasant sight of his face, the scent of his pipe and mine, the taste of
+the bread and cheese and beer we eat and drink together, what are they
+but figments (stray figments, perhaps) of the brain--little thrills
+through nerves made on purpose, and without which there would be no
+stars, no pipe, no bread and cheese and beer, no voice, no friend,
+no me?
+
+And is there, perchance, some sixth sense embedded somewhere in the
+thickness of the flesh--some survival of the past, of the race, of our
+own childhood even, etiolated by disuse? or some rudiment, some effort
+to begin, some priceless hidden faculty to be developed into a future
+source of bliss and consolation for our descendants? some nerve that now
+can only be made to thrill and vibrate in a dream, too delicate as yet
+to ply its function in the light of common day?
+
+And was I, of all people in the world--I, Peter Ibbetson, architect and
+surveyor, Wharton Street, Pentonville--most futile, desultory, and
+uneducated dreamer of dreams--destined to make some great psychical
+discovery?
+
+Pondering deeply over these solemn things, I sent myself to sleep again,
+as was natural enough--but no more to dream. I slept soundly until late
+in the morning, and breakfasted at the Bains Deligny, a delightful
+swimming-bath near the Pont de la Concorde (on the other side), and
+spent most of the day there, alternately swimming, and dozing, and
+smoking cigarettes, and thinking of the wonders of the night before, and
+hoping for their repetition on the night to follow.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+I remained a week in Paris, loafing about by day among old haunts of my
+childhood--a melancholy pleasure--and at night trying to "dream true" as
+my dream duchess had called it. Only once did I succeed.
+
+I had gone to bed thinking most persistently of the "Mare d'Auteuil,"
+and it seemed to me that as soon as I was fairly asleep I woke up there,
+and knew directly that I had come into a "true dream" again, by the
+reality and the bliss. It was transcendent _life_ once more--a very
+ecstasy of remembrance made actual, and _such_ an exquisite surprise!
+
+There was M. le Major, in his green frock-coat, on his knees near a
+little hawthorn-tree by the brink, among the water-logged roots of which
+there dwelt a cunning old dytiscus as big as the bowl of a
+table-spoon--a prize we had often tried to catch in vain.
+
+M. le Major had a net in his hand, and was watching the water intently;
+the perspiration was trickling down his nose; and around him, in silent
+expectation and suspense, were grouped Gogo and Mimsey and my three
+cousins, and a good-humored freckled Irish boy I had quite forgotten,
+and I suddenly remembered that his name was Johnstone, that he was very
+combative, and that he lived in the Rue Basse (now Rue Raynouard).
+
+On the other side of the pond my mother was keeping Medor from the
+water, for fear of his spoiling the sport, and on the bench by the
+willow sat Madame Seraskier--lovely Madame Seraskier--deeply
+interested. I sat down by her side and gazed at her with a joy there is
+no telling.
+
+An old woman came by, selling conical wafer-cakes, and singing--"_V'la
+l'plaisir, mesdames--V'la l'plaisir!_" Madame Seraskier bought ten sous'
+worth--a mountain!
+
+M. le Major made a dash with his net--unsuccessfully, as usual. Medor
+was let loose, and plunged with a plunge that made big waves all round
+the mare, and dived after an imaginary stone, amid general shouts and
+shrieks of excitement. Oh, the familiar voices! I almost wept.
+
+Medor came out of the water without his stone and shook himself,
+twisting and barking and grinning and gyrating, as was his way, quite
+close to me. In my delight and sympathy I was ill-advised enough to try
+and stroke him, and straight the dream was "blurred"--changed to an
+ordinary dream, where all things were jumbled up and incomprehensible; a
+dream pleasant enough, but different in kind and degree--an ordinary
+dream; and in my distress thereat I woke, and failed to dream again (as
+I wished to dream) that night.
+
+Next morning (after an early swim) I went to the Louvre, and stood
+spellbound before Leonardo da Vinci's "Lisa Gioconda," trying hard to
+find where the wondrous beauty lay that I had heard so extravagantly
+extolled; and not trying very successfully, for I had seen Madame
+Seraskier once more, and felt that "Gioconda" was a fraud.
+
+Presently I was conscious of a group just behind me, and heard a
+pleasant male English voice exclaim--
+
+[Illustration: "Lisa Giaconda"]
+
+"And now, duchess, let me present to you my first and last and only
+love, Mona Lisa." I turned round, and there stood a soldier-like old
+gentleman and two ladies (one of whom was the Duchess of Towers),
+staring at the picture.
+
+As I made way for them I caught her eye, and in it again, as I felt
+sure, a kindly look of recognition--just for half a second. She
+evidently recollected having seen me at Lady Cray's, where I had stood
+all the evening alone in a rather conspicuous corner. I was so
+exceptionally tall (in those days of not such tall people as now) that
+it was easy to notice and remember me, especially as I wore my beard,
+which it was unusual to do then among Englishmen.
+
+She little guessed how _I_ remembered _her_; she little knew all she was
+and had been to me--in life and in a dream!
+
+My emotion was so great that I felt it in my very knees; I could
+scarcely walk; I was as weak as water. My worship for the beautiful
+stranger was becoming almost a madness. She was even more lovely than
+Madame Seraskier. It was cruel to be like that.
+
+It seems that I was fated to fall down and prostrate myself before very
+tall, slender women, with dark hair and lily skins and light angelic
+eyes. The fair damsel who sold tripe and pigs' feet in Clerkenwell was
+also of that type, I remembered; and so was Mrs. Deane. Fortunately for
+me it is not a common one!
+
+All that day I spent on quays and bridges, leaning over parapets, and
+looking at the Seine, and nursing my sweet despair, and calling myself
+the biggest fool in Paris, and recalling over and over again that
+gray-blue kindly glance--my only light, the Light of the World for ME!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My brief holiday over, I went back to London--to Pentonville--and
+resumed my old occupations; but the whole tenor of my existence
+was changed.
+
+The day, the working-day (and I worked harder than ever, to Lintot's
+great satisfaction), passed as in an unimportant dream of mild content
+and cheerful acquiescence in everything, work or play.
+
+There was no more quarrelling with my destiny, nor wish to escape from
+myself for a moment. My whole being, as I went about on business or
+recreation bent, was suffused with the memory of the Duchess of Towers
+as with a warm inner glow that kept me at peace with all mankind and
+myself, and thrilled by the hope, the enchanting hope, of once more
+meeting her image at night in a dream, in or about my old home at Passy,
+and perhaps even feeling once more that ineffable bliss of touching her
+hand. Though why should she be there?
+
+When the blessed hour came round for sleep, the real business of my life
+began. I practised "dreaming true" as one practises a fine art, and
+after many failures I became a professed expert--a master.
+
+I lay straight on my back, with my feet crossed, and my hands clasped
+above my head in a symmetrical position; I would fix my will intently
+and persistently on a certain point in space and time that was within my
+memory--for instance, the avenue gate on a certain Christmas afternoon,
+when I remembered waiting for M. le Major to go for a walk--at the same
+time never losing touch of my own present identity as Peter Ibbetson,
+architect, Wharton Street, Pentonville; all of which is not so easy to
+manage as one might think, although the dream duchess had said, "Ce
+n'est que le premier pas qui coute;" and finally one night, instead of
+dreaming the ordinary dreams I had dreamed all my life (but twice), I
+had the rapture of _waking up_, the minute I was fairly asleep, by
+the avenue gate, and of seeing Gogo Pasquier sitting on one of the stone
+posts and looking up the snowy street for the major. Presently he jumped
+up to meet his old friend, whose bottle-green-clad figure had just
+appeared in the distance. I saw and heard their warm and friendly
+greeting, and walked unperceived by their side through Auteuil to the
+_mare_, and back by the fortifications, and listened to the thrilling
+adventures of one Fier-a-bras, which, I confess, I had completely
+forgotten.
+
+[Illustration: THE STORY OF THE GIANT FIER-A-BRAS.]
+
+As we passed all three together through the "Porte de la Muette," M. le
+Major's powers of memory (or invention) began to flag a little--for he
+suddenly said, "_Cric!_" But Gogo pitilessly answered, "_Crac!_" and
+the story had to go on, till we reached at dusk the gate of the
+Pasquiers' house, where these two most affectionately parted, after
+making an appointment for the morrow; and I went in with Gogo, and sat
+in the school-room while Therese gave him his tea, and heard her tell
+him all that had happened in Passy that afternoon. Then he read and
+summed and translated with his mother till it was time to go up to bed,
+and I sat by his bedside as he was lulled asleep by his mother's
+harp... how I listened with all my ears and heart, till the sweet strain
+ceased for the night! Then out of the hushed house I stole, thinking
+unutterable things--through the snow-clad garden, where Medor was baying
+the moon--through the silent avenue and park--through the deserted
+streets of Passy--and on by desolate quays and bridges to dark quarters
+of Paris; till I fell awake in my tracks and found that another dreary
+and commonplace day had dawned over London--but no longer dreary and
+commonplace for me, with such experiences to look back and forward
+to--such a strange inheritance of wonder and delight!
+
+I had a few more occasional failures, such as, for instance, when the
+thread between my waking and sleeping life was snapped by a moment's
+carelessness, or possibly by some movement of my body in bed, in which
+case the vision would suddenly get blurred, the reality of it destroyed,
+and an ordinary dream rise in its place. My immediate consciousness of
+this was enough to wake me on the spot, and I would begin again, _da
+capo_ till all went as I wished.
+
+Evidently our brain contains something akin both to a photographic
+plate and a phonographic cylinder, and many other things of the same
+kind not yet discovered; not a sight or a sound or a smell is lost; not
+a taste or a feeling or an emotion. Unconscious memory records them all,
+without our even heeding what goes on around us beyond the things that
+attract our immediate interest or attention.
+
+Thus night after night I saw reacted before me scenes not only fairly
+remembered, but scenes utterly forgotten, and yet as unmistakably true
+as the remembered ones, and all bathed in that ineffable light, the
+light of other days--the light that never was on sea or land, and yet
+the light of absolute truth.
+
+How it transcends in value as well as in beauty the garish light of
+common day, by which poor humanity has hitherto been content to live and
+die, disdaining through lack of knowledge the shadow for the substance,
+the spirit for the matter! I verified the truth of these sleeping
+experiences in every detail: old family letters I had preserved, and
+which I studied on awaking, confirmed what I had seen and heard in my
+dream; old stories explained themselves. It was all by-gone truth,
+garnered in some remote corner of the brain, and brought out of the dim
+past as I willed, and made actual once more.
+
+And strange to say, and most inexplicable, I saw it all as an
+independent spectator, an outsider, not as an actor going again through
+scenes in which he has played a part before!
+
+Yet many things perplexed and puzzled me.
+
+For instance, Gogo's back, and the back of his head, when I stood
+behind him, were as visible and apparently as true to life as his face,
+and I had never seen his back or the back of his head; it was much later
+in life that I learned the secret of two mirrors. And then, when Gogo
+went out of the room, sometimes apparently passing through me as he did
+so and coming out at the other side (with a momentary blurring of the
+dream), the rest would go on talking just as reasonably, as naturally,
+as before. Could the trees and walls and furniture have had ears and
+eyes, those long-vanished trees and walls and furniture that existed now
+only in my sleeping brain, and have retained the sound and shape and
+meaning of all that passed when Gogo, my only conceivable
+remembrancer, was away?
+
+Francoise, the cook, would come into the drawing-room to discuss the
+dinner with my mother when Gogo was at school; and I would hear the
+orders given, and later I would assist at the eating of the meal (to
+which Gogo would invariably do ample justice), and it was just as my
+mother had ordered. Mystery of mysteries!
+
+What a pleasant life it was they led together, these ghosts of a by-gone
+time! Such a genial, smooth, easygoing, happy-go-lucky state of
+things--half bourgeois, half Bohemian, and yet with a well-marked
+simplicity, refinement, and distinction of bearing and speech that were
+quite aristocratic.
+
+The servants (only three--Therese the house-maid, Francoise the cook,
+and English Sarah, who had been my nurse and was now my mother's maid)
+were on the kindliest and most familiar terms with us, and talked to us
+like friends, and interested themselves in our concerns, and we in
+theirs; I noticed that they always wished us each good-morning and
+good-night--a pretty French fashion of the Passy bourgeoisie in Louis
+Philippe's time (he was a bourgeois king).
+
+Our cuisine was bourgeoise also. Peter Ibbetson's mouth watered (after
+his tenpenny London dinner) to see and smell the steam of "soupe a la
+bonne femme," "soupe aux choux," "pot au feu," "blanquette de veau,"
+"boeuf a la mode," "cotelettes de porc a la sauce piquante,"
+"vinaigrette de boeuf bouilli"--that endless variety of good things on
+which French people grow fat so young--and most excellent claret (at one
+franc a bottle in those happy days): its bouquet seemed to fill the room
+as soon as the cork was drawn!
+
+Sometimes, such a repast ended, "le beau Pasquier," in the fulness of
+his heart, would suddenly let off impossible fireworks of vocalization,
+ascending rockets of chromatic notes which would explode softly very
+high up and come down in full cadences, trills, roulades, like beautiful
+colored stars; and Therese would exclaim, "Ah, q'c'est beau!" as if she
+had been present at a real pyrotechnic display; and Therese was quite
+right. I have never heard the like from any human throat, and should not
+have believed it possible. Only Joachim's violin can do such beautiful
+things so beautifully.
+
+Or else he would tell us of wolves he had shot in Brittany, or
+wild-boars in Burgundy--for he was a great sportsman--or of his
+adventures as a _garde du corps_ of Charles Dix, or of the wonderful
+inventions that were so soon to bring us fame and fortune; and he would
+loyally drink to Henri Cinq; and he was so droll and buoyant and witty
+that it was as good to hear him speak as to hear him sing.
+
+But there was another and a sad side to all this strange comedy of
+vanished lives.
+
+They built castles in the air, and made plans, and talked of all the
+wealth and happiness that would be theirs when my father's ship came
+home, and of all the good they would do, pathetically unconscious of the
+near future; which, of course, was all past history to their loving
+audience of one.
+
+And then my tears would flow with the unbearable ache of love and pity
+combined; they would fall and dry on the waxed floors of my old home in
+Passy, and I would find them still wet on my pillow in Pentonville
+when I woke.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Soon I discovered by practice that I was able for a second or two to be
+more than a mere spectator--to be an actor once more; to turn myself
+(Ibbetson) into my old self (Gogo), and thus be touched and caressed by
+those I had so loved. My mother kissed me and I felt it; just as long as
+I could hold my breath I could walk hand in hand with Madame Seraskier,
+or feel Mimsey's small weight on my back and her arms round my neck for
+four or five yards as I walked, before blurring the dream; and the blur
+would soon pass away, if it did not wake me, and I was Peter Ibbetson
+once more, walking and sitting among them, hearing them talk and laugh,
+watching them at their meals, in their walks; listening to my father's
+songs, my mother's sweet playing, and always unseen and unheeded by
+them. Moreover, I soon learned to touch things without sensibly blurring
+the dream. I would cull a rose, and stick it in my buttonhole, and
+there it remained--but lo! the very rose I had just culled was still on
+the rose-bush also! I would pick up a stone and throw it at the wall,
+where it disappeared without a sound--and the very same stone still lay
+at my feet, however often I might pick it up and throw it!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+No waking joy in the world can give, can equal in intensity, these
+complex joys I had when asleep; waking joys seem so slight, so vague in
+comparison--so much escapes the senses through lack of concentration and
+undivided attention--the waking perceptions are so blunt.
+
+It was a life within a life--an intenser life--in which the fresh
+perceptions of childhood combined with the magic of dream-land, and in
+which there was but one unsatisfied longing; but its name was Lion.
+
+It was the passionate longing to meet the Duchess of Towers once more in
+that land of dreams.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thus for a time I went on, more solitary than ever, but well compensated
+for all my loneliness by this strange new life that had opened itself to
+me, and never ceasing to marvel and rejoice--when one morning I received
+a note from Lady Cray, who wanted some stables built at Cray, their
+country-seat in Hertfordshire, and begged I would go there for the day
+and night.
+
+I was bound to accept this invitation, as a mere matter of business, of
+course; as a friend, Lady Cray seemed to have dropped me long ago, "like
+a 'ot potato," blissfully unconscious that it was I who had dropped her.
+
+But she received me as a friend--an old friend. All my shyness and
+snobbery fell from me at the mere touch of her hand.
+
+I had arrived at Cray early in the afternoon, and had immediately set
+about my work, which took several hours, so that I got to the house only
+just in time to dress for dinner.
+
+When I came into the drawing-room there were several people there, and
+Lady Cray presented me to a young lady, the vicar's daughter, whom I was
+to take in to dinner.
+
+I was very much impressed on being told by her that the company
+assembled in the drawing-room included no less a person than Sir Edwin
+Landseer. Many years ago I had copied an engraving of one of his
+pictures for Mimsey Seraskier. It was called "The Challenge," or "Coming
+Events cast their Shadows before Them." I feasted my eyes on the
+wondrous little man, who seemed extremely chatty and genial, and quite
+unembarrassed by his fame.
+
+A guest was late, and Lord Cray, who seemed somewhat peevishly impatient
+for his food, exclaimed--
+
+"Mary wouldn't be Mary if she were punctual!"
+
+Just then Mary came in--and Mary was no less a person than the Duchess
+of Towers!
+
+My knees trembled under me; but there was no time to give way to any
+such tender weakness. Lord Cray walked away with her; the procession
+filed into the dining room, and somewhere at the end of it my young
+vicaress and myself.
+
+The duchess sat a long way from me, but I met her glance for a moment,
+and fancied I saw again in it that glimmer of kindly recognition.
+
+My neighbor, who was charming, asked me if I did not think the Duchess
+of Towers the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.
+
+I assented with right good-will, and was told that she was as good as
+she was beautiful, and as clever as she was good (as if I did not know
+it); that she would give away the very clothes off her back; that there
+was no trouble she would not take for others; that she did not get on
+well with her husband, who drank, and was altogether bad and vile; that
+she had a great sorrow--an only child, an idiot, to whom she was
+devoted, and who would some day be the Duke of Towers; that she was
+highly accomplished, a great linguist, a great musician, and about the
+most popular woman in all English society.
+
+Ah! Who loved the Duchess of Towers better than this poor scribe, in
+whose soul she lived and shone like a bright particular star--like the
+sun; and who, without his knowing, was being rapidly drawn into the
+sphere of her attraction, as Lintot called it; one day to be finally
+absorbed, I trust, forever!
+
+"And who was this wonderful Duchess of Towers before she married?" I
+asked.
+
+"She was a Miss Seraskier. Her father was a Hungarian, a physician, and
+a political reformer--a most charming person; that's where she gets her
+manners. Her mother, whom she lost when she was quite a child, was a
+very beautiful Irish girl of good family, a first cousin of Lord
+Cray's--a Miss Desmond, who ran away with the interesting patriot. They
+lived somewhere near Paris. It was there that Madame Seraskier died of
+cholera--... What is the matter--are you ill?"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+I made out that I was faint from the heat, and concealed as well as I
+could the flood of emotion and bewilderment that overwhelmed me.
+
+I dared not look again at the Duchess of Towers.
+
+"Oh! little Mimsey dear, with your poor thin arms round my neck, and
+your cold, pale cheek against mine. I felt them there only last night!
+To have grown into such a splendid vision of female health and strength
+and beauty as this--with that enchanting, ever-ready laugh and smile!
+Why, of course, those eyes, so lashless then, so thickly fringed
+to-day!--how could I have mistaken them? Ah, Mimsey, you never smiled or
+laughed in those days, or I should have known your eyes again! Is it
+possible--is it possible?"
+
+Thus I went on to myself till the ladies left, my fair young companion
+expressing her kind anxiety and polite hope that I would soon be
+myself again.
+
+I sat silent till it was time to join the ladies (I could not even
+follow the witty and brilliant anecdotes of the great painter, who held
+the table); and then I went up to my room. I could not face _her_ again
+so soon after what I had heard.
+
+The good Lord Cray came to make kind inquiries, but I soon satisfied him
+that my indisposition was nothing. He stayed on, however, and talked;
+his dinner seemed to have done him a great deal of good, and he wanted
+to smoke (and somebody to smoke with), which he had not been able to do
+in the dining-room on account of some reverend old bishop who was
+present. So he rolled himself a little cigarette, like a Frenchman, and
+puffed away to his heart's content.
+
+He little guessed how his humble architect wished him away, until he
+began to talk of the Duchess of Towers--"Mary Towers," as he called
+her--and to tell me how "Towers" deserved to be kicked, and whipped at
+the cart's tail. "Why, she's the best and most beautiful woman in
+England, and as sharp as a needle! If it hadn't been for her, he'd have
+been in the bankruptcy court long ago," etc. "There's not a duchess in
+England that's fit to hold the candle to her, either for looks or
+brains, or breedin' either. Her mother (the loveliest woman that ever
+lived, except Mary) was a connection of mine; that's where she gets her
+manners!" etc.
+
+Thus did this noble earl make music for me--sweet and bitter music.
+
+Mary! It is a heavenly name, especially on English lips, and spelled in
+the English mode with the adorable _y_! Great men have had a passion for
+it--Byron, Shelley, Burns. But none, methinks, a greater passion than I,
+nor with such good cause.
+
+And yet there must be a bad Mary now and then, here or there, and even
+an ugly one. Indeed, there was once a Bloody Mary who was both! It seems
+incredible!
+
+Mary, indeed! Why not Hecuba? For what was I to the Duchess of Towers?
+
+When I was alone again I went to bed, and tried to sleep on my back,
+with my arms up, in the hope of a true dream; but sleep would not come,
+and I passed a white night, as the French say. I rose early and walked
+about the park, and tried to interest my self in the stables till it was
+breakfast-time. Nobody was up, and I breakfasted alone with Lady Cray,
+who was as kind as she could be. I do not think she could have found me
+a very witty companion. And then I went back to the stables to think,
+and fell into a doze.
+
+At about twelve I heard the sound of wooden balls, and found a lawn
+where some people were playing "croquet." It was quite a new game, and a
+few years later became the fashion.
+
+[Illustration: SWEET AND BITTER MUSIC.]
+
+I sat down under a large weeping-ash close to the lawn; it was like a
+tent, with chairs and tables underneath.
+
+Presently Lady Cray came there with the Duchess of Towers. I wanted to
+fly, but was rooted to the spot.
+
+[Illustration: The Introduction.]
+
+Lady Cray presented me, and almost immediately a servant came with a
+message for her, and I was left with the One Woman in the World! My
+heart was in my mouth, my throat was dry, my pulse was beating in
+my temples.
+
+She asked me, in the most natural manner, if I played "croquet."
+
+"Yes--no--at least, sometimes--that is, I never of it--oh--I forget!" I
+groaned at my idiocy and hid my face in my hands. She asked if I were
+still unwell, and I said no; and then she began to talk quite easily
+about anything, everything, till I felt more at my ease.
+
+Her voice! I had never heard it well but in a dream, and it was the
+same--a very rich and modulated voice--low--contralto, with many varied
+and delightful inflexions; and she used more action in speaking than the
+generality of Englishwomen, thereby reminding me of Madame Seraskier. I
+noticed that her hands were long and very narrow, and also her feet, and
+remembered that Mimsey's were like that--they were considered poor
+Mimsey's only beauty. I also noticed an almost imperceptible scar on her
+left temple, and remembered with a thrill that I had noticed it in my
+dream as we walked up the avenue together. In waking life I had never
+been near enough to her to notice a small scar, and Mimsey had no scar
+of the kind in the old days--of that I felt sure, for I had seen much of
+Mimsey lately.
+
+I grew more accustomed to the situation, and ventured to say that I had
+once met her at Lady Cray's in London.
+
+"Oh yes; I remember. Giulia Grisi sand the 'Willow Song.'" And then she
+crinkled up her eyes, and laughed, and blushed, and went on: "I noticed
+you standing in a corner, under the famous Gainsborough. You reminded me
+of a dear little French boy I once knew who was very kind to me when I
+was a little girl in France, and whose father you happen to be like. But
+I found that you were Mr. Ibbetson, an English architect, and, Lady Cray
+tells me, a very rising one"
+
+"I _was_ a little French boy once. I had to change my name to please a
+relative, and become English--that is, I was always _really_ English,
+you know."
+
+"Good Heavens, what an extraordinary thing! What _was_ your name, then?"
+
+"Pasquier-Gogo Pasquier!" I groaned, and the tears came into my eyes,
+and I looked away. The duchess made no answer, and when I turned and
+looked at her she was looking at me, very pale, her lips quite white,
+her hands tightly clasped in her lap, and trembling all over.
+
+I said, "You used to be little Mimsey Seraskier, and I used to carry you
+pickaback!"
+
+"Oh don't! oh don't!" she said, and began to cry.
+
+I got up and walked about under the ash-tree till she had dried her
+eyes. The croquet-players were intent upon their game.
+
+I again sat down beside her; she had dried her eyes, and at length she
+said--
+
+"What a dreadful thing it was about your poor father and mother, and
+_my_ dear mother! Do you remember her? She died a week after you left. I
+went to Russia with papa--Dr. Seraskier. What a terrible break-up it
+all was!"
+
+And then we gradually fell to talking quite naturally about old times,
+and dear dead people. She never took her eyes off mine. After a while
+I said--
+
+"I went to Passy, and found everything changed and built over. It
+nearly drove me mad to see. I went to St. Cloud, and saw you driving
+with the Empress of the French. That night I had such an extraordinary
+dream! I dreamed I was floundering about the Rue de la Pompe, and had
+just got to the avenue gate, and you were there."
+
+"Good heavens!" she whispered, and turned white again, and trembled all
+over, "what do you mean?"
+
+"Yes," I said, "you came to my rescue. I was pursued by gnomes and
+horrors."
+
+_She._ "Good heavens! by--by two little jailers, a man and his wife, who
+danced and were trying to hem you in?"
+
+It was now my turn to ejaculate "Good heavens!" We both shook and
+trembled together.
+
+I said: "You gave me your hand, and all came straight at once. My old
+school rose in place of the jail."
+
+_She._ "With a yellow omnibus? And boys going off to their _premiere
+communion?_"
+
+_I._ "Yes; and there was a crowd--le Pere et la Mere
+Francois, and Madame Liard, the grocer's wife, and--and
+Mimsey Seraskier, with her cropped head. And
+an organ was playing a tune I knew quite well, but
+cannot now recall." ...
+
+_She._ "Wasn't it 'Maman, les p'tits bateaux?'"
+
+_I._ Oh, of _course!_
+
+     _"'Maman, les p'tits bateaux
+     Qui vont sur l'eau,
+     Ont-ils des jambes?'"_
+
+_She_. "That's it!"
+
+     _"'Eh oui, petit beta!
+     S'ils n'avaient pas
+     Ils n'march'raient pas!'"_
+
+She sank back in her chair, pale and prostrate. After a while--
+
+_She_. "And then I gave you good advice about how to dream true, and we
+got to my old house, and I tried to make you read the letters on the
+portico, and you read them wrong, and I laughed."
+
+_I_. "Yes; I read 'Tete Noire.' Wasn't it idiotic?"
+
+_She_. "And then I touched you again and you read 'Parvis Notre Dame.'"
+
+_I_. "Yes! and you touched me _again_, and I read 'Parva sed
+Apta'--small but fit."
+
+_She_. "Is _that_ what it means? Why, when you were a boy, you told me
+_sed apta_ was all one word, and was the Latin for 'Pavilion.' I
+believed it ever since, and thought 'Parva sed Apta' meant _petit
+pavillon_!"
+
+_I_. "I blush for my bad Latin! After this you gave me good advice
+again, about not touching anything or picking flowers. I never have. And
+then you went away into the park--the light went out of my life,
+sleeping or waking. I have never been able to dream of you since. I
+don't suppose I shall ever meet you again after to-day!"
+
+After this we were silent for a long time, though I hummed and hawed now
+and then, and tried to speak. I was sick with the conflict of my
+feelings. At length she said--
+
+"Dear Mr. Ibbetson, this is all so extraordinary that I must go away
+and think it all over. I cannot tell you what it has been to me to meet
+you once more. And that double dream, common to us both! Oh, I am dazed
+beyond expression, and feel as if I were dreaming now--except that this
+all seems so unreal and impossible--so untrue! We had better part now. I
+don't know if I shall ever meet you again. You will be often in my
+thoughts, but never in my dreams again--that, at least, I can
+command--nor I in yours; it must not be. My poor father taught me how to
+dream before he died, that I might find innocent consolation in dreams
+for my waking troubles, which are many and great, as his were. If I can
+see that any good may come of it, I will write--but no--you must not
+expect a letter. I will now say good-bye and leave you. You go to-day,
+do you not? That is best. I think this had better be a final adieu. I
+cannot tell you of what interest you are to me and always have been. I
+thought you had died long ago. We shall often think of each other--that
+is inevitable--_but never, never dream. That will not do._
+
+"Dear Mr. Ibbetson, I wish you all the good that one human being can
+wish another. And now goodbye, and may God in heaven bless you!"
+
+She rose, trembling and white, and her eyes wet with tears, and wrung
+both my hands, and left me as she had left me in the dream.
+
+The light went out of my life, and I was once more alone--more
+wretchedly and miserably alone than if I had never met her.
+
+I went back to Pentonville, and outwardly took up the thread of my
+monotonous existence, and ate, drank, and worked, and went about as
+usual, but as one in an ordinary dream. For now dreams--true dreams--had
+become the only reality for me.
+
+[Illustration: A FAREWELL.]
+
+So great, so inconceivable and unexampled a wonder had been wrought in a
+dream that all the conditions of life had been altered and reversed.
+
+I and another human being had met--actually and really met--in a double
+dream, a dream common to us both, and clasped each other's hands! And
+each had spoken words to the other which neither ever would or ever
+could forget.
+
+And this other human being and I had been enshrined in each other's
+memory for years--since childhood--and were now linked together by a tie
+so marvellous, an experience so unprecedented, that neither could ever
+well be out of the other's thoughts as long as life and sense and
+memory lasted.
+
+Her very self, as we talked to each other under the ash-tree at Cray,
+was less vividly present to me than that other and still dearer self of
+hers with whom I had walked up the avenue in that balmy dream
+atmosphere, where we had lived and moved and had our being together for
+a few short moments, yet each believing the other at the time to be a
+mere figment of his own (and her) sleeping imagination; such stuff as
+dreams are made of!
+
+And lo! it was all true--as true as the common experience of every-day
+life--more (ten times more), because through our keener and more exalted
+sense perceptions, and less divided attention, we were more conscious of
+each other's real inner being--linked closer together for a space--than
+two mortals had probably ever been since the world began.
+
+That clasp of the hands in the dream--how infinitely more it had
+conveyed of one to the other than even that sad farewell clasp at Cray!
+
+In my poor outer life I waited in vain for a letter; in vain I haunted
+the parks and streets--the street where she lived--in the hope of seeing
+her once more. The house was shut; she was away--in America, as I
+afterwards learned--with her husband and child.
+
+At night, in the familiar scenes I had learned so well to conjure up, I
+explored every nook and corner with the same yearning desire to find a
+trace of her. I was hardly ever away from "Parva sed Apta." There were
+Madame Seraskier and Mimsey and the major, and my mother and Gogo, at
+all times, in and out, and of course as unconscious of my solid presence
+as though I had never existed. And as I looked at Mimsey and her mother
+I wondered at my obtuseness in not recognizing at the very first glance
+who the Duchess of Towers had been, and whose daughter. The height, the
+voice, the eyes, certain tricks of gait and gesture--how could I have
+failed to know her again after such recent dream opportunities?
+
+And Seraskier, towering among them all, as his daughter now towered
+among women. I saw that he lived again in his daughter; _his_ was the
+smile that closed up the eyes, as hers did; had Mimsey ever smiled in
+those days, I should have known her again by this very characteristic
+trait.
+
+Of this daughter of his (the Mimsey of the past years, not the duchess
+of to-day) I never now could have enough, and made her go through again
+and again all the scenes with Gogo, so dear to my remembrance, and to
+hers. I was, in fact, the Prince Charmant, of whose unseen attendance
+she had been conscious in some inconceivable way. What a strange
+foresight! But where was the fee Tarapatapoum? Never there during this
+year of unutterable longing; she had said it; never, never again should
+I be in her dream, or she in mine, however constantly we might dwell in
+each other's thoughts.
+
+So sped a twelvemonth after that last meeting in the flesh at Gray.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now with an unwilling heart and most reluctant pen, I must come to
+the great calamity of my life which I will endeavor to tell in as few
+words as possible.
+
+The reader, if he has been good enough to read without skipping, will
+remember the handsome Mrs. Deane, to whom I fancied I lost my heart, in
+Hopshire, a few years back.
+
+I had not seen her since--had, indeed, almost forgotten her--but had
+heard vaguely that she had left Hopshire, and come to London, and
+married a wealthy man much older than herself.
+
+Well, one day I was in Hyde Park, gazing at the people in the drive,
+when a spick-and-span and very brand-new open carriage went by, and in
+it sad Mrs. Deane (that was), all alone in her glory, and looking very
+sulky indeed. She recognized me and bowed, and I bowed back again, with
+just a moment's little flutter of the heart--an involuntary tribute to
+auld lang syne--and went on my way, wondering that I could ever had
+admired her so.
+
+Presently, to my surprise, I was touched on the elbow. It was Mrs. Deane
+again--I will call her Mrs. Deane still. She had got out and followed
+me on foot. It was her wish that I should drive round the park with her
+and talk of old times. I obeyed, and for the first and last time found
+myself forming part of that proud and gay procession I had so often
+watched with curious eyes.
+
+She seemed anxious to know whether I had ever made it up with Colonel
+Ibbetson, and pleased to hear that I had not, and that I probably never
+should, and that my feeling against him was strong and bitter and
+likely to last.
+
+She appeared to hate him very much.
+
+She inquired kindly after myself and my prospects in life, but did not
+seem deeply interested in my answers--until later, when I talked of my
+French life, and my dear father and mother, when she listened with eager
+sympathy, and I was much touched. She asked if I had portraits of them;
+I had--most excellent miniatures; and when we parted I had promised to
+call upon her next afternoon, and bring these miniatures with me.
+
+She seemed a languid woman, much ennuyee, and evidently without a large
+circle of acquaintance. She told me I was the only person in the whole
+park whom she had bowed to that day. Her husband was in Hamburg, and she
+was going to meet him in Paris in a day or two.
+
+I had not so many friends but what I felt rather glad than otherwise to
+have met her, and willingly called, as I had promised, with the
+portraits.
+
+She lived in a large, new house, magnificently up near the Marble Arch.
+She was quite alone when I called, and asked me immediately if I had
+brought the miniatures; and looked at them quite eagerly, and then at
+me, and exclaimed--
+
+"Good heavens, you are your father's very image!"
+
+Indeed, I had always been considered so.
+
+Both his eyebrows and mine, especially, met in a singular and
+characteristic fashion at the bridge of the nose, and she seemed much
+struck by this. He was represented in the uniform of Charles X's _gardes
+du corps_, in which he had served for two years, and had acquired the
+nickname of "le beau Pasquier." Mrs. Deane seemed never to tire of
+gazing at it, and remarked that my father "must have been the very ideal
+of a young girl's dream" (an indirect compliment which made me blush
+after what she had just said of the likeness between us. I almost began
+to wonder whether she was going to try and make a fool of me again, as
+she had so successfully done a few years ago).
+
+Then she became interested again in my early life and recollections, and
+wanted to know whether my parents were fond of each other. They were a
+most devoted and lover-like pair, and had loved each other at first
+sight and until death, and I told her so; and so on until I became quite
+excited, and imagined she must know of some good fortune to which I was
+entitled, and had been kept out of by the machinations of a
+wicked uncle.
+
+For I had long discovered in my dreams that he had been my father's
+bitterest enemy and the main cause of his financial ruin, by selfish,
+heartless, and dishonest deeds too complicated to explain here--a
+regular Shylock.
+
+I had found this out by listening (in my dreams) to long conversations
+between my father and mother in the old drawing-room at Passy, while
+Gogo was absorbed in his book; and every word that had passed through
+Gogo's inattentive ears into his otherwise preoccupied little brain had
+been recorded there as in a phonograph, and was now repeated over and
+over again for Peter Ibbetson, as he sat unnoticed among them.
+
+I asked her, jokingly, if she had discovered that I was the rightful
+heir to Ibbetson Hall by any chance.
+
+She replied that nothing would give her greater pleasure, but there was
+no such good fortune in store for either her or me; that she had
+discovered long ago that Colonel Ibbetson was the greatest blackguard
+unhung, and nothing new she might discover could make him worse.
+
+I then remembered how he would often speak of her, even to me, and hint
+and insinuate things which were no doubt untrue, and which I
+disbelieved. Not that the question of their truth or untruth made him
+any the less despicable and vile for telling.
+
+She asked me if he had ever spoken of her to me, and after much
+persuasion and cunning cross-examination I told her as much of the truth
+as I dared, and she became a tigress. She assured me that he had managed
+so to injure and compromise her in Hopshire that she and her mother had
+to leave, and she swore to me most solemnly (and I thoroughly believe
+she spoke the truth) that there had never been any relation between
+them that she could not have owned to before the whole world.
+
+She had wished to marry him, it is true, for his wealth and position;
+for both she and her mother were very poor, and often hard put to it to
+make both ends meet and keep up a decent appearance before the world;
+and he had singled her out and paid her marked attention from the first,
+and given her every reason to believe that his attentions were serious
+and honorable.
+
+At this juncture her mother came in, Mrs. Glyn, and we renewed our old
+acquaintance. She had quite forgiven me my school-boy admiration for her
+daughter; all her power of hating, like her daughter's, had concentrated
+itself on Ibbetson; and as I listened to the long story of their wrongs
+and his infamy, I grew to hate him worse than ever, and was ready to be
+their champion on the spot, and to take up their quarrel there and then.
+
+But this would not do, it appeared, for their name must nevermore be in
+any way mixed up with his.
+
+Then suddenly Mrs. Glyn asked me if I knew when he went to India.
+
+I could satisfy her, for I knew that it was just after my parents'
+marriage, nearly a year before my birth; upon which she gave the exact
+date of his departure with his regiment, and the name of the transport,
+and everything; and also, to my surprise, the date of my parents'
+marriage at Marylebone Church, and of my baptism there fifteen months
+later--just fourteen weeks after my birth in Passy. I was growing quite
+bewildered with all this knowledge of my affairs, and wondered more
+and more.
+
+We sat silent for a while, the two women looking at each other and at me
+and at the miniatures. It was getting grewsome. What could it all mean?
+
+Presently Mrs. Glyn, at a nod from her daughter, addressed me thus:
+
+"Mr. Ibbetson, your uncle, as you call him, though he is not your uncle,
+is a very terrible villain, and has done you and your parents a very
+foul wrong. Before I tell you what it is (and I think you ought to know)
+you must give me your word of honor that you will do or say nothing that
+will get our name publicly mixed up in any way with Colonel Ibbetson's.
+The injury to my daughter, now she is happily married to an excellent
+man, would be irreparable."
+
+With a beating heart I solemnly gave the required assurance.
+
+"Then, Mr. Ibbetson, it is right that you should know that Colonel
+Ibbetson, when he was paying his infamous addresses to my daughter, gave
+her unmistakably to understand that you were his natural son, by his
+cousin, Miss Catherine Biddulph, afterwards Madame Pasquier de
+la Mariere!"
+
+"Oh, oh, oh!" I cried, "surely you must be mistaken--he knew it was
+impossible--he had been refused by my mother three times--he went to
+India nearly a year before I was born--he--"
+
+Then Mrs. Deane said, producing an old letter from her pocket:
+
+"Do you know his handwriting and his crest? Do you happen to recollect
+once bringing me a note from at Ibbetson Hall? Here it is," and she
+handed it to me. It was unmistakably his, and I remembered it at once,
+and this is what it said:
+
+"For Heaven's sake, dear friend, don't breathe a word to any living soul
+of what you were clever enough to guess last night! There is a likeness,
+of course.
+
+"Poor Antinoues! He is quite ignorant of the true relationship, which has
+caused me many a pang of shame and remorse....
+
+"'Que voulez-vous? Elle etait ravissaure!' ... We were cousins, much
+thrown together; 'both were so young, and one so beautiful!' ... I was
+but a penniless cornet in those days--hardly more than a boy. Happily an
+unsuspecting Frenchman of good family was there who had loved her long,
+and she married him. 'Il etait temps!' ...
+
+"Can you forgive me this 'entrainement de jeunesse?' I have repented in
+sackcloth and ashes, and made what reparation I could by adopting and
+giving my name to one who is a perpetual reminder to me of a moment's
+infatuation. He little knows, poor boy, and never will, I hope. 'Il n'a
+plus que moi au monde!'
+
+"Burn this as soon as you have read it, and never let the subject be
+mentioned between us again.
+
+"R. ('Qui sait aimer')."
+
+Here was a thunderbolt out of the blue!
+
+I sat stunned and saw scarlet, and felt as if I should see scarlet
+forever.
+
+[Illustration: THE FATAL LETTER.]
+
+After a long silence, during which I could feel my pulse beat to
+bursting-point in my temples, Mrs. Glyn said:
+
+"Now, Mr. Ibbetson, I hope you will do nothing rash--nothing that can
+bring my daughter's name into any quarrel between yourself and your
+uncle. For the sake of your mother's good name, you will be prudent, I
+know. If he could speak like this of his cousin, with whom he had been
+in love when he was young, what lies would he not tell of my poor
+daughter? He _has_--terrible lies! Oh, what we have suffered! When he
+wrote that letter I believe he really meant to marry her. He had the
+greatest trust in her, or he would never have committed himself so
+foolishly."
+
+"Does he know of this letter's existing?" I asked.
+
+"No. When he and my daughter quarrelled she sent him back his
+letters--all but this one, which she told him she had burned immediately
+after reading it, as he had told her to do."
+
+"May I keep it?"
+
+"Yes. I know you may be trusted, and my daughter's name has been removed
+from the outside, as you see. No one but ourselves has ever seen it, nor
+have we mentioned to a soul what it contains, as we never believed it
+for a moment. Two or three years ago we had the curiosity to find out
+when and where your parents had married, and when you were born, and
+when _he_ went to India, it was no surprise to us at all. We then tried
+to find you, but soon gave it up, and thought it better to leave matters
+alone. Then we heard he was in mischief again--just the same sort of
+mischief; and then my daughter saw you in the park, and we concluded you
+ought to know."
+
+Such was the gist of that memorable conversation, which I have condensed
+as much as I could.
+
+When I left these two ladies I walked twice rapidly round the park. I
+saw scarlet often during that walk. Perhaps I looked scarlet. I remember
+people staring at me.
+
+Then I went straight to Lintot's, with the impulse to tell him my
+trouble and ask his advice.
+
+He was away from home, and I waited in his smoking-room for a while,
+reading the letter over and over again.
+
+Then I decided not to tell him, and left the house, taking with me as I
+did so (but without any definite purpose) a heavy loaded stick, a most
+formidable weapon, even in the hands of a boy, and which I myself had
+given to Lintot on his last birthday. [Greek: Anagkae]!
+
+Then I went to my usual eating-house near the circus and dined. To the
+surprise of the waiting-maid, I drank a quart of bitter ale and two
+glasses of sherry. It was my custom to drink water. She plied me with
+questions as to whether I was ill or in trouble. I answered her no, and
+at last begged she would leave me alone.
+
+Ibbetson lived in St. James's Street. I went there. He was out. It was
+nine o'clock, and his servant seemed uncertain when he would return. I
+came back at ten. He was not yet home, and the servant, after thinking a
+while, and looking up and down the street, and finding my appearance
+decent and by no means dangerous, asked me to go upstairs and wait, as I
+told him it was a matter of great importance.
+
+So I went and sat in my uncle's drawing-room and waited.
+
+The servant came with me and lit the candles, and remarked on the
+weather, and handed me the _Saturday Review_ and _Punch_. I must have
+looked quite natural--as I tried to look--and he left me.
+
+I saw a Malay creese on the mantel-piece and hid it behind a
+picture-frame. I locked a door leading to another drawing-room where
+there was a grand piano, and above it a trophy of swords, daggers,
+battle-axes, etc., and put the key in my pocket.
+
+The key of the room where I waited was inside the door.
+
+All this time I had a vague idea of possible violence on his part, but
+no idea of killing him. I felt far too strong for that. Indeed, I had a
+feeling of quiet, irresistible strength--the result of suppressed
+excitement.
+
+I sat down and meditated all I would say. I had settled it over and over
+again, and read and reread the fatal letter.
+
+The servant came up with glasses and soda-water. I trembled lest he
+should observe that the door to the other room was locked, but he did
+not. He opened the window and looked up and down the street. Presently
+he said, "Here's the colonel at last, sir," and went down to open
+the door.
+
+I heard him come in and speak to his servant. Then he came straight up,
+humming _"la donna e mobile,"_ and walked in with just the jaunty, airy
+manner I remembered. He was in evening dress, and very little changed.
+He seemed much surprised to see me, and turned very white.
+
+"Well, my Apollo of the T square, _pourquoi cet honneur?_ Have you come,
+like a dutiful nephew, to humble yourself and beg for forgiveness?"
+
+I forgot all I meant to say (indeed, nothing happened as I had meant),
+but rose and said, "I have come to have a talk with you," as quietly as
+I could, though with a thick voice.
+
+He seemed uneasy, and went towards the door.
+
+I got there before him, and closed it, and locked it, and put the key
+in my pocket.
+
+He darted to the other door and found it locked.
+
+Then he went to the mantel-piece and looked for the creese, and not
+finding it, he turned round with his back to the fireplace and his arms
+akimbo, and tried to look very contemptuous and determined. His chin was
+quite white under his dyed mustache--like wax--and his eyes blinked
+nervously.
+
+I walked up to him and said: "You told Mrs. Deane that I was your
+natural son."
+
+"It's a lie! Who told you so?"
+
+"She did--this afternoon."
+
+"It's a lie--a spiteful invention of a cast-off mistress!"
+
+"She never was your mistress!"
+
+"You fool! I suppose she told you that too. Leave the room, you pitiful
+green jackass, or I'll have you turned out," and he rang the bell.
+
+"Do you know your own handwriting?" I said, and handed him the letter.
+
+He read a line or two and gasped out that it was a forgery, and rang the
+bell again, and looked again behind the clock for his creese. Then he
+lit the letter at a candle and threw it in the fireplace, where it
+blazed out.
+
+I made no attempt to prevent him.
+
+The servant tried to open the door, and Ibbetson went to the window and
+called out for the police. I rushed to the picture where I had hidden
+the creese, and threw it on the table. Then I swung him away from the
+window by his coat-tails, and told him to defend himself, pointing to
+the creese.
+
+He seized it, and stood on the defensive; the servant had apparently run
+down-stairs for assistance.
+
+"Now, then," I said, "down on your knees, you infamous cur, and confess;
+it's your only chance."
+
+"Confess what, you fool?"
+
+"That you're a coward and a liar; that you wrote that letter; that Mrs.
+Deane was no more your mistress than my mother was!"
+
+There was a sound of people running up-stairs. He listened a moment and
+hissed out:
+
+"They _both_ were, you idiot! How can I tell for certain whether you are
+my son or not? It all comes to the same. Of course I wrote the letter.
+Come on, you cowardly assassin, you bastard parricide!" ... and he
+advanced on me with his creese low down in his right hand, the point
+upward, and made a thrust, shrieking out, "Break open the door! quick!"
+They did; but too late!
+
+[Illustration: "BASTARD! PARRICIDE!"]
+
+I saw crimson!
+
+He missed me, and I brought down my stick on his left arm, which he held
+over his head, and then on his head, and he fell, crying:
+
+"O my God! O Christ!"
+
+I struck him again on his head as he was falling, and once again when he
+was on the ground. It seemed to crash right in.
+
+That is why and how I killed Uncle Ibbetson.
+
+
+
+
+Part Five
+
+[Illustration]
+
+     "_Grouille, greve, greve, grouille,
+     File, file, ma quenouille!
+     File sa corde au bourreau
+     Qui siffle dans le preau..._"
+
+
+So sang the old hag in _Notre Dame de Paris!_
+
+So sang to me night and day, for many nights and days, the thin small
+voice that always went piping inside me, now to one tune, now to
+another, but always the same words--that terrible refrain that used to
+haunt me so when I was a school-boy at Bluefriars!
+
+Oh, to be a school-boy again in a long gray coat and ridiculous pink
+stockings--innocent and free--with Esmeralda for my only love, and Athos
+and Porthos and D'Artagnan for my bosom friends, and no worse
+tribulation than to be told on a Saturday afternoon that the third
+volume was in hand--_volume trois en lecture_'.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Sometimes, I remember, I could hardly sleep on a Sunday night, for pity
+of the poor wretch who was to be hanged close by on Monday morning, and
+it has come to that with _me_!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Oh, Mary, Mary, Duchess of Towers, sweet friend of my childhood, and
+love of my life, what must you think of me now?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+How blessed are the faithful! How good it must be to trust in God and
+heaven, and the forgiveness of sin, and be as a little child in all but
+innocence! A whole career of crime wiped out in a moment by just one
+cheap little mental act of faith at the eleventh hour, in the extreme
+terror of well-merited dissolution; and all the evil one has worked
+through life (that goes on breeding evil for ages to come) taken off
+one's shoulders like a filthy garment, and just cast aside, anywhere,
+anyhow, for the infecting of others--who do not count.
+
+What matter if it be a fool's paradise? Paradise is paradise, for
+whoever owns it!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They say a Sicilian drum-major, during the French occupation of Palermo,
+was sentenced to be shot. He was a well-known coward, and it was feared
+he would disgrace his country at the last moment in the presence of the
+French soldiers, who had a way of being shot with a good grace and a
+light heart: they had grown accustomed to it.
+
+For the honor of Sicily his confessor told him, in the strictest
+confidence, that his sentence was a mock one, and that he would be fired
+at with blank cartridges.
+
+It was a pious fraud. All but two of the twelve cartridges had bullets,
+and he fell, riddled through and through. No Frenchman ever died with a
+lighter heart, a better grace. He was superb, and the national honor
+was saved.
+
+Thrice happy Sicilian drum-major, if the story be true! That trust in
+blank cartridges was his paradise.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Oh, it is uphill work to be a stoic when the moment comes and the tug!
+But when the tug lasts for more than a moment--days and nights, days and
+nights! Oh, happy Sicilian drum-major!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Pray? Yes, I will pray night and morning, and all day long, to whatever
+there is left of inherited strength and courage in that luckless,
+misbegotten waif, Peter Ibbetson; that it may bear him up a little while
+yet; that he may not disgrace himself in the dock or on the gallows.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Repent? Yes, of many things. But of the thing for which I am here?
+Never!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is a ghastly thing to be judge and jury and executioner all in one,
+and for a private and personal wrong--to condemn and strike and kill.
+
+Pity comes after--when it is too late, fortunately--the wretched
+weakness of pity! Pooh! no Calcraft will ever pity _me_, and I do not
+want him to.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He had his long, snaky knife against my stick; he, too, was a big strong
+man, well skilled in self-defence! Down he went, and I struck him again
+and again. "O my God! O Christ!" he shrieked....
+
+"It will ring in my heart and my ears till I die--till I die!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was no time to lose--no time to think for the best. It is all for
+the best as it is. What might he not have said if he had lived!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thank Heaven, pity is not remorse or shame; and what crime could well
+be worse than his? To rob one's dearly beloved dead of their fair shame!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He might have been mad, perhaps, and have grown in time to believe the
+lies he told himself. Such things have been. But such a madman should no
+more be suffered to live than a mad dog. The only way to kill the lie
+was to kill the liar--that is, if one _can_ ever kill a lie!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Poor worm! after all, he could not help it, I suppose! he was _built_
+like that! and _I_ was built to kill him for it, and be hanged.'
+[Greek: Anagkae]!
+
+What an exit for "Gogo--gentil petit Gogo!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Just opposite that wall, on the other side, was once a small tripe and
+trotter shop, kept by a most lovely daughter of the people, so fair and
+good in my eyes that I would have asked her to be my wife. What would
+she think of me now? That I should have dared to aspire! What a
+King Cophetua!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What does everybody think? I can never breathe the real cause to a soul.
+Only two women know the truth, and they will take good care not to tell.
+Thank Heaven for that!
+
+What matters what anybody thinks? "It will be all the same as a hundred
+years hence." That is the most sensible proverb ever invented.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But meanwhile!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The judge puts on the black cap, and it is all for you! Every eye is
+fixed on you, so big and young and strong and full of life! Ugh!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They pinion you, and you have to walk and be a man, and the chaplain
+exhorts and prays and tries to comfort. Then a sea of faces; people
+opposite, who have been eating and drinking and making merry, waiting for
+_you!_ A cap is pulled over your eyes--oh, horror! horror! horror!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Heureux tambour-major de Sicile!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Il faut laver son ligne sale en famille, et c'est ce que j'ai fait.
+Mais ca va ma couter cher!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Would I do it all over again? Oh, let me hope, yes!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Ah, he died too quick; I dealt him those four blows in less than as
+many seconds. It was five minutes, perhaps--or, at the most, ten--from
+the moment he came into the room to that when I finished him and was
+caught red-handed. And I--what a long agony!
+
+Oh, that I might once more dream a "true dream," and see my dear people
+once more! But it seems that I have lost the power of dreaming true
+since that fatal night. I try and try, but it will not come. My dreams
+are dreadful; and, oh, the _waking_!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After all, my life hitherto, but for a few happy years of childhood, has
+not been worth living; it is most unlikely that it ever would have been,
+had I lived to a hundred! Oh, Mary! Mary!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And penal servitude! Better any death than that. It is good that my
+secret must die with me--that there will be no extenuating
+circumstances, no recommendation to mercy, no commutation of the swift
+penalty of death.
+
+"File, file... File sa corde au bourreau!"
+
+By such monotonous thoughts, and others as dreary and hopeless,
+recurring again and again in the same dull round, I beguiled the
+terrible time that intervened between Ibbetson's death and my trial at
+the Old Bailey.
+
+It all seems very trivial and unimportant now--not worth
+recording--even hard to remember.
+
+But at the time my misery was so great, my terror of the gallows so
+poignant, that each day I thought I must die of sheer grief before
+another twenty-four hours could possibly pass over me.
+
+The intolerable strain would grow more and more severe till a climax of
+tension was reached, and a hysterical burst of tears would relieve me
+for a while, and I would feel reconciled to my fate, and able to face
+death like a man.... Then the anguish would gradually steal over me
+again, and the uncontrollable weakness of the flesh....
+
+And each of these two opposite moods, while it lasted, made the other
+seem impossible, and as if it never could come back again; yet back it
+came with the regularity of a tide--the most harrowing seesaw that
+ever was.
+
+I had always been unstable like that; but whereas I had hitherto
+oscillated between high elation and despondency, it was now from a dumb,
+resigned despair to the wildest agony and terror.
+
+I sought in vain for the only comfort it was in me to seek; but when,
+overdone with suffering, I fell asleep at last, I could no longer dream
+true; I could dream only as other wretches dream.
+
+I always dreamed those two little dancing, deformed jailers, man and
+wife, had got me at last; and that I shrieked aloud for my beloved
+duchess to succor me, as they ran me in, each butting at me sideways,
+and showing their toothless gums in a black smile, and poisoning me
+with their hot sour breath! The gate was there, and the avenue, all
+distorted and quite unlike; and, opposite, a jail; but no powerful
+Duchess of Towers to wave the horror away.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It will be remembered by some, perhaps, how short was my trial.
+
+The plea of "not guilty" was entered for me. The defence set up was
+insanity, based on the absence of any adequate motive. This defence was
+soon disposed of by the prosecution; witnesses to my sanity were not
+wanting, and motives enough were found in my past relations with Colonel
+Ibbetson to "make me--a violent, morose, and vindictive-natured
+man--imbrue my hands in the gore of my relative and benefactor--a man
+old enough to be my father--who, indeed, might have been my father, for
+the love he had bestowed upon me, with his honored name, when I was left
+a penniless, foreign orphan on his hands."
+
+Here I laughed loud and long, and made a most painful impression, as is
+duly recorded in the reports of the trial.
+
+The jury found me guilty quite early in the afternoon of the second day,
+without leaving the box; and I, "preserving to the last the callous and
+unmoved demeanor I had borne all through the trial," was duly sentenced
+to death without any hope of mercy, but with an expression of regret on
+the part of the judge--a famous hanging judge--that a man of my
+education and promise should be brought by his own evil nature and
+uncontrollable passions to so deplorable an end.
+
+Now whether the worst of certainties is better than suspense--whether my
+nerves of pain had been so exercised during the period preceding my
+trial that I had really become callous, as they say a man's back does
+after a certain number of strokes from the "cat"--certain it was that I
+knew the worst, and acquiesced in it with a surprised sense of actual
+relief, and found it in me to feel it not unbearable.
+
+Such, at least, was my mood that night. I made the most of it. It was
+almost happiness by comparison with what I had gone through. I remember
+eating with a heartiness that surprised me. I could have gone straight
+from my dinner to the gallows, and died with a light heart and a good
+grace--like a Sicilian drum-major.
+
+I resolved to write the whole true story to the Duchess of Towers, with
+an avowal of my long and hopeless adoration for her, and the expression
+of a hope that she would try to think of me only as her old playfellow,
+and as she had known me before this terrible disaster. And thinking of
+the letter I would write till very late, I fell asleep in my cell, with
+two warders to watch over me; and then--Another phase of my inner
+life began.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Without effort, without let or hindrance of any kind, I was at the
+avenue gate.
+
+The pink and white may, the lilacs and laburnums were in full bloom, the
+sun made golden paths everywhere. The warm air was full of fragrance,
+and alive with all the buzz and chirp of early summer.
+
+I was half crying with joy to reach the land of my true dreams again, to
+feel at home once more--_chez moi! chez moi!_
+
+La Mere Francois sat peeling potatoes at the door of her _loge_; she was
+singing a little song about _cinq sous, sinq sous, pour monter notre
+menage._ I had forgotten it, but it all came back now.
+
+[Illustration: "CINQ SOUS, CINQ SOUS, POUR MONTER NOTRE MENAGE."]
+
+The facetious postman, Yverdon, went in at the gate of my old garden;
+the bell rang as he pushed it, and I followed him.
+
+Under the apple-tree, which was putting forth shoots of blossom in
+profusion, sat my mother and Monsieur le Major. My mother took the
+letter from the postman's hand as he said, "Pour Vous? Oh yes, Madame
+Pasquier, God sev ze Kveen!" and paid the postage. It was from Colonel
+Ibbetson, then in Ireland, and not yet a colonel.
+
+Medor lay snoring on the grass, and Gogo and Mimsey were looking at the
+pictures in the _musee des familles._
+
+In a garden chair lolled Dr. Seraskier, apparently asleep, with his long
+porcelain pipe across his knees.
+
+Madame Seraskier, in a yellow nankeen gown with gigot sleeves, was
+cutting curl-papers out of the _Constitutionnel_.
+
+I gazed on them all with unutterable tenderness. I was gazing on them
+perhaps for the last time.
+
+I called out to them by name.
+
+"Oh, speak to me, beloved shades! Oh, my father! oh, mother, I want you
+so desperately! Come out of the past for a few seconds, and give me some
+words of comfort! I'm in such woful plight! If you could only
+_know_ ..."
+
+But they could neither hear nor see me.
+
+Then suddenly another figure stepped forth from behind the
+apple-tree--no old-fashioned, unsubstantial shadow of by-gone days that
+one can only see and hear, and that cannot hear and see one back again;
+but one in all the splendid fulness of life, a pillar of help and
+strength--Mary, Duchess of Towers!
+
+I fell on my knees as she came to me with both hands extended.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Ibbetson, I have been seeking and waiting for you here night
+after night! I have been frantic! If you hadn't come at last, I must
+have thrown everything to the winds, and gone to see you in Newgate,
+waking and before the world, to have a talk with you--an _abboccamento_.
+I suppose you couldn't sleep, or were unable to dream."
+
+I could not answer at first. I could only cover her hands with kisses,
+as I felt her warm life-current mixing with mine--a rapture!
+
+And then I said--
+
+"I swear to you by all I hold most sacred--by _my_ mother's memory and
+_yours_--by yourself--that I never meant to take Ibbetson's life, or
+even strike him; the miserable blow was dealt...."
+
+"As if you need tell me that! As if I didn't know you of old, my poor
+friend, kindest and gentlest of men! Why, I am holding your hands, and
+see into the very depths of your heart!"
+
+(I put down all she said as she said it. Of course I am not, and never
+have been, what her old affectionate regard made me seem in her eyes,
+any more than I am the bloodthirsty monster I passed for. Woman-like,
+she was the slave of her predilections.)
+
+"And now, Mr. Ibbetson," she went on, "let me first of all tell you, for
+a certainty, that the sentence will be commuted. I saw the Home
+Secretary three or four hours ago. The real cause of your deplorable
+quarrel with your uncle is an open secret. His character is well known.
+A Mrs. Gregory (whom you knew in Hopshire as Mrs. Deane) has been with
+the Home Secretary this afternoon. Your chivalrous reticence at the
+trial...."
+
+"Oh," I interrupted, "I don't care to live any longer! Now that I have
+met you once more, and that you have forgiven me and think well of me in
+spite of everything, I am ready to die. There has never been anybody but
+you in the world for _me_--never a ghost of a woman, never even a friend
+since my mother died and yours. Between that time and the night I first
+saw you at Lady Cray's concert, I can scarcely be said to have lived at
+all. I fed on scraps of remembrance. You see I have no talent for making
+new friends, but oh, such a genius for fidelity to old ones! I was
+waiting for Mimsey to come back again, I suppose, the one survivor to me
+of that sweet time, and when she came at last I was too stupid to
+recognize her. She suddenly blazed and dazzled into my poor life like a
+meteor, and filled it with a maddening love and pain. I don't know which
+of the two has been the sweetest; both have been my life. You cannot
+realize what it has been. Trust me, I have lived my fill. I am ready and
+willing to die. It is the only perfect consummation I can think of.
+Nothing can ever equal this moment--nothing on earth or in heaven. And
+if I were free to-morrow, life would not be worth having without _you_.
+I would not take it as a gift."
+
+She sat down by me on the grass with her hands clasped across her knees,
+close to the unconscious shadows of our kith and kin, within hearing of
+their happy talk and laughter.
+
+Suddenly we both heard Mimsey say to Gogo--
+
+"O, ils sont joliment bien ensemble, le Prince Charmant et la fee
+Tarapatapoum!"
+
+We looked at each other and actually laughed aloud. The duchess said--
+
+"Was there ever, since the world began, such a _muse en scene_, and for
+such a meeting, Mr. Ibbetson? Think of it! Conceive it! _I_ arranged it
+all. I chose a day when they were all together. As they would say in
+America, _I_ am the boss of this particular dream."
+
+And she laughed again, through her tears, that enchanting ripple of a
+laugh that closed her eyes and made her so irresistible.
+
+"Was there ever," said I--"ever since the world began, such ecstasy as I
+feel now? After this what can there be for me but death--well earned and
+well paid for? Welcome and lovely death!"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"You have not yet thought, Mr. Ibbetson--you have not realized what life
+may have in store for you if--if all you have said about your affection
+for me is true. Oh, it is too terrible for me to think of, I know, that
+you, scarcely more than a boy, should have to spend the rest of your
+life in miserable confinement and unprofitable monotonous toil. But
+there is _another_ side to that picture.
+
+"Now listen to your old friend's story--poor little Mimsey's confession.
+I will make it as short as I can.
+
+"Do you remember when you first saw me, a sickly, plain, sad little
+girl, at the avenue gate, twenty years ago?
+
+"Le Pere Francois was killing a fowl--cutting its throat with a
+clasp-knife--and the poor thing struggled frantically in his grasp as
+its blood flowed into the gutter. A group of boys were looking on in
+great glee, and all the while Pere Francois was gossiping with M. le
+Cure, who didn't seem to mind in the least. I was fainting with pity and
+horror. Suddenly you came out of the school opposite with Alfred and
+Charlie Plunket, and saw it all, and in a fit of noble rage you called
+Pere Francois a 'sacred pig of assassin'--which, as you know, is very
+rude in French--and struck him as near his face as you could reach.
+
+"Have you forgotten that? Ah, _I_ haven't! It was not an effectual deed,
+perhaps, and certainly came too late to save the fowl. Besides, Pere
+Francois struck you back again, and left some of the fowl's blood on
+your cheek. It was a baptism! You became on the spot my hero--my angel
+of light. Look at Gogo over there. Is he beautiful enough? That was
+_you_, Mr. Ibbetson.
+
+"M. le Cure said something about 'ces _Anglais_' who go mad if a man
+whips his horse, and yet pay people to box each other to death. Don't
+you really remember? Oh, the recollection to _me!_
+
+"And that little language we invented and used to talk so fluently!
+Don't you _rappel_ it to yourself? 'Ne le _recollectes_ tu pas?' as we
+would have said in those days, for it used to be _thee_ and _thou_
+with us then.
+
+"Well, at all events, you must remember how for five happy years we were
+so often together; how you drew for me, read to me, played with me; took
+my part in everything, right or wrong; carried me pickaback when I was
+tired. Your drawings--I have them all. And oh! you were so funny
+sometimes! How you used to make mamma laugh, and M. le Major! Just look
+at Gogo again. Have you forgotten what he is doing now? I haven't.... He
+has just changed the _musee des familles_ for the _Penny Magazine_, and
+is explaining Hogarth's pictures of the 'Idle and Industrious
+Apprentices' to Mimsey, and they are both agreed that the idle one is
+much the less objectionable of the two!
+
+"Mimsey looks passive enough, with her thumb in her mouth, doesn't she?
+Her little heart is so full of gratitude and love for Gogo that she
+can't speak. She can only suck her thumb. Poor, sick, ungainly child!
+She would like to be Gogo's slave--she would die for Gogo. And her
+mother adores Gogo too; she is almost jealous of dear Madame Pasquier
+for having so sweet a son. In just one minute from now, when she has
+cut that last curl-paper, poor long-dead mamma will call Gogo to her and
+give him a good 'Irish hug,' and make him happy for a week. Wait a
+minute and see. _There!_ What did I tell you?
+
+"Well, all that came to an end. Madame Pasquier went away and never came
+back, and so did Gogo. Monsieur and Madame Pasquier were dead, and dear
+mamma died in a week from the cholera. Poor heartbroken Mimsey was taken
+away to St. Petersburg, Warsaw, Leipsic, Venice, all over Europe, by her
+father, as heart-broken as herself.
+
+"It was her wish and her father's that she should become a pianist by
+profession, and she studied hard for many years in almost every capital,
+and under almost every master in Europe, and she gave promise
+of success.
+
+"And so, wandering from one place to another, she became a young
+woman--a greatly petted and spoiled and made-much-of young woman, Mr.
+Ibbetson, although she says it who shouldn't; and had many suitors of
+all kinds and countries.
+
+"But the heroic and angelic Gogo, with his lovely straight nose, and his
+hair _aux enfants d'Edouard_, and his dear little white silk chimney-pot
+hat and Eton jacket, was always enshrined in her memory, in her inmost
+heart, as the incarnation of all that was beautiful and brave and good.
+But alas! what had become of this Gogo in the mean time? Ah, he was
+never even heard of--he was dead!
+
+"Well, this long-legged, tender-hearted, grown-up young Mimsey of
+nineteen was attracted by a very witty and accomplished English attache
+at Vienna--a Mr. Harcourt, who seemed deeply in love with her, and
+wished her to be his wife.
+
+"He was not rich, but Dr. Seraskier liked and trusted him so much that
+he dispossessed himself of almost everything he had to enable this young
+couple to marry--and they did. And truth compels me to admit that for a
+year they were very happy and contented with fate and each other.
+
+"Then a great misfortune befell them both. In a most unexpected manner,
+through four or five consecutive deaths in Mr. Harcourt's family, he
+became, first, Lord Harcourt, and then the Duke of Towers. And since
+then, Mr. Ibbetson, I have not had an hour's peace or happiness.
+
+"In the first place a son was born to me--a cripple, poor dear! and
+deformed from his birth; and as he grew older it soon became evident
+that he was also born without a mind.
+
+"Then my unfortunate husband changed completely; he drank and gambled
+and worse, till we came to live together as strangers, and only spoke to
+each other in public and before the world...."
+
+"Ah," I said, "you were still a great lady--an English duchess!"
+
+I could not endure the thought of that happy twelvemonth with that
+bestial duke! I, sober, chaste, and clean--of all but blood, alas!--and
+a condemned convict!
+
+Oh, Mr. Ibbetson, you must make no mistake about _me_! I was never
+intended by nature for a duchess--especially an English one. Not but
+what, if dukes and duchesses are necessary, the English are the
+best--and, of course, by dukes and duchesses I mean all that
+upper-ten-thousand in England which calls itself 'society'--as if there
+were no other worth speaking of. Some of them are almost angelic, but
+they are not for outsiders like me. Perpetual hunting and shooting and
+fishing and horseracing--eating, drinking, and killing, and making
+love--eternal court gossip and tittle-tattle--the Prince--the
+Queen--whom and what the Queen likes, whom and what she doesn't!--tame
+English party politics--the Church--a Church that doesn't know its own
+mind, in spite of its deans, bishops, archbishops, and their wives and
+daughters--and all their silly, solemn sense of social rank and dignity!
+Endless small-talk, dinners, and drums, and no society from year's end
+to year's end but each other! Ah, one must be caught young, and put in
+harness early, to lead such an existence as that and be content! And I
+had met and known _such_ men and women with my father! They _were_
+something to know!
+
+There is another society in London and elsewhere--a freemasonry of
+intellect and culture and hard work--_la haute boheme du talent_--men
+and women whose names are or ought to be household words all over the
+world; many of them are good friends of mine, both here and abroad; and
+that society, which was good enough for my father and mother, is quite
+good enough for me.
+
+I am a republican, Mr. Ibbetson--a cosmopolite--a born Bohemian!
+
+_"'Mon grand pere etait rossignol; Ma grand mere etait hirondelle!"_
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Look at my dear people there--look at your dear people! What waifs and
+strays, until their ship comes home, which we know it never will! Our
+fathers forever racking their five wits in the pursuit of an idea! Our
+mothers forever racking theirs to save money and make both ends
+meet!... Why, Mr. Ibbetson, you are nearer to the _rossignol_ than I am.
+Do you remember your father's voice? Shall I ever forget it! He sang to
+me only last night, and in the midst of my harrowing anxiety about you I
+was beguiled into listening outside the window. He sang Rossini's
+_'Cujus Animam.'_ He _was_ the nightingale; that was his vocation, if he
+could but have known it. And you are my brother Bohemian; that is
+_yours!_ ... Ah, _my_ vocation! It was to be the wife of some busy
+brain-worker--man of science--conspirator--writer--artist--architect,
+if you like; to fence him round and shield him from all the little
+worries and troubles and petty vexations of life. I am a woman of
+business _par excellence_--a manager, and all that. He would have had a
+warm, well-ordered little nest to come home to after hunting his idea!
+
+"Well, I thought myself the most unhappy woman alive, and wrapped myself
+up in my affection for my much-afflicted little son; and as I held him
+to my breast, and vainly tried to warm and mesmerize him into feeling
+and intelligence, Gogo came back into my heart, and I was forever
+thinking, 'Oh, if I had a son like Gogo what a happy woman I should be!'
+and pitied Madame Pasquier for dying and leaving him so soon, for I had
+just begun to dream true, and had seen Gogo and his sweet mother
+once again.
+
+"And then one night--one never-to-be-forgotten night--I went to Lady
+Gray's concert, and saw you standing in a corner by yourself; and I
+thought, with a leap of my heart, 'Why, that must be Gogo, grown dark,
+and with a beard and mustache like a Frenchman!' But alas, I found that
+you were only a Mr. Ibbetson, Lady Cray's architect, whom she had asked
+to her house because he was 'quite the handsomest young man she had
+ever seen!'
+
+"You needn't laugh. You looked very nice, I assure you!
+
+"Well, Mr. Ibbetson, although you were not Gogo, you became suddenly so
+interesting to me that I never forgot you--you were never quite out of
+my mind. I wanted to counsel and advise you, and take you by the hand,
+and be an elder sister to you, for I felt myself already older than you
+in the world and its ways. I wanted to be twenty years older still, and
+to have you for my son. I don't know _what_ I wanted! You seemed so
+lonely, and fresh, and unspotted from the world, among all those smart
+worldlings, and yet so big and strong and square and invincible--oh, so
+strong! And then you looked at me with such sincere and sweet and
+chivalrous admiration and sympathy--there, I cannot speak of it--and
+then you were _so_ like what Gogo might have become! Oh, you made as
+warm and devoted a friend of me at first sight as any one might desire!
+
+"And at the same time you made me feel so self-conscious and shy that I
+dared not ask to be introduced to you--I, who scarcely know what
+shyness is.
+
+"Dear Giulia Grisi sang '_Sedut' al Pie d' un' Salice,' and that tune
+has always been associated in my mind with your tongue ever since, and
+always will be. Your dear mother used to play it on the harp. Do
+you remember?
+
+"Then came that extraordinary dream, which you remember as well as I do:
+_wasn't_ it a wonder? You see, my dear father had learned a strange
+secret of the brain--how in sleep to recall past things and people and
+places as they had once been seen or known by him--even unremembered
+things. He called it 'dreaming true,' and by long practice, he told me,
+he had brought the art of doing this to perfection. It was the one
+consolation of his troubled life to go over and over again in sleep all
+his happy youth and childhood, and the few short years he had spent with
+his beloved young wife. And before he died, when he saw I had become so
+unhappy that life seemed to have no longer any possible hope of pleasure
+for me, he taught me his very simple secret.
+
+"Thus have I revisited in sleep every place I have ever lived in, and
+especially this, the beloved spot where I first as a little girl
+knew _you_!"
+
+That night when we met again in our common dream I was looking at the
+boys from Saindou's school going to their _premiere communion_, and
+thinking very much of you, as I had seen you, when awake, a few hours
+before, looking out of the window at the 'Tete Noire;' when you suddenly
+appeared in great seeming trouble and walking like a tipsy man; and my
+vision was disturbed by the shadow of a prison--alas! alas!--and two
+little jailers jingling their keys and trying to hem you in.
+
+My emotion at seeing you again so soon was so great that I nearly woke.
+But I rescued you from your imaginary terrors and held you by the hand.
+You remember all the rest.
+
+I could not understand why you should be in my dream, as I had almost
+always dreamed true--that is, about things that _had_ been in my
+life--not about things that _might_ be; nor could I account for the
+solidity of your hand, nor understand why you didn't fade away when I
+took it, and blur the dream. It was a most perplexing mystery that
+troubled many hours of both my waking and sleeping life. Then came that
+meeting with you at Cray, and part of the mystery was accounted for, for
+you were my old friend Gogo, after all. But it is still a mystery, an
+awful mystery, that two people should meet as we are meeting now in one
+and the same dream--should dovetail so accurately into each other's
+brains. What a link between us two, Mr. Ibbetson, already linked by
+such memories!
+
+After meeting you at Cray I felt that I must never meet you again,
+either waking or dreaming. The discovery that you were Gogo, after all,
+combined with the preoccupation which as a mere stranger you had already
+caused me for so long, created such a disturbance in my spirit
+that--that--there, you must try and imagine it for yourself.
+
+Even before that revelation at Cray I had often known you were here in
+my dream, and I had carefully avoided you ... though little dreaming
+you were here in your own dream too! Often from that little
+dormer-window up there I have seen you wandering about the park and
+avenue in seeming search of _me_, and wondered why and how you came. You
+drove me into attics and servants' bedrooms to conceal myself from you.
+It was quite a game of hide-and-seek--_cache-cache_, as we used to
+call it.
+
+But after our meeting at Cray I felt there must be no more
+_cache-cache_; I avoided coming here at all; you drove me away
+altogether.
+
+Now try to imagine what I felt when the news of your terrible quarrel
+with Mr. Ibbetson burst upon the world. I was beside myself! I came here
+night after night; I looked for you everywhere--in the park, in the Bois
+de Boulogne, at the Mare d'Auteuil, at St. Cloud--in every place I could
+think of! And now here you are at last--at last!
+
+Hush! Don't speak yet! I have soon done!
+
+Six months ago I lost my poor little son, and, much as I loved him, I
+cannot wish him back again. In a fortnight I shall be legally separated
+from my wretched husband--I shall be quite alone in the world! And then,
+Mr. Ibbetson--oh, _then_, dearest friend that child or woman ever
+had--every hour that I can steal from my waking existence shall
+henceforward be devoted to you as long as both of us live, and sleep the
+same hours out of the twenty-four. My one object and endeavor shall be
+to make up for the wreck of your sweet and valuable young life. 'Stone
+walls shall not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage!' [And here she
+laughed and cried together, so that her eyes, closing up, squeezed out
+her tears, and I thought, "Oh, that I might drink them!"]
+
+And now I will leave you. I am a weak and loving woman, and must not
+stay by your side till I can do so without too much self-reproach.
+
+And indeed I feel I shall soon fall awake from sheer exhaustion of joy.
+Oh, selfish and jealous wretch that I am, to talk of joy!
+
+"I cannot help rejoicing that no other woman can be to you what I hope
+to be. No other woman can ever come _near_ you! I am your tyrant and
+your slave--your calamity has made you mine forever; but all my
+life--all--all--shall be spent in trying to make you forget yours, and I
+think I shall succeed."
+
+"Oh, don't make such dreadful haste!" I exclaimed. "Am _I_ dreaming
+true? What is to prove all this to me when I wake? Either I am the most
+abject and wretched of men, or life will never have another unhappy
+moment. How am I to _know_?'
+
+"Listen. Do you remember 'Parva sed Apta, le petit pavilion,' as you
+used to call it? That is still my home when I am here. It shall be
+yours, if you like, when the time comes. You will find much to interest
+you there. Well, to-morrow early, in your cell, you will receive from me
+an envelope with a slip of paper in it, containing some violets, and the
+words 'Parva sed Apta--a bientot' written in violet ink. Will that
+convince you?"
+
+"Oh yes, yes!"
+
+"Well, then, give me your hands, dearest and best--both hands! I shall
+soon be here again, by this apple-tree; I shall count the hours.
+Good-bye!" and she was gone, and I woke.
+
+I woke to the gaslit darkness of my cell. It was just before dawn. One
+of the warders asked me civilly if I wanted anything, and gave me a
+drink of water.
+
+I thanked him quietly, and recalled what had just happened to me, with a
+wonder, an ecstasy, for which I can find no words.
+
+No, it had _not_ been a _dream_--of that I felt quite sure--not in any
+one single respect; there had been nothing of the dream about it except
+its transcendent, ineffable enchantment.
+
+Every inflexion of that beloved voice, with its scarcely perceptible
+foreign accent that I had never noticed before; every animated gesture,
+with its subtle reminiscence of both her father and her mother; her
+black dress trimmed with gray; her black and gray hat; the scent of
+sandal-wood about her--all were more distinctly and vividly impressed
+upon me than if she had just been actually, and in the flesh, at my
+bedside. Her tones still rang in my ears. My eyes were full of her: now
+her profile, so pure and chiselled; now her full face, with her gray
+eyes (sometimes tender and grave and wet with tears, sometimes half
+closed in laughter) fixed on mine; her lithe sweet body curved forward,
+as she sat and clasped her knees; her arched and slender smooth straight
+feet so delicately shod, that seemed now and then to beat time to
+her story....
+
+And then that strange sense of the transfusion of life at the touching
+of the hands! Oh, it was _no dream_! Though what it was I
+cannot tell....
+
+I turned on my side, happy beyond expression, and fell asleep again--a
+dreamless sleep that lasted till I was woke and told to dress.
+
+[Illustration: "MY EYES WERE FULL OF HER."]
+
+Some breakfast was brought to me, and _with it an envelope, open, which
+contained some violets, and a slip of paper, scented with sandal-wood,
+on which were written, in violet ink, the words--
+
+"Parva sed Apla--a bientot!
+Tarapatapoum."_
+
+I will pass over the time that elapsed between my sentence and its
+commutation; the ministrations and exhortations of the good chaplain;
+the kind and touching farewells of Mr. and Mrs. Lintot, who had also
+believed that I was Ibbetson's son (I undeceived them); the visit of my
+old friend Mrs. Deane ... and her strange passion of gratitude and
+admiration.
+
+I have no doubt it would all be interesting enough, if properly
+remembered and ably told. But it was all too much like a
+dream--anybody's dream--not one of _mine_--all too slight and flimsy to
+have left an abiding remembrance, or to matter much.
+
+In due time I was removed to the jail at----, and bade farewell to the
+world, and adapted myself to the conditions of my new outer life with a
+good grace and with a very light heart.
+
+The prison routine, leaving the brain so free and unoccupied; the
+healthy labor, the pure air, the plain, wholesome food were delightful
+to me--a much-needed daily mental rest after the tumultuous emotions of
+each night.
+
+For I was soon back again in Passy, where I spent every hour of my
+sleep, you may be sure, never very far from the old apple-tree, which
+went through all its changes, from bare bough to tender shoots and
+blossoms, from blossom to ripe fruit, from fruit to yellow falling leaf,
+and then to bare boughs again, and all in a few peaceful nights, which
+were my days. I flatter myself by this time that I know the habits of a
+French apple-tree, and its caterpillars!
+
+And all the dear people I loved, and of whom I could never tire, were
+about--all but one. _The_ One!
+
+At last she arrived. The garden door was pushed, the bell rang, and she
+came across the lawn, radiant and tall and swift, and opened wide her
+arms. And there, with our little world around us--all that we had ever
+loved and cared for, but quite unseen and unheard by them--for the first
+time in my life since my mother and Madame Seraskier had died I held a
+woman in my arms, and she pressed her lips to mine.
+
+[Illustration: "AT LAST SHE ARRIVED."]
+
+Round and round the lawn we walked and talked, as we had often done
+fifteen, sixteen, twenty years ago. There were many things to say. "The
+Charming Prince" and the "Fairy Tarapatapoum" were "prettily well
+together"--at last!
+
+The time sped quickly--far too quickly. I said--
+
+"You told me I should see your house--'Parva sed Apta'--that I should
+find much to interest me there." ...
+
+She blushed a little and smiled, and said--
+
+"You mustn't expect _too_ much," and we soon found ourselves walking
+thither up the avenue. Thus we had often walked as children, and once--a
+memorable once--besides.
+
+There stood the little white house with its golden legend, as I had seen
+it a thousand times when a boy--a hundred since.
+
+How sweet and small it looked in the mellow sunshine! We mounted the
+stone _perron_, and opened the door and entered. My heart beat
+violently.
+
+Everything was as it had always been, as far as I could see. Dr.
+Seraskier sat in a chair by the window reading Schiller, and took no
+notice of us. His hair moved in the gentle breeze. Overhead we heard the
+rooms being swept and the beds made.
+
+I followed her into a little lumber-room, where I did not remember to
+have been before; it was full of odds and ends.
+
+"Why have you brought me here?" I asked.
+
+She laughed and said--
+
+"Open the door in the wall opposite."
+
+There was no door, and I said so.
+
+Then she took my hand, and lo! there _was_ a door! And she pushed, and
+we entered another suite of apartments that never could have been there
+before; there had never been room for them--nor ever could have been--in
+all Passy!
+
+[Illustration: "'AND NEUHA LED HER TORQUIL BY THE HAND.'"]
+
+"Come," she said, laughing and blushing at once; for she seemed nervous
+and excited and shy--do you remember--
+
+      'And Neuha led her Torquil by the hand,
+       And waved along the vault her flaming brand!'
+
+--do you remember your little drawing out of _The Island_, in the green
+morocco Byron? Here it is, in the top drawer of this beautiful cabinet.
+Here are all the drawings you ever did for me--plain and colored--with
+dates, explanations, etc., all written by myself--_l'album de la fee
+Tarapatapoum_. They are only duplicates. I have the real ones at my
+house in Hampshire.
+
+The cabinet also is a duplicate;--isn't it a beauty?--it's from the
+Czar's Winter Palace. Everything here is a duplicate, more or less. See,
+this is a little dining-room;--did you ever see anything so perfect?--it
+is the famous _salle a manger_ of Princesse de Chevagne. I never use it,
+except now and then to eat a slice of English household bread with
+French butter and 'cassonade.' Little Mimsey, out there, does so
+sometimes, when Gogo brings her one, and it makes big Mimsey's mouth
+water to see her, so she has to go and do likewise. Would you like
+a slice?
+
+You see the cloth is spread, _deux couverts_. There is a bottle of
+famous champagne from Mr. De Rothschild's; there's plenty more where
+that came from. The flowers are from Chatsworth, and this is a lobster
+salad for _you_. Papa was great at lobster salads and taught me. I mixed
+it myself a fortnight ago, and, as you see, it is as fresh and sweet as
+if I had only just made it, and the flowers haven't faded a bit.
+
+Here are cigarettes and pipes and cigars. I hope they are good. I don't
+smoke myself.
+
+Isn't all the furniture rare and beautiful? I have robbed every palace
+in Europe of its very best, and yet the owners are not a penny the
+worse. You should see up-stairs.
+
+Look at those pictures--the very pick of Raphael and Titian and
+Velasquez. Look at that piano--I have heard Liszt play upon it over and
+over again, in Leipsic!
+
+Here is my library. Every book I ever read is there, and every binding
+I ever admired. I don't often read them, but I dust them carefully. I've
+arranged that dust shall fall on them in the usual way to make it real,
+and remind one of the outer life one is so glad to leave. All has to be
+taken very seriously here, and one must put one's self to a little
+trouble. See, here is my father's microscope, and under it a small
+spider caught on the premises by myself. It is still alive. It seems
+cruel, doesn't it? but it only exists in our brains.
+
+Look at the dress I've got on--feel it; how every detail is worked out.
+And you have unconsciously done the same: that's the suit you wore that
+morning at Cray under the ash-tree--the nicest suit I ever saw. Here is
+a spot of ink on your sleeve as real as can be (bravo!). And this button
+is coming off--quite right; I will sew it on with a dream needle, and
+dream thread, and a dream thimble!
+
+This little door leads to every picture-gallery in Europe. It took me a
+long time to build and arrange them all by myself--quite a week of
+nights. It is very pleasant to walk there with a good catalogue, and
+make it rain cats and dogs outside.
+
+Through this curtain is an opera box--the most comfortable one I've
+ever been in; it does for theatres as well, and oratorios and concerts
+and scientific lectures. You shall see from it every performance I've
+ever been at, in half a dozen languages; you shall hold my hand and
+understand them all. Every singer that I ever heard, you shall hear.
+Dear Giulia Grisi shall sing the 'Willow Song' again and again, and you
+shall hear the applause. Ah, what applause!
+
+Come into this little room--my favorite; out of _this_ window and down
+these steps we can walk or drive to any place you or I have ever been
+to, and other places besides. Nothing is far, and we have only to go
+hand in hand. I don't know yet where my stables and coach-houses are;
+you must help me to find out. But so far I have never lacked a carriage
+at the bottom of those steps when I wanted to drive, nor a steam-launch,
+nor a gondola, nor a lovely place to go to.
+
+Out of _this_ window, from this divan, we can sit and gaze on whatever
+we like. What shall it be? Just now, you perceive, there is a wild and
+turbulent sea, with not a ship in sight. Do you hear the waves tumbling
+and splashing, and see the albatross? I had been reading Keats's 'Ode to
+the Nightingale,' and was so fascinated by the idea of a lattice opening
+on the foam
+
+     '_Of perilous seas by faery lands forlorn_'
+
+that I thought it would be nice to have a lattice like that myself. I
+tried to evolve that sea from my inner consciousness, you know, or
+rather from seas that I have sailed over. Do you like it? It was done a
+fortnight ago, and the waves have been tumbling about ever since. How
+they roar! and hark at the wind! I couldn't manage the 'faery lands.' It
+wants one lattice for the sea, and one for the land, I'm afraid. You
+must help me. Mean while, what would you like there tonight--the
+Yosemite Valley? the Nevski Prospect in the winter, with the sledges?
+the Rialto? the Bay of Naples after sunset, with Vesuvius in eruption?...
+
+--"Oh Mary--Mimsey--what do I care for Vesuvius, and sunsets, and the
+Bay of Naples ... _just now_? ... Vesuvius is in my heart!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thus began for us both a period of twenty-five years, during which we
+passed eight or nine hours out of the twenty-four in each other's
+company--except on a few rare occasions, when illness or some other
+cause prevented one of us from sleeping at the proper time.
+
+Mary! Mary!
+
+I idolized her while she lived; I idolize her memory.
+
+For her sake all women are sacred to me, even the lowest and most
+depraved and God-forsaken. They always found a helping friend in _her_.
+
+How can I pay a fitting tribute to one so near to me--nearer than any
+woman can ever have been to any man?
+
+I know her mind as I know my own! No two human souls can ever have
+interpenetrated each other as ours have done, or we should have heard of
+it. Every thought she ever had from her childhood to her death has been
+revealed--every thought of mine! Living as we did, it was inevitable.
+The touch of a finger was enough to establish the strange circuit, and
+wake a common consciousness of past and present, either hers or mine.
+
+And oh, how thankful am I that some lucky chance has preserved me,
+murderer and convict as I am, from anything she would have found it
+impossible to condone!
+
+I try not to think that shyness and poverty, ungainliness and social
+imbecility combined, have had as much to do as self-restraint and
+self-respect in keeping me out of so many pitfalls that have been fatal
+to so many men better and more gifted than myself.
+
+I try to think that her extraordinary affection, the chance result of a
+persistent impression received in childhood, has followed me through
+life without my knowing it, and in some occult, mysterious way has kept
+me from thoughts and deeds that would have rendered me unworthy, even in
+her too indulgent eyes.
+
+Who knows but that her sweet mother's farewell kiss and blessing, and
+the tender tears she shed over me when I bade her good-bye at the avenue
+gate so many years ago, may have had an antiseptic charm? Mary! I have
+followed her from her sickly, suffering childhood to her girlhood--from
+her half-ripe, gracefully lanky girlhood to the day of her retirement
+from the world of which she was so great an ornament. From girl to woman
+it seems like a triumphal procession through all the courts of
+Europe--scenes the like of which I have never even dreamed--flattery and
+strife to have turned the head of any princess! And she was the simple
+daughter of a working scientist and physician--the granddaughter of
+a fiddler.
+
+Yet even Austrian court etiquette was waived in favor of the child of
+plain Dr. Seraskier.
+
+What men have I seen at her feet--how splendid, handsome, gallant,
+brilliant, chivalrous, lordly, and gay! And to all, from her, the same
+happy geniality--the same kindly, laughing, frolicsome, innocent gayety,
+with never a thought of self.
+
+M. le Major was right--"elle avait toutes les intelligences de la tete
+et du coeur." And old and young, the best and the worst, seemed to love
+and respect her alike--and women as well as men--for her perfect
+sincerity, her sweet reasonableness.
+
+And all this time I was plodding at my dull drawing-board in
+Pentonville, carrying out another's designs for a stable or a pauper's
+cottage, and not even achieving that poor task particularly well!
+
+It would have driven me mad with humiliation and jealousy to see this
+past life of hers, but we saw it all hand in hand together--the magical
+circuit was established! And I knew, as I saw, how it all affected her,
+and marvelled at her simplicity in thinking all this pomp and splendor
+of so little consequence.
+
+And I trembled to find that what space in her heart was not filled by
+the remembrance of her ever-beloved mother and the image of her father
+(one of the noblest and best of men) enshrined the ridiculous figure of
+a small boy in a white silk hat and an Eton jacket. And that small
+boy was I!
+
+Then came a dreadful twelvemonth that I was fain to leave a blank--the
+twelvemonth during which her girlish fancy for her husband lasted--and
+then her life was mine again forever!
+
+And _my_ life!
+
+The life of a convict is not, as a rule, a happy one; his bed is not
+generally thought a bed of roses.
+
+Mine was!
+
+If I had been the most miserable leper that ever crawled to his wattled
+hut in Molokai, I should also have been the happiest of men, could sleep
+but have found me there, and could I but sleeping have been the friend
+of sleeping Mary Seraskier. She would have loved me all the more!
+
+She has filled my long life of bondage with such felicity as no monarch
+has ever dreamed, and has found her own felicity in doing so. That poor,
+plodding existence I led before my great misadventure, and have tried to
+describe--she has witnessed almost every hour of it with passionate
+interest and sympathy, as we went hand in hand together through each
+other's past. She would at any time have been only too glad to share it,
+leaving her own.
+
+I dreaded the effect of such a sordid revelation upon one who had lived
+so brilliantly and at such an altitude. I need have had no fear! Just as
+she thought me an "angelic hero" at eight years old, she remained
+persuaded all through her life that I was an Apollo--a misunderstood
+genius--a martyr!
+
+I am sick with shame when I think of it. But I am not the first unworthy
+mortal on whom blind, undiscriminating love has chosen to lavish its
+most priceless treasures. Tarapatapoum is not the only fairy who has
+idealized a hulking clown with an ass's head into a Prince Charming;
+the spectacle, alas! is not infrequent. But at least I have been humbly
+thankful for the undeserved blessing, and known its value. And,
+moreover, I think I may lay claim to one talent: that of also knowing by
+intuition when and where and how to love--in a moment--in a
+flash--and forever!
+
+Twenty-five years!
+
+It seems like a thousand, so much have we seen and felt and done in that
+busy enchanted quarter of a century. And yet how quickly the time
+has sped!
+
+And now I must endeavor to give some account of our wonderful inner
+life--_a deux_--a delicate and difficult task.
+
+There is both an impertinence and a lack of taste in any man's laying
+bare to the public eye--to any eye--the bliss that has come to him
+through the love of a devoted woman, with whose life his own has
+been bound up.
+
+The most sympathetic reader is apt to be repelled by such a
+revelation--to be sceptical of the beauties and virtues and mental gifts
+of one he has never seen; at all events, to feel that they are no
+concern of his, and ought to be the subject of a sacred reticence on the
+part of her too fortunate lover or husband.
+
+The lack of such reticence has marred the interest of many an
+autobiography--of many a novel, even; and in private life, who does not
+know by painful experience how embarrassing to the listener such tender
+confidences can sometimes be? I will try my best not to transgress in
+this particular. If I fail (I may have failed already), I can only plead
+that the circumstances are quite exceptional and not to be matched; and
+that allowances must be made for the deep gratitude I owe and feel over
+and above even my passionate admiration and love.
+
+For the next three years of my life has nothing to show but the
+alternation of such honeymooning as never was before with a dull but
+contented prison life, not one hour of which is worth recording, or even
+remembering, except as a foil to its alternative.
+
+It had but one hour for me, the bed hour, and fortunately that was an
+early one.
+
+Healthily tired in body, blissfully expectant in mind, I would lie on my
+back, with my hands duly crossed under my head, and sleep would soon
+steal over me like balm; and before I had forgotten who and what and
+where I really was, I would reach the goal on which my will was intent,
+and waking up, find my body in another place, in another garb, on a
+couch by an enchanted window, still with my arms crossed behind my
+head--in the sacramental attitude.
+
+Then would I stretch my limbs and slip myself free of my outer life, as
+a new-born butterfly from the durance of its self-spun cocoon, with an
+unutterable sense of youth and strength and freshness and felicity; and
+opening my eyes I would see on the adjacent couch the form of Mary, also
+supine, but motionless and inanimate as a statue. Nothing could wake her
+to life till the time came: her hours were somewhat later, and she was
+still in the toils of the outer life I had just left behind me.
+
+And these toils, in her case, were more complicated than in mine.
+Although she had given up the world, she had many friends and an immense
+correspondence. And then, being a woman endowed with boundless health
+and energy, splendid buoyancy of animal spirits, and a great capacity
+for business, she had made for herself many cares and occupations.
+
+She was the virtual mistress of a home for fallen women, a reformatory
+for juvenile thieves, and a children's convalescent hospital--to all of
+which she gave her immediate personal superintendence, and almost every
+penny she had. She had let her house in Hampshire, and lived with a
+couple of female servants in a small furnished house on Campden Hill.
+She did without a carriage, and went about in cabs and omnibuses,
+dressed like a daily governess, though nobody could appear more regally
+magnificent than she did when we were together.
+
+She still kept her name and title, as a potent weapon of influence on
+behalf of her charities, and wielded it mercilessly in her constant raid
+on the purse of the benevolent Philistine, who is fond of great people.
+
+All of which gave rise to much comment that did not affect her
+equanimity in the least.
+
+She also attended lectures, committees, boards, and councils; opened
+bazaars and soup kitchens and coffee taverns, etc. The list of her
+self-imposed tasks was endless. Thus her outer life was filled to
+overflowing, and, unlike mine, every hour of it was worth record--as I
+well know, who have witnessed it all. But this is not the place in which
+to write the outer life of the Duchess of Towers; another hand has done
+that, as everybody knows.
+
+Every page henceforward must be sacred to Mary Seraskier, the "fee
+Tarapatapoum" of "Magna sed Apta" (for so we had called the new home
+and palace of art she had added on to "Parva sed Apta," the home of her
+childhood).
+
+To return thither, where we left her lying unconscious. Soon the color
+would come back to her cheeks, the breath to her nostrils, the pulse to
+her heart, and she would wake to her Eden, as she called it--our common
+inner life--that we might spend it in each other's company for the next
+eight hours.
+
+Pending this happy moment, I would make coffee (such coffee!), and smoke
+a cigarette or two; and to fully appreciate the bliss of _that_ one must
+be an habitual smoker who lives his real life in an English jail.
+
+When she awoke from her sixteen hours' busy trance in the outer world,
+such a choice of pleasures lay before us as no other mortal has ever
+known. She had been all her life a great traveller, and had dwelt in
+many lands and cities, and seen more of life and the world and nature
+than most people. I had but to take her hand, and one of us had but to
+wish, and, lo! wherever either of us had been, whatever either of us had
+seen or heard or felt, or even eaten or drunk, there it was all over
+again to choose from, with the other to share in it--such a hypnotism of
+ourselves and each other as was never dreamed of before.
+
+Everything was as life-like, as real to us both, as it had been to
+either at the actual time of its occurrence, with an added freshness and
+charm that never belonged to mortal existence. It was no dream; it was a
+second life, a better land.
+
+We had, however, to stay within certain bounds, and beware of
+transgressing certain laws that we discovered for ourselves, but could
+not quite account for. For instance, it was fatal to attempt exploits
+that were outside of our real experience; to fly, or to jump from a
+height, or do any of these non-natural things that make the charm and
+wonder of ordinary dreams. If we did so our true dream was blurred, and
+became as an ordinary dream--vague, futile, unreal, and untrue--the
+baseless fabric of a vision. Nor must we alter ourselves in any way;
+even to the shape of a finger-nail, we must remain ourselves; although
+we kept ourselves at our very best, and could choose what age we should
+be. We chose from twenty-six to twenty-eight, and stuck to it.
+
+Yet there were many things, quite as impossible in real life, that we
+could do with impunity--most delightful things!
+
+For instance, after the waking cup of coffee, it was certainly
+delightful to spend a couple of hours in the Yosemite Valley, leisurely
+strolling about and gazing at the giant pines--a never-palling source of
+delight to both of us--breathing the fragrant fresh air, looking at our
+fellow-tourists and listening to their talk, with the agreeable
+consciousness that, solid and substantial as we were to each other, we
+were quite inaudible, invisible, and intangible to them. Often we would
+dispense with the tourists, and have the Yosemite Valley all to
+ourselves. (Always there, and in whatever place she had visited with her
+husband, we would dispense with the figure of her former self and him, a
+sight I could not have borne.)
+
+When we had strolled and gazed our fill, it was delightful again, just
+by a slight effort of her will and a few moments' closing of our eyes,
+to find ourselves driving along the Via Cornice to an exquisite garden
+concert in Dresden, or being rowed in a gondola to a Saturday Pop at St.
+James's Hall. And thence, jumping into a hansom, we would be whisked
+through Piccadilly and the park to the Arc de Triomphe home to "Magna
+sed Apta," Rue de la Pompe, Passy (a charming drive, and not a bit too
+long), just in time for dinner.
+
+A very delicious little dinner, judiciously ordered out of _her_
+remembrance, not _mine_ (and served in the most exquisite little
+dining-room in all Paris--the Princesse de Chevagne's): "huitres
+d'Ostende," let us say, and "soupe a la bonne femme," with a "perdrix
+aux choux" to follow, and pancakes, and "fromage de Brie;" and to drink,
+a bottle of "Romane Conti;" without even the bother of waiters to change
+the dishes; a wish, a moment's shutting of the eyes--_augenblick_! and
+it was done--and then we could wait on each other.
+
+After my prison fare, and with nothing but tenpenny London dinners to
+recollect in the immediate past, I trust I shall not be thought a gross
+materialist for appreciating these small banquets, and in such company.
+(The only dinner I could recall which was not a tenpenny one, except the
+old dinners of my childhood, was that famous dinner at Cray, where I had
+discovered that the Duchess of Towers was Mimsey Seraskier, and I did
+not eat much of _that_.)
+
+Then a cigarette and a cup of coffee, and a glass of curacoa; and after,
+to reach our private box we had but to cross the room and lift
+a curtain.
+
+And there before us was the theatre or opera-house brilliantly lighted,
+and the instruments tuning up, and the splendid company pouring in:
+crowned heads, famous beauties, world-renowned warriors and statesmen,
+Garibaldi, Gortschakoff, Cavour, Bismarck, and Moltke, now so famous,
+and who not? Mary would point them out to me. And in the next box Dr.
+Seraskier and his tall daughter, who seemed friends with all that
+brilliant crowd.
+
+Now it was St. Petersburg, now Berlin, now Vienna, Paris, Naples, Milan,
+London--every great city in turn. But our box was always the same, and
+always the best in the house, and I the one person privileged to smoke
+my cigar in the face of all that royalty, fashion, and splendor.
+
+Then, after the overture, up went the curtain. If it was a play, and the
+play was in German or Russian or Italian, I had but to touch Mary's
+little finger to understand it all--a true but incomprehensible thing.
+For well as I might understand, I could not have spoken a word of
+either, and the moment that slight contact was discontinued, they might
+as well have been acting in Greek or Hebrew, for _me_.
+
+But it was for music we cared the most, and I think I may say that of
+music during those three years (and ever after) we have had our glut.
+For all through her busy waking life Mary found time to hear whatever
+good music was going on in London, that she might bring it back to me at
+night; and we would rehear it together, again and again, and _da capo_.
+
+It is a rare privilege for two private individuals, and one of them a
+convict, to assist at a performance honored by the patronage and
+presence of crowned heads, and yet be able to encore any particular
+thing that pleases them. How often have we done that!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Oh, Joachim! oh, Clara Schumann! oh, Piattil--all of whom I know so
+well, but have never heard with the fleshly ear! Oh, others, whom it
+would be invidious to mention without mentioning all--a glorious list!
+How we have made you, all unconscious, repeat the same movements over
+and over again, without ever from you a sign of impatience or fatigue!
+How often have we summoned Liszt to play to us on his own favorite
+piano, which adorned our own favorite sitting-room! How little he knew
+(or will ever know now, alas!) what exquisite delight he gave us!
+
+Oh, Pattit, Angelina! Oh, Santley and Sims Reeves! Oh, De Soria,
+nightingale of the drawing-room, I wonder you have a note left!
+
+And you, Ristori, and you, Salvini, et vous, divine Sarah, qui debutiez
+alors! On me dit que votre adorable voix a perdu un peu de sa premiere
+fraicheur. Cela ne m'etonne pas! Bien sur, nous y sommes pour
+quelque chose!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And then the picture-galleries, the museums, the botanical and
+zoological gardens of all countries--"Magna sed Apta" had space for them
+all, even to the Elgin Marbles room of the British Museum, which I
+added myself.
+
+What enchanted hours have we spent among the pictures and statues of the
+world, weeding them here and there, perhaps, or hanging them
+differently, or placing them in what we thought a better light! The
+"Venus of Milo" showed to far greater advantage in "Magna sed Apta" than
+at the Louvre.
+
+And when busied thus delightfully at home, and to enhance the delight,
+we made it shocking bad weather outside; it rained cats and dogs, or
+else the north wind piped, and snow fell on the desolate gardens of
+"Magna sed Apta," and whitened the landscape as far as eye could see.
+
+Nearest to our hearts, however, were many pictures of our own time, for
+we were moderns of the moderns, after all, in spite of our efforts of
+self-culture.
+
+There was scarcely a living or recently living master in Europe whose
+best works were not in our possession, so lighted and hung that even the
+masters themselves would have been content; for we had plenty of space
+at our command, and each picture had a wall to itself, so toned as to do
+full justice to its beauty, and a comfortable sofa for two
+just opposite.
+
+But in the little room we most lived in, the room with the magic window,
+we had crowded a few special favorites of the English school, for we had
+so much foreign blood in us that we were more British than John Bull
+himself--_plus royalistes que le Roi_.
+
+There was Millais's "Autumn Leaves," his "Youth of Sir Walter Raleigh,"
+his "Chill October"; Watts's "Endymion," and "Orpheus and Eurydice";
+Burne-Jones's "Chant d'Amour," and his "Laus Veneris"; Alma-Tadema's
+"Audience of Agrippa," and the "Women of Amphissa"; J. Whistler's
+portrait of his mother; the "Venus and Aesculapius," by E. J. Poynter;
+F. Leighton's "Daphnephoria"; George Mason's "Harvest Moon"; and
+Frederic Walker's "Harbor of Refuge," and, of course, Merridew's
+"Sun-God."
+
+While on a screen, designed by H. S. Marks, and exquisitely decorated
+round the margin with golden plovers and their eggs (which I adore),
+were smaller gems in oil and water-color that Mary had fallen in love
+with at one time or another. The immortal "Moonlight Sonata," by
+Whistler; E, J. Poynter's exquisite "Our Lady of the Fields" (dated
+Paris, 1857); a pair of adorable "Bimbi" by V. Prinsep, who seems very
+fond of children; T. R. Lamont's touching "L'Apres Diner de l'Abbe
+Constantin," with the sweet girl playing the old spinet; and that
+admirable work of T. Armstrong, in his earlier and more realistic
+manner, "Le Zouave et la Nounou," not to mention splendid rough sketches
+by John Leech, Charles Keene, Tenniel, Sambourne, Furniss, Caldecott,
+etc.; not to mention, also, endless little sketches in silver point of a
+most impossibly colossal, blackavised, shaggy-coated St. Bernard--signed
+with the familiar French name of some gay troubadour of the pencil, some
+stray half-breed like myself, and who seems to have loved his dog as
+much as I loved mine.
+
+Then suddenly, in the midst of all this unparalleled artistic splendor,
+we felt that a something was wanting. There was a certain hollowness
+about it; and we discovered that in our case the principal motives for
+collecting all these beautiful things were absent.
+
+  1. We were not the sole possessors.
+  2. We had nobody to show them to.
+  3. Therefore we could take no pride in them.
+
+[Illustration: THE NURSERY SCHOOL-ROOM.]
+
+And found that when we wanted bad weather for a change, and the joys of
+home, we could be quite as happy in my old school-room, where the
+squirrels and the monkey and the hedgehog were, with each of us on a
+cane-bottomed arm-chair by the wood-fire, each roasting chestnuts for
+the other, and one book between us, for one of us to read out loud; or,
+better still, the morning and evening papers she had read a few hours
+earlier; and marvellous to relate, she had not even _read_ them when
+awake! she had merely glanced through them carefully, taking in the
+aspect of each column one after another, from top to bottom--and yet she
+was able to read out every word from the dream-paper she held in her
+hands--thus truly chewing the very cud of journalism!
+
+This always seemed to us, in a small but practical way, the most
+complete and signal triumph of mind over matter we had yet achieved.
+
+Not, indeed, that we could read much, we had so much to talk about.
+
+Unfortunately, the weak part of "Magna sed Apta" was its library.
+Naturally it could only consist of books that one or the other of us had
+read when awake. She had led such an active life that but little leisure
+had been left her for books, and I had read only as an every-day young
+man reads who is fond of reading.
+
+However, such books as we _had_ read were made the most of, and so
+magnificently bound that even their authors would have blushed with
+pride and pleasure had they been there to see. And though we had little
+time for reading them over again, we could enjoy the true bibliophilous
+delight of gazing at their backs, and taking them down and fingering
+them and putting them carefully back again.
+
+In most of these treats, excursions, festivities, and pleasures of the
+fireside, Mary was naturally leader and hostess; it could scarcely have
+been otherwise.
+
+There was once a famous Mary, of whom it was said that to know her was a
+liberal education. I think I may say that to have known Mary Seraskier
+has been all that to me!
+
+But now and then I would make some small attempt at returning her
+hospitality.
+
+We have slummed together in Clerkenwell, Smithfield, Cow Cross,
+Petticoat Lane, Ratcliffe Highway, and the East India and West
+India docks.
+
+She has been with me to penny gaffs and music-halls; to Greenwich Fair,
+and Cremorne and Rosherville gardens--and liked them all. She knew
+Pentonville as well as I do; and my old lodgings there, where we have
+both leaned over my former shoulder as I read or drew. It was she who
+rescued from oblivion my little prophetic song about "The Chime," which
+I had quite forgotten. She has been to Mr. Lintot's parties, and found
+them most amusing--especially Mr. Lintot.
+
+And going further back into the past, she has roamed with me all over
+Paris, and climbed with me the towers of Notre Dame, and looked in vain
+for the mystic word [Greek: Anagkae]!
+
+But I had also better things to show, untravelled as I was.
+
+She had never seen Hampstead Heath, which I knew by heart; and Hampstead
+Heath at any time, but especially on a sunny morning in late October, is
+not to be disdained by any one.
+
+Half the leaves have fallen, so that one can see the fading glory of
+those that remain; yellow and brown and pale and hectic red, shining
+like golden guineas and bright copper coins against the rich, dark,
+business-like green of the trees that mean to flourish all the winter
+through, like the tall slanting pines near the Spaniards, and the old
+cedar-trees, and hedges of yew and holly, for which the Hampstead
+gardens are famous.
+
+Before us lies a sea of fern, gone a russet-brown from decay, in which
+are isles of dark green gorse, and little trees with little scarlet and
+orange and lemon-colored leaflets fluttering down, and running after
+each other on the bright grass, under the brisk west wind which makes
+the willows rustle, and turn up the whites of their leaves in pious
+resignation to the coming change.
+
+Harrow-on-the-Hill, with its pointed spire, rises blue in the distance;
+and distant ridges, like receding waves, rise into blueness, one after
+the other, out of the low-lying mist; the last ridge bluely melting into
+space. In the midst of it all gleams the Welsh Harp Lake, like a piece
+of sky that has become unstuck and tumbled into the landscape with its
+shiny side up.
+
+On the other side, all London, with nothing but the gilded cross of St.
+Paul's on a level with the eye; it lies at our feet, as Paris used to do
+from the heights of Passy, a sight to make true dreamers gaze and think
+and dream the more; and there we sit thinking and dreaming and gazing
+our fill, hand in hand, our spirits rushing together.
+
+Once as we sat we heard the clatter of hoofs behind us, and there was a
+troop of my old regiment out exercising. Invisible to all but ourselves,
+and each other, we watched the wanton troopers riding by on their meek
+black chargers.
+
+First came the cornet--a sunny-haired Apollo, a gilded youth, graceful
+and magnificent to the eye--careless, fearless, but stupid, harsh, and
+proud--an English Phebus de Chateaupers--the son of a great contractor;
+I remembered him well, and that he loved me not. Then the rank and file
+in stable jackets, most of them (but for a stalwart corporal here and
+there) raw, lanky youths, giving promise of much future strength, and
+each leading a second horse; and among them, longest and lankiest of
+them all, but ruddy as a ploughboy, and stolidly whistling _"On revient
+toujours a ses premiers amours,"_ rode my former self--a sight (or
+sound) that seemed to touch some tender chord in Mary's nature, where
+there were so many, since it filled her eyes with tears.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+To describe in full a honey-moon filled with such adventures, and that
+lasted for three years, is unnecessary. It would be but another
+superficial record of travel, by another unskilled pen. And what a pen
+is wanted for such a theme! It was not mere life, it was the very cream
+and essence of life, that we shared with each other--all the toil and
+trouble, the friction and fatigue, left out. The necessary earthly
+journey through time and space from one joy to another was omitted,
+unless such a journey were a joy in itself.
+
+For instance, a pleasant hour can be spent on the deck of a splendid
+steamer, as it cleaves its way through a sapphire tropical sea, bound
+for some lovely West Indian islet; with a good cigar and the dearest
+companion in the world, watching the dolphins and the flying-fish, and
+mildly interesting one's self in one's fellow-passengers, the captain,
+the crew. And then, the hour spent and the cigar smoked out, it is well
+to shut one's eyes and have one's self quietly lowered down the side of
+the vessel into a beautiful sledge, and then, half smothered in costly
+furs, to be whirled along the frozen Neva to a ball at the Winter
+Palace, there to valse with one's Mary among all the beauty and chivalry
+of St. Petersburg, and never a soul to find fault with one's valsing,
+which at first was far from perfect, or one's attire, which was not that
+of the fashionable world of the day, nor was Mary's either. We were
+aesthetic people, and very Greek, who made for ourselves fashions of our
+own, which I will not describe.
+
+[Illustration:]
+
+Where have we not waltzed together, from Buckingham Palace downward? I
+confess I grew to take a delight in valsing, or waltzing, or whatever it
+is properly called; and although it is not much to boast of, I may say
+that after a year or two no better dancer than I was to be found in
+all Vienna.
+
+And here, by the way, I may mention what pleasure it gave me (hand in
+hand with Mary, of course, as usual) to renew and improve my
+acquaintance with our British aristocracy, begun so agreeably many years
+ago at Lady Cray's concert.
+
+Our British aristocracy does not waltz well by any means, and lacks
+lightness generally; but it may gratify and encourage some of its
+members to hear that Peter Ibbetson (ex-private soldier, architect and
+surveyor, convict and criminal lunatic), who has had unrivalled
+opportunities for mixing with the cream of European society, considers
+our British aristocracy quite the best-looking, best-dressed, and
+best-behaved aristocracy of them all, and the most sensible and the
+least exclusive--perhaps the most sensible _because_ the least
+exclusive.
+
+It often snubs, but does not altogether repulse, those gifted and
+privileged outsiders who (just for the honor and glory of the thing) are
+ever so ready to flatter and instruct and amuse it, and run its
+errands, and fetch and carry, and tumble for its pleasure, and even to
+marry such of its "ugly ducklings" (or shall we say such of its
+"unprepossessing cygnets?") as cannot hope to mate with birds of their
+own feather.
+
+For it has the true English eye for physical beauty.
+
+Indeed, it is much given to throw the handkerchief--successfully, of
+course--and, most fortunately for itself, beyond the pale of its own
+narrow precincts--nay, beyond the broad Atlantic, even, to the land
+where beauty and dollars are to be found in such happy combination.
+
+Nor does it disdain the comeliness of the daughters of Israel, nor their
+shekels, nor their brains, nor their ancient and most valuable blood. It
+knows the secret virtue of that mechanical transfusion of fluids
+familiar to science under the name of "endosmoses" and "exosmoses" (I
+hope I have spelled them rightly), and practises the same. Whereby it
+shows itself wise in its generation, and will endure the longer, which
+cannot be very long.
+
+Peter Ibbetson (etc., etc.), for one, wishes it no manner of harm.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But to return. With all these temptations of travel and amusement and
+society and the great world, such was our insatiable fondness for "the
+pretty place of our childhood" and all its associations, that our
+greatest pleasure of all was to live our old life over again and again,
+and make Gogo and Mimsey and our parents and cousins and M. le Major go
+through their old paces once more; and to recall _new_ old paces for
+them, which we were sometimes able to do, out of stray forgotten bits of
+the past; to hunt for which was the most exciting sport in the world.
+
+Our tenderness for these beloved shades increased with familiarity. We
+could see all the charm and goodness and kindness of these dear fathers
+and mothers of ours with the eyes of matured experience, for we were
+pretty much of an age with them now; no other children could ever say as
+much since the world began, and how few young parents could bear such a
+scrutiny as ours.
+
+Ah! what would we not have given to extort just a spark of recognition,
+but that was impossible; or to have been able to whisper just a word of
+warning, which would have averted the impending strokes of inexorable
+fate! They might have been alive now, perhaps--old indeed, but honored
+and loved as no parents ever were before. How different everything would
+have been! Alas! alas!
+
+And of all things in the world, we never tired of that walk through the
+avenue and park and Bois de Boulogne to the Mare d'Auteuil; strolling
+there leisurely on an early spring afternoon, just in time to spend a
+midsummer hour or two on its bank, and watch the old water-rat and the
+dytiscus and the tadpoles and newts, and see the frogs jump; and then
+walking home at dusk in the school-room of my old home; and then back to
+war, well-lighted "Magna sed Apta" by moonlight through the avenue on
+New Year's Eve, ankle-deep in snow; all in a few short hours.
+
+Dream winds and dream weathers--what an enchantment! And all real!
+
+Soft caressing rains that do not wet us if we do not wish them to; sharp
+frosts that brace but never chill; blazing suns that neither scorch
+nor dazzle.
+
+Blustering winds of early spring, that seem to sweep right through these
+solid frames of ours, and thrill us to the very marrow with the old
+heroic excitement and ecstasy we knew so well in happy childhood, but
+can no longer feel now when awake!
+
+Bland summer breezes, heavy with the scent of long lost French woods and
+fields and gardens in full flower; swift, soft, moist equinoctial gales,
+blowing from the far-off orchards of Meudon, or the old market gardens
+of Suresnes in their autumnal decay, and laden, we do not know why, with
+strange, mysterious, troubling reminiscence too subtle and elusive to be
+expressed in any tongue--too sweet for any words! And then the dark
+December wind that comes down from the north, and brings the short,
+early twilights and the snow, and drives us home, pleasantly shivering,
+to the chimney-corner and the hissing logs--_chez nous!_
+
+It is the last night of an old year--_la veille du jour de l'an_.
+
+Ankle-deep in snow, we walk to warm, well-lighted "Magna sed Apta," up
+the moonlit avenue. It is dream snow, and yet we feel it crunch beneath
+our feet; but if we turn to look, the tracks of our footsteps have
+disappeared--and we cast no shadows, though the moon is full!
+
+M. le Major goes by, and Yverdon the postman, and Pere Francois, with
+his big sabots, and others, and their footprints remain--and their
+shadows are strong and sharp!
+
+They wish each other the compliments of the season as they meet and
+pass; they wish us nothing! We give them _la bonne annee_ at the tops of
+our voices; they do not heed us in the least, though our voices are as
+resonant as theirs. We are wishing them a "Happy New Year," that dawned
+for good or evil nearly twenty years ago.
+
+Out comes Gogo from the Seraskiers', with Mimsey. He makes a snowball
+and throws it. It flies straight through me, and splashes itself on Pere
+Francois's broad back. "Ah, ce polisson de Monsieur Gogo ... attendez un
+peu!" and Pere Francois returns the compliment--straight through me
+again, as it seems; and I do not even feel it! Mary and I are as solid
+to each other as flesh and blood can make us. We cannot even touch these
+dream people without their melting away into thin air; we can only hear
+and see them, but that in perfection!
+
+There goes that little Andre Corbin, the poulterer's son, running along
+the slippery top of Madame Pele's garden wall, which is nearly ten
+feet high.
+
+"Good heavens," cries Mary, "stop him! Don't you remember? When he gets
+to the corner he'll fall down and break both his legs!"
+
+I rush and bellow out to him--
+
+"Descends donc, malheureux; tu vas te casser les deux jambes! Saute!
+saute!" ... I cry, holding out my arms. He does not pay the slightest
+attention: he reaches the corner, followed low down by Gogo and Mimsey,
+who are beside themselves with generous envy and admiration. Stimulated
+by their applause, he becomes more foolhardy than ever, and even tries
+to be droll, and standing on one leg, sings a little song that begins--
+
+_"Maman m'a donne quat' sous Pour m'en aller a la foire, Non pas pour
+manger ni boire, Alais pour m'regaler d'joujoux!"_
+
+Then suddenly down he slips, poor boy, and breaks both his legs below
+the knee on an iron rail, whereby he becomes a cripple for life.
+
+All this sad little tragedy of a New-year's Eve plays itself anew. The
+sympathetic crowd collects; Mimsey and Gogo weep; the heart-broken
+parents arrive, and the good little doctor Larcher; and Mary and I look
+on like criminals, so impossible it seems not to feel that we might have
+prevented it all!
+
+We two alone are alive and substantial in all this strange world of
+shadows, who seem, as far as we can hear and see, no less substantial
+and alive than ourselves. They exist for us; we do not exist for them.
+We exist for each other only, waking or sleeping; for even the people
+among whom our waking life is spent know hardly more of us, and what our
+real existence is, than poor little Andre Corbin, who has just broken
+his legs for us over again!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+And so, back to "Magna sed Apta," both saddened by this deplorable
+misadventure, to muse and talk and marvel over these wonders; penetrated
+to the very heart's core by a dim sense of some vast, mysterious power,
+latent in the sub-consciousness of man--unheard of, undreamed of as yet,
+but linking him with the Infinite and the Eternal.
+
+And how many things we always had to talk about besides!
+
+Heaven knows, I am not a brilliant conversationalist, but she was the
+most easily amusable person in the world--interested in everything that
+interested me, and I disdamaged myself (to use one of her
+Anglo-Gallicisms) of the sulky silence of years.
+
+Of her as a companion it is not for me to speak. It would be
+impertinent, and even ludicrous, for a person in my position to dilate
+on the social gifts of the famous Duchess of Towers.
+
+Incredible as it may appear, however, most of our conversation was about
+very common and earthly topics--her homes and refuges, the difficulties
+of their management, her eternal want of money, her many schemes and
+plans and experiments and failures and disenchantments--in all of which
+I naturally took a very warm interest. And then my jail, and all that
+occurred there--in all of which I became interested myself because it
+interested her so passionately; she knew every corner of it that I knew,
+every detail of the life there--the name, appearance, and history of
+almost every inmate, and criticised its internal economy with a
+practical knowledge of affairs; a business-like sagacity at which I
+never ceased to marvel.
+
+One of my drollest recollections is of a visit she
+paid there _in the flesh_, by some famous philanthropists of both sexes.
+I was interviewed by them all as the model prisoner, who, for his
+unorthodoxy, was a credit to the institution. She listened demurely to
+my intelligent answers when I was questioned as to my bodily health,
+etc., and asked whether I had any complaints to make. Complaints! Never
+was jail-bird so thoroughly satisfied with his nest--so healthy, so
+happy, so well-behaved. She took notes all the time.
+
+[Illustration: MARY, DUCHESS OF TOWERS. From a photograph by
+Strlkzchuski, Warsaw.]
+
+Eight hours before we had been strolling hand in hand through the Uffizi
+Gallery in Florence; eight hours later we should be in each
+other's arms.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Strange to relate, this happiness of ours--so deep, so acute, so
+transcendent, so unmatched in all the history of human affection--was
+not always free of unreasonable longings and regrets. Man is never so
+blessed but what he would have his blessedness still greater.
+
+The reality of our close companionship, of our true possession of each
+other (during our allotted time), was absolute, complete, and thorough.
+No Darby that ever lived can ever have had sweeter, warmer, more tender
+memories of any Joan than I have now of Mary Seraskier! Although each
+was, in a way, but a seeming illusion of the other's brain, the illusion
+was no illusion for us. It was an illusion that showed the truth, as
+does the illusion of sight. Like twin kernels in one shell
+("Philipschen," as Mary called it), we touched at more points and were
+closer than the rest of mankind (with each of them a separate shell of
+his own). We tried and tested this in every way we could devise, and
+never found ourselves at fault, and never ceased to marvel at so great a
+wonder. For instance, I received letters from her in jail (and answered
+them) in an intricate cipher we had invented and perfected together
+entirely during sleep, and referring to things that had happened to us
+both when together.[A]
+
+[Footnote A: _Note_.--Several of these letters are in my possession.
+MADGE PLUNKET.]
+
+Our privileges were such as probably no human beings could have ever
+enjoyed before. Time and space were annihilated for us at the mere wish
+of either--we lived in a palace of delight; all conceivable luxuries
+were ours--and, better than all, and perennially, such freshness and
+elation as belong only to the morning of life--and such a love for each
+other (the result of circumstances not to be paralleled) as time could
+never slake or quench till death should come and part us. All this, and
+more, was our portion for eight hours out of twenty-four.
+
+So what must we do sometimes, but fret that the sixteen hours which
+remained did not belong to us well; that we must live two-thirds of our
+lives apart; that we could not share the toils and troubles of our
+work-a-day, waking existence, as we shared the blissful guerdon of our
+seeming sleep--the glories of our common dream.
+
+And then we would lament the lost years we had spent in mutual ignorance
+and separation--a deplorable waste of life; when life, sleeping or
+waking, was so short.
+
+How different things might have been with us had we but known!
+
+We need never have lost sight and touch of each other; we might have
+grown up, and learned and worked and struggled together from the
+first--boy and girl, brother and sister, lovers, man and wife--and yet
+have found our blessed dream-land and dwelt in it just the same.
+
+Children might have been born to us! Sweet children, _beaux comme le
+jour_, as in Madame Perrault's fairy tales; even beautiful and good as
+their mother.
+
+And as we talked of these imaginary little beings and tried to picture
+them, we felt in ourselves such a stupendous capacity for loving the
+same that we would fall to weeping on each other's shoulders. Full well
+I knew, even as if they had formed a part of my own personal experience,
+all the passion and tenderness, all the wasted anguish of her brief,
+ill-starred motherhood: the very ache of my jealousy that she should
+have borne a child to another man was forgotten in that keen and
+thorough comprehension! Ah, yes ... that hungry love, that woful pity,
+which not to know is hardly quite to have lived! Childless as I am
+(though old enough to be a grandfather) I have it all by heart!
+
+Never could we hope for son or daughter of our own. For us the blessed
+flower of love in rich, profuse, unfading bloom; but its blessed fruit
+of life, never, never, never!
+
+Our only children were Mimsey and Gogo, between whom and ourselves was
+an impassable gulf, and who were unconscious of our very existence,
+except for Mimsey's strange consciousness that a Fairy Tarapatapoum and
+a Prince Charming were watching over them.
+
+All this would always end, as it could not but end, in our realizing the
+more fully our utter dependence on each other for all that made life not
+only worth living, ingrates that we were, but a heaven on earth for us
+both; and, indeed, we could not but recognize that merely thus to love
+and be loved was in itself a thing so immense (without all the other
+blessings we had) that we were fain to tremble at our audacity in daring
+to wish for more.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thus sped three years, and would have sped all the rest, perhaps, but
+for an incident that made an epoch in our joint lives, and turned all
+our thoughts and energies in a new direction.
+
+
+
+
+Part Six
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Some petty annoyance to which I had been subjected by one of the prison
+authorities had kept me awake for a little while after I had gone to
+bed, so that when at last I awoke in "Magna sed Apta," and lay on my
+couch there (with that ever-fresh feeling of coming to life in heaven
+after my daily round of work in an earthly jail), I was conscious that
+Mary was there already, making coffee, the fragrance of which filled
+the room, and softly humming a tune as she did so--a quaint, original,
+but most beautiful tune, that thrilled me with indescribable emotion,
+for I had never heard it with the bodily ear before, and yet it was as
+familiar to me as "God save the Queen."
+
+As I listened with rapt ears and closed eyes, wonderful scenes passed
+before my mental vision: the beautiful white-haired lady of my childish
+dreams, leading a small _female_ child by the hand, and that child was
+myself; the pigeons and their tower, the stream and the water-mill; the
+white-haired young man with red heels to his shoes; a very fine lady,
+very tall, stout, and middle-aged, magnificently dressed in brocaded
+silk; a park with lawns and alleys and trees cut into trim formal
+shapes; a turreted castle--all kinds of charming scenes and people of
+another age and country.
+
+"What on earth is that wonderful tune, Mary?" I exclaimed, when she had
+finished it.
+
+"It's my favorite tune," she answered; "I seldom hum it for fear of
+wearing away its charm. I suppose that is why you have never heard it
+before. Isn't it lovely? I've been trying to lull you awake with it.
+
+"My grandfather, the violinist, used to play it with variations of his
+own, and made it famous in his time; but it was never published, and
+it's now forgotten.
+
+"It is called 'Le Chant du Triste Commensal,' and was composed by his
+grandmother, a beautiful French woman, who played the fiddle too; but
+not as a profession. He remembered her playing it when he was a child
+and she was quite an old lady, just as I remember _his_ playing it when
+I was a girl in Vienna, and he was a white-haired old man. She used to
+play holding her fiddle downward, on her knee, it seems; and always
+played in perfect tune, quite in the middle of the note, and with
+excellent taste and expression; it was her playing that decided his
+career. But she was like 'Single-speech Hamilton,' for this was the only
+thing she ever composed. She composed it under great grief and
+excitement, just after her husband had died from the bite of a wolf, and
+just before the birth of her twin-daughters--her only children--one of
+whom was my great-grandmother."
+
+"And what was this wonderful old lady's name?"
+
+"Gatienne Aubery; she married a Breton squire called Budes, who was a
+_gentilhomme verrier_ near St. Prest, in Anjou--that is, he made
+glass--decanters, water-bottles, tumblers, and all that, I suppose--in
+spite of his nobility. It was not considered derogatory to do so;
+indeed, it was the only trade permitted to the _noblesse_, and one had
+to be at least a squire to engage in it.
+
+"She was a very notable woman, _la belle Verriere_, as she was called;
+and she managed the glass factory for many years after her husband's
+death, and made lots of money for her two daughters."
+
+"How strange!" I exclaimed; "Gatienne Aubery! Dame du Brail--Budes--the
+names are quite familiar to me. Mathurin Budes, Seigneur de Monhoudeard
+et de Verny le Moustier."
+
+"Yes, that's it. How wonderful that you should know! One daughter,
+Jeanne, married my greatgrandfather, an officer in the Hungarian army;
+and Seraskier, the fiddler, was their only child. The other (so like her
+sister that only her mother could distinguish them) was called Anne, and
+married a Comte de Bois something."
+
+"Boismorinel. Why, all those names are in my family too. My father used
+to make me paint their arms and quarterings when I was a child, on
+Sunday mornings, to keep me quiet. Perhaps we are related by blood,
+you and I."
+
+"Oh, that would be too delightful!" said Mary. "I wonder how we could
+find out? Have you no family papers?"
+
+_I_. "There were lots of them, in a horse-hair trunk, but I don't know
+where they are now. What good would family papers have been to me?
+Ibbetson took charge of them when I changed my name. I suppose his
+lawyers have got them."
+
+_She_. "Happy thought; we will do without lawyers. Let us go round to
+your old house, and make Gogo paint the quarterings over again for us,
+and look over his shoulder."
+
+Happy thought, indeed! We drank our coffee and went straight to my old
+house, with the wish (immediate father to the deed) that Gogo should be
+there, once more engaged in his long forgotten accomplishment of
+painting coats of arms.
+
+It was a beautiful Sunday morning, and we found Gogo hard at work at a
+small table by an open window. The floor was covered with old deeds and
+parchments and family papers; and le beau Pasquier, at another table,
+was deep in his own pedigree, making notes on the margin--an occupation
+in which he delighted--and unconsciously humming as he did so. The sunny
+room was filled with the penetrating soft sound of his voice, as a
+conservatory is filled with the scent of its flowers.
+
+By the strangest inconsistency my dear father, a genuine republican at
+heart (for all his fancied loyalty to the white lily of the Bourbons), a
+would-be scientist, who in reality was far more impressed by a clever
+and industrious French mechanic than by a prince (and would, I think,
+have preferred the former's friendship and society), yet took both a
+pleasure and a pride in his quaint old parchments and obscure
+quarterings. So would I, perhaps, if things had gone differently with
+me--for what true democrat, however intolerant of such weakness in
+others, ever thinks lightly of his own personal claims to aristocratic
+descent, shadowy as these may be!
+
+He was fond of such proverbs and aphorisms as "noblesse oblige," "bon
+sang ne sait mentir," "bon chien chasse de race," etc., and had even
+invented a little aphorism of his own, to comfort him when he was extra
+hard up, "bon gentilhomme n'a jamais honte de la misere." All of which
+sayings, to do him justice, he reserved for home consumption
+exclusively, and he would have been the first to laugh on hearing them
+in the mouth of any one else.
+
+Of his one great gift, the treasure in his throat, he thought absolutely
+nothing at all.
+
+"Ce que c'est que de nous!"
+
+Gogo was coloring the quarterings of the Pasquier family--_la maison
+de Pasquier_, as it was called--in a printed book (_Armorial General du
+Maine et de l'Anjou_), according to the instructions that were given
+underneath. He used one of Madame Liard's three-sou boxes, and the tints
+left much to be desired.
+
+We looked over his shoulder and read the picturesque old jargon, which
+sounds even prettier and more comforting and more idiotic in French than
+in English. It ran thus--
+
+"Pasquier (branche des Seigneurs de la Mariere et du Hirel), party de 4
+pieces et coupe de 2.
+
+"Au premier, de Herault, qui est de ecartele de gueules et d'argent.
+
+"Au deux, de Budes, qui est d'or au pin de sinople.
+
+"Au trois, d'Aubery--qui est d'azur a trois croissants d'argent.
+
+"Au quatre, de Busson qui est d'argent au lyon de sable arme couronne et
+lampasse d'or," And so on, through the other quarterings: Bigot, Epinay,
+Malestroit, Mathefelon. And finally, "Sur le tout, de Pasquier qui est
+d'or a trois lyons d'azur, au franc quartier ecartele des royames de
+Castille et de Leon."
+
+Presently my mother came home from the English chapel in the Rue
+Marboeuf, where she had been with Sarah, the English maid. Lunch was
+announced, and we were left alone with the family papers. With infinite
+precautions, for fear of blurring the dream, we were able to find what
+we wanted to find--namely, that we were the great-great-grandchildren
+and only possible living descendants of Gatienne, the fair glassmaker
+and composer of "Le Chant du Triste Commensal."
+
+Thus runs the descent--
+
+Jean Aubery, Seigneur du Brail, married Anne Busson. His daughter,
+Gatienne Aubery, Dame du Brail, married Mathurin Budes, Seigneur de
+Verny le Moustier et de Monhoudeard.
+
+ --------------------------^--------------------------
+/                                                     \
+
+
+Anne Budes, Dame de            Jeanne Budes, Dame du
+  Verny le Moustier, married     Brail et de Monhoudeard,
+  Guy Herault, Comte             married Ulric
+  de Boismorinel.                Seraskier.
+
+Jeanne Francois Herault de     Otto Seraskier, violinist,
+  Boismorinel married            married Teresa Pulci.
+  Francois Pasquier de la
+  Mariere.
+
+
+Jean Pasquier de la Mariere    Johann Seraskier, M.D.,
+  married Catherine              married Laura Desmond.
+  Ibbetson-Biddulph.
+
+Pierre Pasquier de la Mariere  Mary Seraskier, Duchess of
+  (_alias_ Peter Ibbetson,  Towers.
+  convict).
+
+We walked back to "Magna sed Apta" in great joy, and there we celebrated
+our newly-discovered kinship by a simple repast, out of _my_ repertoire
+this time. It consisted of oysters from Rules's in Maiden Lane, when
+they were sixpence a dozen, and bottled stout (_l'eau m'en vient a la
+bouche_); and we spent the rest of the hours allotted to us that night
+in evolving such visions as we could from the old tune "Le Chant du
+Triste Commensal," with varying success; she humming it, accompanying
+herself on the piano in her masterly, musician-like way, with one hand,
+and seeing all that I saw by holding my hand with the other.
+
+By slow degrees the scenes and people evoked grew less dim, and whenever
+the splendid and important lady, whom we soon identified for certain as
+Gatienne, our common great-great-grandmother, appeared--"la belle
+verriere de Verny le Moustier"--she was more distinct than the others;
+no doubt, because we both had part and parcel in her individuality, and
+also because her individuality was so strongly marked.
+
+And before I was called away at the inexorable hour, we had the supreme
+satisfaction of seeing her play the fiddle to a shadowy company of
+patched and powdered and bewigged ladies and gentlemen, who seemed to
+take much sympathetic delight in her performance, and actually, even, of
+just hearing the thin, unearthly tones of that most original and
+exquisite melody, "Le Chant du Triste Commensal," to a quite inaudible
+accompaniment on the spinet by her daughter, evidently Anne Herault,
+Comtesse de Boismorinel (_nee_ Budes), while the small child Jeanne de
+Boismorinel (afterwards Dame Pasquier de la Mariere) listened with
+dreamy rapture.
+
+And, just as Mary had said, she played her fiddle with its body
+downward, and resting on her knees, as though it had been an undersized
+'cello. I then vaguely remembered having dreamed of such a figure when a
+small child.
+
+Within twenty-four hours of this strange adventure the practical and
+business-like Mary had started, in the flesh and with her maid, for that
+part of France where these, my ancestors, had lived, and within a
+fortnight she had made herself mistress of all my French family history,
+and had visited such of the different houses of my kin as were still in
+existence.
+
+The turreted castle of my childish dreams, which, with the adjacent
+glass-factory, was still called Verny le Moustier, was one of these. She
+found it in the possession of a certain Count Hector du Chamorin, whose
+grandfather had purchased it at the beginning of the century.
+
+He had built an entirely new plant, and made it one of the first
+glass-factories in Western France. But the old turreted _corps de logis_
+still remained, and his foreman lived there with his wife and family.
+The _pigeonnier_ had been pulled down to make room for a shed with a
+steam-engine, and the whole aspect of the place was revolutionized; but
+the stream and water-mill (the latter a mere picturesque ruin) were
+still there; the stream was, however, little more than a ditch, some ten
+feet deep and twenty broad, with a fringe of gnarled and twisted willows
+and alders, many of them dead.
+
+It was called "Le Brail," and had given its name to my
+great-great-grandmother's property, whence it had issued thirty miles
+away (and many hundred years ago); but the old Chateau du Brail, the
+manor of the Auberys, had become a farm-house.
+
+The Chateau de la Mariere, in its walled park, and with its beautiful,
+tall, hexagonal tower, dated 1550, and visible for miles around, was now
+a prosperous cider brewery; it is still, and lies on the high-road from
+Angers to Le Mans.
+
+The old forest of Boismorinel, that had once belonged to the family of
+Herault, was still in existence; charcoal-burners were to be found in
+its depths, and a stray roebuck or two; but no more wolves and
+wild-boars, as in the olden time. And where the old castle had been now
+stood the new railway station of Boismorinel et Saint Maixent.
+
+[Illustration: LA BELLE VERRIERE]
+
+Most of such Budes, Bussons, Heraults, Auberys, and Pasquiers as were
+still to be found in the country, probably distant kinsmen of Mary's
+and mine, were lawyers, doctors, or priests, or had gone into trade and
+become respectably uninteresting; such as they were, they would scarcely
+have cared to claim kinship with such as I.
+
+But a hundred years ago and more these were names of importance in Maine
+and Anjou; their bearers were descended for the most part from younger
+branches of houses which in the Middle Ages had intermarried with all
+there was of the best in France; and although they were looked down upon
+by the _noblesse_ of the court and Versailles, as were all the
+provincial nobility, they held their own well in their own country;
+feasting, hunting, and shooting with each other; dancing and fiddling
+and making love and intermarrying; and blowing glass, and growing richer
+and richer, till the Revolution came and blew them and their glass into
+space, and with them many greater than themselves, but few better. And
+all record of them and of their doings, pleasant and genial people as
+they were, is lost, and can only be recalled by a dream.
+
+Verny le Moustier was not the least interesting of these old manors.
+
+It had been built three hundred years ago, on the site of a still older
+monastery (whence its name); the ruined walls of the old abbey were (and
+are) still extant in the house-garden, covered with apricot and pear and
+peach trees, which had been sown or planted by our common ancestress
+when she was a bride.
+
+Count Hector, who took a great pleasure in explaining all the past
+history of the place to Mary, had built himself a fine new house in
+what remained of the old park, and a quarter of a mile away from the
+old manor-house. Every room of the latter was shown to her; old wood
+panels still remained, prettily painted in a by-gone fashion; old
+documents, and parchment deeds, and leases concerning fish-ponds,
+farms, and the like, were brought out for her inspection, signed by
+my grandfather Pasquier, my great-grandfather Boismorinel, and our
+great-great-grandmother and her husband, Mathurin Budes, the lord of
+Verny le Moustier; and the tradition of Gatienne, _la belle Verriere_
+(also nicknamed _la reine de Hongrie_, it seems) still lingered in the
+county; and many old people still remembered, more or less correctly,
+"Le Chant du Triste Commensal," which a hundred years ago had been in
+everybody's mouth.
+
+She was said to have been the tallest and handsomest woman in Anjou, of
+an imperious will and very masculine character, but immensely popular
+among rich and poor alike; of indomitable energy, and with a finger in
+every pie; but always more for the good of others than her own--a
+typical, managing, business-like French woman, and an exquisite
+musician to boot.
+
+Such was our common ancestress, from whom, no doubt, we drew our love of
+music and our strange, almost hysterical susceptibility to the power of
+sound; from whom had issued those two born nightingales of our
+race--Seraskier, the violinist, and my father, the singer. And, strange
+to say, her eyebrows met at the bridge of her nose just like mine, and
+from under them beamed the luminous, black-fringed, gray-blue eyes of
+Mary, that suffered eclipse whenever their owners laughed or smiled!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+During this interesting journey of Mary's in the flesh, we met every
+night at "Magna sed Apta" in the spirit, as usual; and I was made to
+participate in every incident of it.
+
+We sat by the magic window, and had for our entertainment, now the
+Verrerie de Verny le Moustier in its present state, all full of modern
+life, color, and sound, steam and gas, as she had seen it a few hours
+before; now the old chateau as it was a hundred years ago; dim and
+indistinct, as though seen by nearsighted eyes at the close of a gray,
+misty afternoon in late autumn through a blurred window-pane, with busy
+but silent shadows moving about--silent, because at first we could not
+hear their speech; it was too thin for our mortal ears, even in this
+dream within our dream! Only Gatienne, the authoritative and commanding
+Gatienne, was faintly audible.
+
+Then we would go down and mix with them. Thus, at one moment, we would
+be in the midst of a charming old-fashioned French family group of
+shadows: Gatienne, with her lovely twin-daughters Jeanne and Anne, and
+her gardeners round her, all trailing young peach and apricot trees
+against what still remained of the ancient buttresses and walls of the
+Abbaye de Verny le Moustier--all this more than a hundred years ago--the
+pale sun of a long-past noon casting the fainter shadows of these faint
+shadows on the shadowy garden-path.
+
+Then, presto! Changing the scene as one changes a slide in a
+magic-lantern, we would skip a century, and behold!
+
+Another French family group, equally charming, on the self-same spot,
+but in the garb of to-day, and no longer shadowy or mute by any means.
+Little trees have grown big; big trees have disappeared to make place
+for industrious workshops and machinery; but the old abbey walls have
+been respected, and gay, genial father, and handsome mother, and lovely
+daughters, all pressing on "la belle Duchesse Anglaise" peaches and
+apricots of her great-great-grandmother's growing.
+
+For this amiable family of the Chamorin became devoted to Mary in a very
+short time--that is, the very moment they first saw her; and she never
+forgot their kindness, courtesy, and hospitality; they made her feel in
+five minutes as though she had known them for many years.
+
+I may as well state here that a few months later she received from
+Mademoiselle du Chamorin (with a charming letter) the identical violin
+that had once belonged to _la belle Verriere_, and which Count Hector
+had found in the possession of an old farmer--the great-grandson of
+Gatienne's coachman--and had purchased, that he might present it as a
+New-year's gift to her descendant, the Duchess of Towers.
+
+It is now mine, alas! I cannot play it; but it amuses and comforts me to
+hold in my hand, when broad and wide awake, an instrument that Mary and
+I have so often heard and seen in our dream, and which has so often rung
+in by-gone days with the strange melody that has had so great an
+influence on our lives. Its aspect, shape, and color, every mark and
+stain of it, were familiar to us before we had ever seen it with the
+bodily eye or handled it with the hand of flesh. It thus came straight
+to us out of the dim and distant past, heralded by the ghost of itself!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To return. Gradually, by practice and the concentration of our united
+will, the old-time figures grew to gain substance and color, and their
+voices became perceptible; till at length there arrived a day when we
+could move among them, and hear them and see them as distinctly as we
+could our own immediate progenitors close by--as Gogo and Mimsey, as
+Monsieur le Major, and the rest.
+
+The child who went about hand in hand with the white-haired lady (whose
+hair was only powdered) and fed the pigeons was my grandmother, Jeanne
+de Boismorinel (who married Francois Pasquier de la Mariere). It was her
+father who wore red heels to his shoes, and made her believe she could
+manufacture little cocked-hats in colored glass; she had lived again in
+me whenever, as a child, I had dreamed that exquisite dream.
+
+I could now evoke her at will; and, with her, many buried memories were
+called out of nothingness into life.
+
+Among other wonderful things, I heard the red-heeled gentleman, M. de
+Boismorinel (my great-grandfather), sing beautiful old songs by Lulli
+and others to the spinet, which he played charmingly a rare
+accomplishment in those days. And lo! these tunes were tunes that had
+risen oft and unbidden in my consciousness, and I had fondly imagined
+that I had composed them myself--little impromptus of my own. And lo,
+again! His voice, thin, high, nasal, but very sympathetic and musical,
+was that never still small voice that has been singing unremittingly for
+more than half a century in the unswept, ungarnished corner of my brain
+where all the cobwebs are.
+
+[Illustration: "THAT NEVER STILL SMALL VOICE."]
+
+And these cobwebs?
+
+Well, I soon became aware, by deeply diving into my inner consciousness
+when awake and at my daily prison toil (which left the mind singularly
+clear and free), that I was full, quite full, of slight elusive
+reminiscences which were neither of my waking life nor of my dream-life
+with Mary: reminiscences of sub-dreams during sleep, and belonging to
+the period of my childhood and early youth; sub-dreams which no doubt
+had been forgotten when I woke, at which time I could only remember the
+surface dreams that had just preceded my waking.
+
+Ponds, rivers, bridges, roads, and streams, avenues of trees, arbors,
+windmills and water-mills, corridors and rooms, church functions,
+village fairs, festivities, men and women and animals, all of another
+time and of a country where I had never set my foot, were familiar to my
+remembrance. I had but to dive deep enough into myself, and there they
+were; and when night came, and sleep, and "Magna sed Apta," I could
+re-evoke them all, and make them real and complete for Mary and myself.
+
+That these subtle reminiscences were true antenatal memories was soon
+proved by my excursions with Mary into the past; and her experience of
+such reminiscences, and their corroboration, were just as my own. We
+have heard and seen her grandfather play the "Chant du Triste Commensal"
+to crowded concert-rooms, applauded to the echo by men and women long
+dead and buried and forgotten!
+
+Now, I believe such reminiscences to form part of the sub-consciousness
+of others, as well as Mary's and mine, and that by perseverance in
+self-research many will succeed in reaching them--perhaps even more
+easily and completely than we have done.
+
+It is something like listening for the overtones of a musical note; we
+do not hear them at first, though they are there, clamoring for
+recognition; and when at last we hear them, we wonder at our former
+obtuseness, so distinct are they.
+
+Let a man with an average ear, however uncultivated, strike the C low
+down on a good piano-forte, keeping his foot on the loud pedal. At first
+he will hear nothing but the rich fundamental note C.
+
+But let him become _expectant_ of certain other notes; for instance, of
+the C in the octave immediately above, then the G immediately above
+that, then the E higher still; he will hear them all in time as clearly
+as the note originally struck; and, finally, a shrill little ghostly and
+quite importunate B flat in the treble will pulsate so loudly in his ear
+that he will never cease to hear it whenever that low C is sounded.
+
+By just such a process, only with infinitely more pains (and in the end
+with what pleasure and surprise), will he grow aware in time of a dim,
+latent, antenatal experience that underlies his own personal experience
+of this life.
+
+We also found that we were able not only to assist as mere spectators at
+such past scenes as I have described (and they were endless), but also
+to identify ourselves occasionally with the actors, and cease for the
+moment to be Mary Seraskier and Peter Ibbetson. Notably was this the
+case with Gatienne. We could each be Gatienne for a space (though never
+both of us together), and when we resumed our own personality again we
+carried back with it a portion of hers, never to be lost again--a
+strange phenomenon, if the reader will but think of it, and
+constituting the germ of a comparative personal immortality on earth.
+
+At my work in prison, even, I could distinctly remember having been
+Gatienne; so that for the time being, Gatienne, a provincial French
+woman who lived a hundred years ago, was contentedly undergoing penal
+servitude in an English jail during the latter half of the
+nineteenth century.
+
+A questionable privilege, perhaps.
+
+But to make up for it, when she was not alive in me she could be brought
+to life in Mary (only in one at a time, it seemed), and travel by rail
+and steamer, and know the uses of gas and electricity, and read the
+telegrams of "our special correspondents" in the _Times_, and taste her
+nineteenth century under more favorable conditions.
+
+Thus we took _la belle Verriere_ by turns, and she saw and heard things
+she little dreamed of a hundred years ago. Besides, she was made to
+share in the glories of "Magna sed Apta."
+
+And the better we knew her the more we loved her; she was a very nice
+person to descend from, and Mary and I were well agreed that we could
+not have chosen a better great-great-grandmother, and wondered what each
+of our seven others was like, for we had fifteen of these between us,
+and as many great-great-grandfathers.
+
+Thirty great-great-grandfathers and great-great-grandmothers had made us
+what we were; it was no good fighting against them and the millions at
+their backs.
+
+Which of them all, strong, but gentle and shy, and hating the very
+sight of blood, yet saw scarlet when he was roused, and thirsted for the
+blood of his foe?
+
+Which of them all, passionate and tender, but proud, high-minded, and
+chaste, and with the world at her feet, was yet ready to "throw her cap
+over the windmills," and give up all for love, deeming the world
+well lost?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That we could have thus identified ourselves, only more easily and
+thoroughly, with our own more immediate progenitors, we felt certain
+enough. But after mature thought we resolved to desist from any further
+attempt at such transfusion of identity, for sacred reasons of
+discretion which the reader will appreciate.
+
+But that this will be done some day (now the way has been made clear),
+and also that the inconveniences and possible abuses of such a faculty
+will be obviated or minimized by the ever-active ingenuity of mankind,
+is to my mind a foregone conclusion.
+
+It is too valuable a faculty to be left in abeyance, and I leave the
+probable and possible consequences of its culture to the reader's
+imagination--merely pointing out to him (as an inducement to cultivate
+that faculty in himself) that if anything can keep us well within the
+thorny path that leads to happiness and virtue, it is the certainty that
+those who come after us will remember having been ourselves, if only in
+a dream--even as the newly-hatched chicken has remembered in its egg the
+use of eyes and ears and the rest, out of the fulness of its long
+antenatal experience; and more fortunate than the helpless human infant
+in this respect, can enter on the business and pleasures of its brief,
+irresponsible existence at once!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Wherefore, oh reader, if you be but sound in mind and body, it most
+seriously behooves you (not only for the sake of those who come after
+you, but your own) to go forth and multiply exceedingly, to marry early
+and much and often, and to select the very best of your kind in the
+opposite sex for this most precious, excellent, and blessed purpose;
+that all your future reincarnations (and hers), however brief, may be
+many; and bring you not only joy and peace and pleasurable wonderment
+and recreation, but the priceless guerdon of well-earned self-approval!
+
+For whoever remembers having once been you, wakes you for the nonce out
+of--nirvana, shall we say? His strength, his beauty, and his wit are
+yours; and the felicity he derives from them in this earthly life is for
+you to share, whenever this subtle remembrance of you stirs in his
+consciousness; and you can never quite sink back again into--nirvana,
+till all your future wakers shall cease to be!
+
+It is like a little old-fashioned French game we used to play at Passy,
+and which is not bad for a dark, rainy afternoon: people sit all round
+in a circle, and each hands on to his neighbor a spill or a
+lucifer-match just blown out, but in which a little live spark still
+lingers; saying, as he does so--
+
+_"Petit bonhomme vit encore!"_
+
+And he, in whose hand the spark becomes extinct, has to pay forfeit and
+retire--"Helas! petit bonhomme n'est plus! ... Pauv' petit bonhomme!"
+
+Ever thus may a little live spark of your own individual consciousness,
+when the full, quick flame of your actual life here below is
+extinguished, be handed down mildly incandescent to your remotest
+posterity. May it never quite go out--it need not! May you ever be able
+to say of yourself, from generation to generation, "Petit bonhomme vit
+encore!" and still keep one finger at least in the pleasant earthly pie!
+
+And, reader, remember so to order your life on earth that the memory of
+you (like that of Gatienne, la belle Verriere de Verny le Moustier) may
+smell sweet and blossom in the dust--a memory pleasant to recall--to
+this end that its recallings and its recallers may be as numerous as
+filial love and ancestral pride can make them....
+
+And oh! looking _backward_ (as _we_ did), be tender to the failings of
+your forbears, who little guessed when alive that the secrets of their
+long buried hearts should one day be revealed to _you_! Their faults are
+really your own, like the faults of your innocent, ignorant childhood,
+so to say, when you did not know better, as you do now; or will
+soon, thanks to
+
+_"Le Chant du Triste Commensal!"_
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Wherefore, also, beware and be warned in time, ye tenth transmitters of
+a foolish face, ye reckless begetters of diseased or puny bodies, with
+hearts and brains to match! Far down the corridors of time shall
+club-footed retribution follow in your footsteps, and overtake you at
+every turn! Most remorselessly, most vindictively, will you be aroused,
+in sleepless hours of unbearable misery (future-waking nightmares), from
+your false, uneasy dream of death; to participate in an inheritance of
+woe still worse than yours--worse with all the accumulated interest of
+long years and centuries of iniquitous self-indulgence, and poisoned by
+the sting of a self-reproach that shall never cease till the last of
+your tainted progeny dies out, and finds his true nirvana, and yours, in
+the dim, forgetful depths of interstellar space!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And here let me most conscientiously affirm that, partly from my keen
+sense of the solemnity of such an appeal, and the grave responsibility I
+take upon myself in making it; but more especially in order to impress
+you, oh reader, with the full significance of this apocalyptic and
+somewhat minatory utterance (that it may haunt your finer sense during
+your midnight hours of introspective self-communion), I have done my
+best, my very best, to couch it in the obscurest and most unintelligible
+phraseology I could invent. If I have failed to do this, if I have
+unintentionally made any part of my meaning clear, if I have once
+deviated by mistake into what might almost appear like sense--mere
+common-sense--it is the fault of my half-French and wholly imperfect
+education. I am but a poor scribe!
+
+Thus roughly have I tried to give an account of this, the most
+important of our joint discoveries in the strange new world revealed to
+us by chance. More than twenty years of our united lives have been
+devoted to the following out of this slender clew--with what surprising
+results will, I trust, be seen in subsequent volumes.
+
+We have not had time to attempt the unravelling of our English ancestry
+as well--the Crays, and the Desmonds, the Ibbetsons, and Biddulphs,
+etc.--which connects us with the past history of England. The farther we
+got back into France, the more fascinating it became, and the
+easier--and the more difficult to leave.
+
+What an unexampled experience has been ours! To think that we have
+seen--actually seen--_de nos propres yeux vu_--Napoleon Bonaparte
+himself, the arch-arbiter of the world, on the very pinnacle of his
+pride and power; in his little cocked hat and gray double-breasted
+overcoat, astride his white charger, with all his staff around him, just
+as he has been so often painted! Surely the most impressive,
+unforgettable, ineffaceable little figure in all modern history, and
+clothed in the most cunningly imagined make-up that ever theatrical
+costumier devised to catch the public eye and haunt the public memory
+for ages and ages yet to come!
+
+It is a singularly new, piquant, and exciting sensation to stare in
+person, and as in the present, at bygone actualities, and be able to
+foretell the past and remember the future all in one!
+
+To think that we have even beheld him before he was first consul--slim
+and pale, his lank hair dangling down his neck and cheeks, if possible
+more impressive still as innocent as a child of all that lay before him!
+Europe at his feet--the throne--Waterloo-St. Helena--the Iron English
+Duke--the pinnacle turned into a pillory so soon!
+
+_"O corse a cheveux plats, que la France etait belle Au soleil de
+Messidor!"_
+
+And Mirabeau and Robespierre, and Danton and Marat and Charlotte Corday!
+we have seen them too; and Marie Antoinette and the fish-wives, and "the
+beautiful head of Lamballe" (on its pike!) ... and watched the tumbrils
+go by to the Place du Carrousel, and gazed at the guillotine by
+moonlight--silent and terror-stricken, our very hearts in our mouths....
+
+And in the midst of it all, ridiculous stray memories of Madame Tussaud
+would come stealing into our ghastly dream of blood and retribution,
+mixing up past and present and future in a manner not to be described,
+and making us smile through our tears!
+
+Then we were present (several times!) at the taking of the Bastille, and
+indeed witnessed most of the stormy scenes of that stormy time, with our
+Carlyle in our hands; and often have we thought, and with many a hearty
+laugh, what fun it must be to write immortal histories, with never an
+eye-witness to contradict you!
+
+And going further back we have haunted Versailles in the days of its
+splendor, and drunk our fill of all the glories of the court of
+Louis XIV!
+
+What imposing ceremonials, what stupendous royal functions have we not
+attended--where all the beauty, wit, and chivalry of France, prostrate
+with reverence and awe (as in the very presence of a god), did loyal
+homage to the greatest monarch this world has ever seen--while we sat
+by, on the very steps of his throne, as he solemnly gave out his royal
+command! and laughed aloud under his very nose--the shallow, silly,
+pompous little snob--and longed to pull it! and tried to disinfect his
+greasy, civet-scented, full-bottomed wig with wholesome whiffs from a
+nineteenth-century regalia!
+
+Nothing of that foolish but fascinating period escaped us. Town, hamlet,
+river, forest, and field; royal palace, princely castle, and starving
+peasants' hut; pulpit, stage, and salon; port, camp, and marketplace;
+tribunal and university; factory, shop, studio, smithy; tavern and
+gambling-hell and den of thieves; convent and jail, torture-chamber and
+gibbet-close, and what not all!
+
+And at every successive step our once desponding, over-anxious,
+over-burdened latter-day souls have swelled with joy and pride and hope
+at the triumphs of our own day all along the line! Yea, even though we
+have heard the illustrious Bossuet preach, and applauded Moliere in one
+of his own plays, and gazed at and listened to (and almost forgiven)
+Racine and Corneille, and Boileau and Fenelon, and the good
+Lafontaine--those five ruthless persecutors of our own innocent French
+childhood!
+
+And still ascending the stream of time, we have hobnobbed with Montaigne
+and Rabelais, and been personally bored by Malherbe, and sat at
+Ronsard's feet, and ridden by Froissart's side, and slummed with
+Francois Villon--in what enchanted slums! ...
+
+Francois Villon! Think of that, ye fond British bards and bardlets
+of to-day--ye would-be translators and imitators of that
+never-to-be-translated, never-to-be-imitated lament, the immortal
+_Ballade des Dames du Temps jadis_!
+
+And while I speak of it, I may as well mention that we have seen them
+too, or some of them--those fair ladies _he_ had never seen, and who had
+already melted away before his coming, like the snows of yester year,
+_les neiges d'antan!_ Bertha, with the big feet; Joan of Arc, the good
+Lorrainer (what would she think of her native province now!); the very
+learned Heloise, for love of whom one Peter Esbaillart, or Abelard (a
+more luckless Peter than even I!), suffered such cruel indignities at
+monkish hands; and that haughty, naughty queen, in her Tower of Nesle,
+
+_"Qui commanda que Buridan Fut jecte en ung Sac en Seine...."_
+
+Yes, we have seen them with the eye, and heard them speak and sing, and
+scold and jest, and laugh and weep, and even pray! And I have sketched
+them, as you shall see some day, good reader! And let me tell you that
+their beauty was by no means maddening: the standard of female
+loveliness has gone up, even in France! Even _la tres sage Helois_ was
+scarcely worth such a sacrifice as--but there! Possess your soul in
+patience; all that, and it is all but endless, will appear in due time,
+with such descriptions and illustrations as I flatter myself the world
+has never bargained for, and will value as it has never valued any
+historical records yet!
+
+Day after day, for more than twenty years, Mary has kept a voluminous
+diary (in a cipher known to us both); it is now my property, and in it
+every detail of our long journey into the past has been set down.
+
+Contemporaneously, day by day (during the leisure accorded to me by the
+kindness of Governor----) I have drawn over again from memory the
+sketches of people and places I was able to make straight from nature
+during those wonderful nights at "Magna sed Apta." I can guarantee the
+correctness of them, and the fidelity of their likenesses; no doubt
+their execution leaves much to be desired.
+
+Both her task and mine (to the future publication of which this
+autobiography is but an introduction) have been performed with the
+minutest care and conscientiousness; no time or trouble have been
+spared. For instance, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew alone, which we
+were able to study from seventeen different points of view, cost us no
+less than two months' unremitting labor.
+
+As we reached further and further back through the stream of time, the
+task became easier in a way; but we have had to generalize more, and
+often, for want of time and space, to use types in lieu of individuals.
+For with every successive generation the number of our progenitors
+increased in geometrical progression (as in the problem of the nails in
+the horseshoe) until a limit of numbers was reached--namely, the sum of
+the inhabitants of the terrestrial globe. In the seventh century there
+was not a person living in France (not to mention Europe) who was not in
+the line of our direct ancestry, excepting, of course, those who had
+died without issue and were mere collaterals.
+
+[Illustration: "THE MAMMOTH."]
+
+We have even just been able to see, as in a glass darkly, the faint
+shadows of the Mammoth and the cave bear, and of the man who hunted and
+killed and ate them, that he might live and prevail.
+
+The Mammoth!
+
+We have walked round him and under him as he browsed, and even _through_
+him where he lay and rested, as one walks through the dun mist in a
+little hollow on a still, damp morning; and turning round to look (at
+the proper distance) there was the unmistakable shape again, just thick
+enough to blot out the lines of the dim primeval landscape beyond, and
+make a hole in the blank sky. A dread silhouette, thrilling our hearts
+with awe--blurred and indistinct like a composite photograph--merely the
+_type_, as it had been seen generally by all who had ever seen it at
+all, every one of whom _(exceptis excipiendis)_ was necessarily an
+ancestor of ours, and of every man now living.
+
+There it stood or reclined, the monster, like the phantom of an
+overgrown hairy elephant; we could almost see, or fancy we saw, the
+expression of his dull, cold, antediluvian eye--almost perceive a
+suggestion of russet-brown in his fell.
+
+Mary firmly believed that we should have got in time to our hairy
+ancestor with pointed ears and a tail, and have been able to ascertain
+whether he was arboreal in his habits or not. With what passionate
+interest she would have followed and studied and described him! And I!
+With what eager joy, and yet with what filial reverence, I would have
+sketched his likeness--with what conscientious fidelity as far as my poor
+powers would allow! (For all we know to the contrary he may have been
+the most attractive and engaging little beast that ever was, and far
+less humiliating to descend from than many a titled yahoo of the
+present day.)
+
+Fate, alas, has willed that it should be otherwise, and on others, duly
+trained, must devolve the delightful task of following up the clew we
+have been so fortunate as to discover.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now the time has come for me to tell as quickly as I may the story
+of my bereavement--a bereavement so immense that no man, living or dead,
+can ever have experienced the like; and to explain how it is that I have
+not only survived it and kept my wits (which some people seem to doubt),
+but am here calmly and cheerfully writing my reminiscences, just as if I
+were a famous Academician, actor, novelist, statesman, or general
+diner-out--blandly garrulous and well-satisfied with myself and
+the world.
+
+During the latter years of our joint existence Mary and I engrossed by
+our fascinating journey through the centuries, had seen little or
+nothing of each other's outer lives, or rather I had seen nothing of
+hers (for she still came back sometimes with me to my jail); I only saw
+her as she chose to appear in our dream.
+
+Perhaps at the bottom of this there may have been a feminine dislike on
+her part to be seen growing older, for at "Magna sed Apta" we were
+always twenty-eight or thereabouts--at our very best. We had truly
+discovered the fountain of perennial youth, and had drunk thereof! And
+in our dream we always felt even younger than we looked; we had the
+buoyancy of children and their freshness.
+
+Often had we talked of death and separation and the mystery beyond, but
+only as people do for whom such contingencies are remote; yet in reality
+time flew as rapidly for us as for others, although we were less
+sensible of its flight.
+
+There came a day when Mary's exuberant vitality, so constantly
+overtaxed, broke down, and she was ill for a while; although that did
+not prevent our meeting as usual, and there was no perceptible
+difference in her when we met. But I am certain that in reality she was
+never quite the same again as she had been, and the dread possibility of
+parting any day would come up oftener in our talk; in our minds, only
+too often, and our minds were as one.
+
+She knew that if I died first, everything I had brought into "Magna sed
+Apta" (and little it was) would be there no more; even to my body, ever
+lying supine on the couch by the enchanted window, it she had woke by
+chance to our common life before I had, or remained after I had been
+summoned away to my jail.
+
+And I knew that, if she died, not only her body on the adjacent couch,
+but all "Magna sed Apta" itself would melt away, and be as if it had
+never been, with its endless galleries and gardens and magic windows,
+and all the wonders it contained.
+
+Sometimes I felt a hideous nervous dread, on sinking into sleep, lest I
+should find it was so, and the ever-heavenly delight of waking there,
+and finding all as usual, was but the keener. I would kneel by her
+inanimate body, and gaze at her with a passion of love that seemed made
+up of all the different kinds of love a human being can feel; even the
+love of a dog for his mistress was in it, and that of a wild beast for
+its young.
+
+With eager, tremulous anxiety and aching suspense I would watch for the
+first light breath from her lips, the first faint tinge of carmine in
+her cheek, that always heralded her coming back to life. And when she
+opened her eyes and smiled, and stretched her long young limbs in the
+joy of waking, what transports of gratitude and relief!
+
+[Illustration: "WAITING"]
+
+Ah me! the recollection!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At last a terrible unforgettable night arrived when my presentiment was
+fulfilled.
+
+I awoke in the little lumber-room of "Parva sed Apta," where the door
+had always been that led to and from our palace of delight; but there
+was no door any longer--nothing but a blank wall....
+
+I woke back at once in my cell, in such a state as it is impossible to
+describe. I felt there must be some mistake, and after much time and
+effort was able to sink into sleep again, but with the same result: the
+blank wall, the certainty that "Magna sed Apta" was closed forever, that
+Mary was dead; and then the terrible jump back into my prison
+life again.
+
+This happened several times during the night, and when the morning
+dawned I was a raving madman. I took the warder who first came
+(attracted by my cries of "Mary!") for Colonel Ibbetson, and tried to
+kill him, and should have done so, but that he was a very big man,
+almost as powerful as myself and only half my age.
+
+Other warders came to the rescue, and I took them all for Ibbetsons, and
+fought like the maniac I was.
+
+When I came to myself, after long horrors and brain-fever and what not,
+I was removed from the jail infirmary to another place, where I am now.
+
+I had suddenly recovered my reason, and woke to mental agony such as I,
+who had stood in the dock and been condemned to a shameful death, had
+never even dreamed of.
+
+I soon had the knowledge of my loss confirmed, and heard (it had been
+common talk for more than nine days) that the famous Mary, Duchess of
+Towers, had met her death at the ------ station of the Metropolitan
+Railway.
+
+A woman, carrying a child, had been jostled by a tipsy man just as a
+train was entering the station, and dropped her child onto the metals.
+She tried to jump after it but was held back, and Mary, who had just
+come up, jumped in her stead, and by a miracle of strength and agility
+was just able to clutch the child and get onto the six-foot way as the
+engine came by.
+
+She was able to carry the child to the end of the train, and was helped
+onto the platform. It was her train, and she got into a carriage, but
+she was dead before it reached the next station. Her heart, (which, it
+seems, had been diseased for some time) had stopped, and all was over.
+
+So died Mary Seraskier, at fifty-three.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I lay for many weeks convalescent in body, but in a state of dumb, dry
+tearless, despair, to which there never came a moment's relief, except
+in the dreamless sleep I got from chloral, which was given to me in
+large quantities--and then, the _waking_!
+
+I never spoke nor answered a question, and hardly ever stirred. I had
+one fixed idea--that of self-destruction; and after two unsuccessful
+attempts, I was so closely bound and watched night and day that any
+further attempt was impossible. They would not trust me with a toothpick
+or a button or a piece of common packthread.
+
+I tried to starve myself to death and refused all solid food: but an
+intolerable thirst (perhaps artificially brought on) made it impossible
+for me to refuse any liquid that was offered, and I was tempted with
+milk, beef-tea, port, and sherry, and these kept me alive....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I had lost all wish to dream.
+
+At length, one afternoon, a strange, inexplicable, overwhelming
+nostalgic desire came over me to see once more the Mare d'Auteuil--only
+once; to walk thither for the last time through the Chaussee de la
+Muette, and by the fortifications.
+
+It grew upon me till it became a torture to wait for bedtime, so frantic
+was my impatience.
+
+When the long-wished-for hour arrived at last, I laid myself down once
+more (as nearly as I could for my bonds) in the old position I had not
+tried for so long; my will intent upon the Porte de la Muette, an old
+stone gate-way that separated the Grande Rue de Passy from the entrance
+to the Bois de Boulogne--a kind of Temple Bar.
+
+It was pulled down forty-five years ago.
+
+I soon found myself there, just where the Grande Rue meets the Rue de la
+Pompe, and went through the arch and looked towards the Bois.
+
+It was a dull, leaden day in autumn; few people were about, but a gay
+_repas de noces_ was being held at a little restaurant on my right-hand
+side. It was to celebrate the wedding of Achille Grigoux, the
+green-grocer, with Felicite Lenormand, who had been the Seraskiers'
+house-maid. I suddenly remembered all this, and that Mimsey and Gogo
+were of the party--the latter, indeed, being _premier garcon d'honneur_,
+on whom would soon devolve the duty of stealing the bride's garter, and
+cutting it up into little bits to adorn the button-holes of the male
+guests before the ball began.
+
+In an archway on my left some forlorn, worn-out old rips, broken-kneed
+and broken-winded, were patiently waiting, ready saddled and bridled, to
+be hired--Chloris, Murat, Rigolette, and others: I knew and had ridden
+them all nearly half a century ago. Poor old shadows of the long-dead
+past, so life-like and real and pathetic--it "split me the heart" to
+see them!
+
+A handsome young blue-coated, silver-buttoned courier of the name of
+Lami came trotting along from St. Cloud on a roan horse, with a great
+jingling of his horse's bells and clacking of his short-handled whip. He
+stopped at the restaurant and called for a glass of white wine, and
+rising in his stirrups, shouted gayly for Monsieur et Madame Grigoux.
+They appeared at the first-floor window, looking very happy, and he
+drank their health, and they his. I could see Gogo and Mimsey in the
+crowd behind them, and mildly wondered again, as I had so often wondered
+before, how I came to see it all from the outside--from another point of
+view than Gogo's.
+
+Then the courier bowed gallantly, and said, _"Bonne chance!"_ and went
+trotting down the Grande Rue on his way to the Tuileries, and the
+wedding guests began to sing: they sang a song beginning--
+
+_"Il etait un petit navire, Qui n'avait jamais navigue_...."
+
+I had quite forgotten it, and listened till the end, and thought it very
+pretty; and was interested in a dull, mechanical way at discovering
+that it must be the original of Thackeray's famous ballad of "Little
+Billee," which I did not hear till many years after. When they came to
+the last verse--
+
+"_Si cette histoire vous embete, Nous allons la recommencer_,"
+
+I went on my way. This was my last walk in dreamland, perhaps, and
+dream-hours are uncertain, and I would make the most of them, and
+look about me.
+
+I walked towards Ranelagh, a kind of casino, where they used to give
+balls and theatrical performances on Sunday and Thursday nights (and
+where afterwards Rossini spent the latter years of his life; then it was
+pulled down, I am told, to make room for many smart little villas).
+
+In the meadow opposite M. Erard's park, Saindou's school-boys were
+playing rounders--_la balle au camp_--from which I concluded it was a
+Thursday afternoon, a half-holiday; if they had had clean shirts on
+(which they had not) it would have been Sunday, and the holiday a
+whole one.
+
+I knew them all, and the two _pions_, or ushers, M. Lartigue and _le
+petit Cazal_; but no longer cared for them or found them amusing or
+interesting in the least.
+
+Opposite the Ranelagh a few old hackney-coach men were pacifically
+killing time by a game of _bouchon_--knocking sous off a cork with other
+sous--great fat sous and double sous long gone out of fashion. It is a
+very good game, and I watched it for a while and envied the
+long-dead players.
+
+Close by was a small wooden shed, or _baraque_, prettily painted and
+glazed, and ornamented at the top with little tricolor flags; it
+belonged to a couple of old ladies, Mere Manette and Grandmere
+Manette-the two oldest women ever seen. They were very keen about
+business, and would not give credit for a centime--not even to English
+boys. They were said to be immensely rich and quite alone in the world.
+How very dead they must be now! I thought. And I gazed at them and
+wondered at their liveliness and the pleasure they took in living. They
+sold many things: nougat, _pain d'epices_, mirlitons, hoops, drums,
+noisy battledoors and shuttlecocks; and little ten-sou hand-mirrors,
+neatly bound in zinc, that could open and shut.
+
+I looked at myself in one of these that was hanging outside; I was old
+and worn and gray-my face badly shaven--my hair almost white. I had
+never been old in a dream before.
+
+I walked through the gate in the fortifications on to the outer Talus
+(which was quite bare in those days), in the direction of the Mare
+d'Auteuil. The place seemed very deserted and dull for a Thursday. It
+was a sad and sober walk; my melancholy was not to be borne--my heart
+was utterly broken, and my body so tired I could scarcely drag myself
+along. Never before had I known in a dream what it was to be tired.
+
+I gazed at the famous fortifications in all their brand-new pinkness,
+the scaffoldings barely removed--some of them still lying in the dry
+ditch between--and smiled to think how these little brick and granite
+walls would avail to keep the Germans out of Paris thirty years later
+(twenty years ago). I tried to throw a stone across the narrow part, and
+found I could no longer throw stones; so I sat down and rested. How thin
+my legs were! and how miserably clad--in old prison trousers, greasy,
+stained, and frayed, and ignobly kneed--and what boots!
+
+[Illustration: "I sat down and rested."]
+
+Never had I been shabby in a dream before.
+
+Why could not I, once for all, walk round to the other side and take a
+header _a la hussarde_ off those lofty bulwarks, and kill myself for
+good and all? Alas! I should only blur the dream, and perhaps even wake
+in my miserable strait-waistcoat. And I wanted to see the _mare_ once
+more, very badly.
+
+This set me thinking. I would fill my pockets with stones, and throw
+myself into the Mare d'Auteuil after I had taken a last good look at it,
+and around. Perhaps the shock of emotion, in my present state of
+weakness, might really kill me in my sleep. Who knows? it was worth
+trying, anyhow.
+
+I got up and dragged myself to the _mare_. It was deserted but for one
+solitary female figure, soberly clad in black and gray, that sat
+motionless on the bench by the old willow.
+
+I walked slowly round in her direction, picking up stones and putting
+them into my pockets, and saw that she was gray-haired and middle-aged,
+with very dark eyebrows, and extremely tall, and that her magnificent
+eyes were following me.
+
+Then, as I drew nearer, she smiled and showed gleaming white teeth, and
+her eyes crinkled and nearly closed up as she did so.
+
+"Oh, my God!" I shrieked; "it is Mary Seraskier!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I ran to her--I threw myself at her feet, and buried my face in her lap,
+and there I sobbed like a hysterical child, while she tried to soothe me
+as one soothes a child.
+
+After a while I looked up into her face. It was old and worn and gray,
+and her hair nearly white, like mine. I had never seen her like that
+before; she had always been eight-and-twenty. But age became her
+well--she looked so benignly beautiful and calm and grand that I was
+awed--and quick, chill waves went down my backbone.
+
+Her dress and bonnet were old and shabby, her gloves had been
+mended--old kid gloves with fur about the wrists. She drew them off, and
+took my hands and made me sit beside her, and looked at me for a while
+with all her might in silence.
+
+At length she said: "Gogo mio, I know all you have been through by the
+touch of your hands. Does the touch of mine tell you nothing?"
+
+It told me nothing but her huge love for me, which was all I cared for,
+and I said so.
+
+She sighed, and said: "I was afraid it would be like this. The old
+circuit is broken, and can't be restored--not yet!"
+
+We tried again hard; but it was useless.
+
+She looked round and about and up at the tree-tops, everywhere; and then
+at me again, with great wistfulness, and shivered, and finally began to
+speak, with hesitation at first, and in a manner foreign to her. But
+soon she became apparently herself, and found her old swift smile and
+laugh, her happy slight shrugs and gestures, and quaint polyglot
+colloquialisms (which I omit, as I cannot always spell them); her
+homely, simple ways of speech, her fluent, magnetic energy, the winning
+and sympathetic modulations of her voice, its quick humorous changes
+from grave to gay--all that made everything she said so suggestive of
+all she wanted to say besides.
+
+"Gogo, I knew you would come. I _wished_ it! How dreadfully you have
+suffered! How thin you are! It shocks me to see you! But that will not
+be any more; we are going to change all that.
+
+"Gogo, you have no idea how difficult it has been for me to come back,
+even for a few short hours, for I can't hold on very long. It is like
+hanging on to the window-sill by one's wrists. This time it is Hero
+swimming to Leander, or Juliet climbing up to Romeo.
+
+"Nobody has ever come back before.
+
+"I am but a poor husk of my former self, put together at great pains for
+you to know me by. I could not make myself again what I have always been
+to you. I had to be content with this, and so must you. These are the
+clothes I died in. But you knew me directly, dear Gogo.
+
+"I have come a long way--such a long way--to have an _abboccamento_ with
+you. I had so many things to say. And now we are both here, hand in hand
+as we used to be, I can't even understand what they were; and if I
+could, I couldn't make _you_ understand. But you will know some day, and
+there is no hurry whatever.
+
+"Every thought you have had since I died, I know already; _your_ share
+of the circuit is unbroken at least. I know now why you picked up those
+stones and put them in your pockets. You must never think of _that_
+again--you never will. Besides, it would be of no use, poor Gogo!"
+
+Then she looked up at the sky and all round her again, and smiled in her
+old happy manner, and rubbed her eyes with the backs of her hands, and
+seemed to settle herself for a good long talk--an _abboccamento!_
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Of all she said I can only give a few fragments--whatever I can recall
+and understand when awake. Wherever I have forgotten I will put a line
+of little dots. Only when I sleep and dream can I recall and understand
+the rest. It seems all very simple then. I often say to myself, "I will
+fix it well in my mind, and put it into well-chosen words--_her_
+words--and learn them by heart; and then wake cautiously and remember
+them, and write them all down in a book, so that they shall do for
+others all they have done for me, and turn doubt into happy certainty,
+and despair into patience and hope and high elation."
+
+[Illustration: "IT IS MARY SERASKIER!"]
+
+But the bell rings and I wake, and my memory plays me false. Nothing
+remains but the knowledge _that all will be well for us all, and of such
+a kind that those who do not sigh for the moon will be well content_.
+
+Alas, this knowledge: I cannot impart it to others. Like many who have
+lived before me, I cannot prove--I can only affirm....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"How odd and old-fashioned it feels," she began, "to have eyes and ears
+again, and all that--little open windows on to what is near us. They are
+very clumsy contrivances! I had already forgotten them."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Look, there goes our old friend, the water-rat, under the bank--the old
+fat father--_le bon gros pere_--as we used to call him. He is only a
+little flat picture moving upsidedown in the opposite direction across
+the backs of our eyes, and the farther he goes the smaller he seems. A
+couple of hundred yards off we shouldn't see him at all. As it is, we
+can only see the outside of him, and that only on one side at a time;
+and yet he is full of important and wonderful things that have taken
+millions of years to make--like us! And to see him at all we have to
+look straight at him--and then we can't see what's behind us or
+around--and if it was dark we couldn't see anything whatever.
+
+Poor eyes! Little bags full of water, with a little magnifying-glass
+inside, and a nasturtium leaf behind--to catch the light and feel it!
+
+A celebrated German oculist once told papa that if his instrument-maker
+were to send him such an ill-made machine as a human eye, he would send
+it back and refuse to pay the bill. I can understand that now; and yet
+on earth where should we be without eyes? And afterwards where should we
+be if some of us hadn't once had them on earth?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I can hear your dear voice, Gogo, with both ears. Why two ears? Why
+only two? What you want, or think, or feel, you try to tell me in sounds
+that you have been taught--English, French. If I didn't know English and
+French, it would be no good whatever. Language is a poor thing. You fill
+your lungs with wind and shake a little slit in your throat, and make
+mouths, and that shakes the air; and the air shakes a pair of little
+drums in my head--a very complicated arrangement, with lots of bones
+behind--and my brain seizes your meaning in the rough. What a roundabout
+way, and what a waste of time!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And so with all the rest. We can't even smell straight! A dog would
+laugh at us--not that even a dog knows much!
+
+And feeling! We can feel too hot or too cold, and it sometimes makes us
+ill, or even kills us. But we can't feel the coming storm, or which is
+north and south, or where the new moon is, or the sun at midnight, or
+the stars at noon, or even what o'clock it is by our own measurement. We
+cannot even find our way home blindfolded--not even a pigeon can do
+that, nor a swallow, nor an owl! Only a mole, or a blind man, perhaps,
+feebly groping with a stick, if he has already been that way before.
+
+And taste! It is well said there is no accounting for it.
+
+And then, to keep all this going, we have to eat, and drink, and sleep,
+and all the rest. What a burden!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And you and I are the only mortals that I know of who ever found a way
+to each other's inner being by the touch of the hands. And then we had
+to go to sleep first. Our bodies were miles apart; not that _that_ would
+have made any difference, for we could never have done it waking--never;
+not if we hugged each other to extinction!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Gogo, I cannot find any words to tell you _how_, for there are none in
+any language that _I_ ever knew to tell it; but where I am it is all ear
+and eye and the rest in _one_, and there is, oh, how much more besides!
+Things a homing-pigeon has known, and an ant, and a mole, and a
+water-beetle, and an earthworm, and a leaf, and a root, and a
+magnet--even a lump of chalk, and more. One can see and smell and touch
+and taste a sound, as well as hear it, and _vice versa_. It is very
+simple, though it may not seem so to you now.
+
+And the sounds! Ah, what sounds! The thick atmosphere of earth is no
+conductor for such as _they_, and earthly ear-drums no receiver. Sound
+is everything. Sound and light are one.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And what does it all mean?
+
+I knew what it meant when I was there--part of it, at least--and should
+know again in a few hours. But this poor old earth-brain of mine, which
+I have had to put on once more as an old woman puts on a nightcap, is
+like my eyes and ears. It can now only understand what is of the
+earth--what _you_ can understand, Gogo, who are still of the earth. I
+forget, as one forgets an ordinary dream, as one sometimes forgets the
+answer to a riddle, or the last verse of a song. It is on the tip of the
+tongue; but there it sticks, and won't come any farther.
+
+Remember, it is only in your brain I am living now--your earthly brain,
+that has been my only home for so many happy years, as mine has
+been yours.
+
+How we have nestled!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But this I know: one must have had them all once--brains, ears, eyes,
+and the rest--on earth. 'Il faut avoir passe par la!' or no
+after-existence for man or beast would be possible or even conceivable.
+
+One cannot teach a born deaf-mute how to understand a musical score,
+nor a born blind man how to feel color. To Beethoven, who had once heard
+with the ear, his deafness made no difference, nor their blindness to
+Homer and Milton.
+
+Can you make out my little parable?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Sound and light and heat, and electricity and motion, and will and
+thought and remembrance, and love and hate and pity, and the desire to
+be born and to live, and the longing of all things alive and dead to get
+near each other, or to fly apart--and lots of other things besides! All
+that comes to the same--'C'est comme qui dirait bonnet blanc et blanc
+bonnet,' as Monsieur le Major used to say. 'C'est simple comme bonjour!'
+
+Where I am, Gogo, I can hear the sun shining on the earth and making
+the flowers blow, and the birds sing, and the bells peal for birth and
+marriage and death--happy, happy death, if you only knew--'C'est la clef
+des champs!'
+
+It shines on moons and planets, and I can hear it, and hear the echo
+they give back again. The very stars are singing; rather a long way off!
+but it is well worth their while with such an audience as lies between
+us and them; and they can't help it....
+
+I can't hear it here--not a bit--now that I've got my ears on; besides,
+the winds of the earth are too loud....
+
+Ah, that _is_ music, if you like; but men and women are stone-deaf to
+it--their ears are in the way! ...
+
+Those poor unseen flat fish that live in the darkness and mud at the
+bottom of deep seas can't catch the music men and women make upon the
+earth--such poor music as it is! But if ever so faint a murmur, borne on
+the wings and fins of a sunbeam, reaches them for a few minutes at
+mid-day, and they have a speck of marrow in their spines to feel it, and
+no ears or eyes to come between, they are better off than any man, Gogo.
+Their dull existence is more blessed than his.
+
+But alas for them, as yet! They haven't got the memory of the eye and
+ear, and without that no speck of spinal marrow will avail; they must be
+content to wait, like you.
+
+The blind and deaf?
+
+Oh yes; _la bas_, it is all right for the poor deaf-mutes and born
+blind of the earth; they can remember with the past eyes and ears of all
+the rest. Besides, it is no longer _they_. There is no _they_! That is
+only a detail.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+You must try and realize that it is just as though all space between us
+and the sun and stars were full of little specks of spinal marrow, much
+too small to be seen in any microscope--smaller than anything in the
+world. All space is full of them, shoulder to shoulder--almost as close
+as sardines in a box--and there is still room for more! Yet a single
+drop of water would hold them all, and not be the less transparent. They
+all remember having been alive on earth or elsewhere, in some form or
+other, and each knows all the others remember. I can only compare it
+to that.
+
+Once all that space was only full of stones, rushing, whirling,
+meeting, and crushing together, and melting and steaming in the
+white-heat of their own hurry. But now there's a crop of something
+better than stones, I can promise you! It goes on gathering, and being
+garnered and mingled and sifted and winnowed--the precious,
+indestructible harvest of how many millions of years of life!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And this I know: the longer and more strenuously and completely one
+lives one's life on earth the better for all. It is the foundation of
+everything. Though if men could guess what is in store for them when
+they die, without also knowing _that_, they would not have the patience
+to live--they wouldn't wait! For who would fardels bear? They would just
+put stones in their pockets, as you did, and make for the nearest pond.
+
+They mustn't!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Nothing is lost--nothing! From the ineffable, high, fleeting thought a
+Shakespeare can't find words to express, to the slightest sensation of
+an earthworm--nothing! Not a leaf's feeling of the light, not a
+loadstone's sense of the pole, not a single volcanic or electric thrill
+of the mother earth.
+
+All knowledge must begin on earth for _us_. It is the most favored
+planet in this poor system of ours just now, and for a few short
+millions of years to come. There are just a couple of others, perhaps
+three; but they are not of great consequence. 'Il y fait trop chaud--ou
+pas assez!' They are failures.
+
+The sun, the father sun, _le bon gros pere_, rains life on to the
+mother earth. A poor little life it was at first, as you know--grasses
+and moss, and little wriggling, transparent things--all stomach; it is
+quite true! That is what we come from--Shakespeare, and you, and I!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After each individual death the earth retains each individual clay to
+be used again and again; and, as far as I can see, it rains back each
+individual essence to the sun--or somewhere near it--like a precious
+water-drop returned to the sea, where it mingles, after having been
+about and seen something of the world, and learned the use of five small
+wits--and remembering all! Yes, like that poor little exiled wandering
+water-drop in the pretty song your father used to sing, and which always
+manages to find its home at last--
+
+     _'Va passaggier' in fiume,
+     Va prigionier' in fonte,
+       Ma sempre ritorn' al mar.'_
+
+Or else it is as if little grains of salt were being showered into the
+Mare d'Auteuil, to melt and mingle with the water and each other till
+the Mare d'Auteuil itself was as salt as salt can be.
+
+Not till that Mare d'Auteuil of the sun is saturated with the salt of
+the earth, of earthly life and knowledge, will the purpose be complete,
+and then old mother earth may well dry up into a cinder like the moon;
+its occupation will be gone, like hers--'adieu, panier, les vendanges
+sont faites!'
+
+And, as for the sun and its surrounding ocean of life--ah, that is
+beyond _me_! but the sun will dry up, too, and its ocean of life no
+doubt be drawn to other greater suns. For everything seems to go on more
+or less in the same way, only crescendo, everywhere and forever.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+You must understand that it is not a bit like an ocean, nor a bit like
+water-drops, or grains of salt, or specks of spinal marrow; but it is
+only by such poor metaphors that I can give you a glimpse of what I
+mean, since you can no longer understand me, as you used to do on
+earthly things, by the mere touch of our hands.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Gogo, I am the only little water-drop, the one grain of salt that has
+not yet been able to dissolve and melt away in that universal sea; I am
+the exception.
+
+It is as though a long, invisible chain bound me still to the earth,
+and I were hung at the other end of it in a little transparent locket, a
+kind of cage, which lets me see and hear things all round, but keeps me
+from melting away.
+
+And soon I found that this locket was made of that half of you that is
+still in me, so that I couldn't dissolve, because half of me wasn't dead
+at all; for the chain linked me to that half of myself I had left in
+you, so that half of me actually wasn't there to be dissolved.... I am
+getting rather mixed!
+
+But oh, my heart's true love, how I hugged my chain, with you at the
+other end of it!
+
+With such pain and effort as you cannot conceive, I have crept along it
+back to you, like a spider on an endless thread of its own spinning.
+Such love as mine is stronger then death indeed!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have come to tell you that we are inseparable forever, you and I, one
+double speck of spinal marrow--'Philipschen!'--one little grain of salt,
+one drop. There is to be no parting for _us_--I can see that; but such
+extraordinary luck seems reserved for you and me alone up to now; and it
+is all our own doing.
+
+But not till you join me shall you and I be complete, and free to melt
+away in that universal ocean, and take our part, as One, in all is
+to be.
+
+That moment--you must not hasten it by a moment. Time is nothing. I'm
+even beginning to believe there's no such thing; there is so little
+difference, _la-bas_, between a year and a day. And as for space--dear
+me, an inch is as as an ell!
+
+Things cannot be measured like that.
+
+A midge's life is as long as a man's, for it has time to learn its
+business, and do all the harm it can, and fight, and make love, and
+marry, and reproduce its kind, and grow disenchanted and bored and sick
+and content to die--all in a summer afternoon. An average man can live
+to seventy years without doing much more.
+
+And then there are tall midges, and clever and good-looking ones, and
+midges of great personal strength and cunning, who can fly a little
+faster and a little farther than the rest, and live an hour longer to
+drink a whole drop more of some other creature's blood; but it does not
+make a very great difference!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+No, time and space mean just the same as 'nothing.'
+
+But for you they mean much, as you have much to do. Our joint life must
+be revealed--that long, sweet life of make-believe, that has been so
+much more real than reality. Ah! where and what were time or space to
+us then?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And you must tell all we have found out, and how; the way must be shown
+to others with better brains and better training than _we_ had. The
+value to mankind--to mankind here and hereafter--may be incalculable.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For some day, when all is found out that can be found out on earth, and
+made the common property of all (or even before that), the great man
+will perhaps arise and make the great guess that is to set us all free,
+here and hereafter. Who knows?
+
+I feel this splendid guesser will be some inspired musician of the
+future, as simple as a little child in all things but his knowledge of
+the power of sound; but even little children will have learned much in
+those days. He will want new notes and find them--new notes between the
+black and white keys. He will go blind like Milton and Homer, and deaf
+like Beethoven; and then, all in the stillness and the dark, all in the
+depths of his forlorn and lonely soul, he will make his best music, and
+out of the endless mazes of its counterpoint he will evolve a secret, as
+we did from the "Chant du Triste Commensal," but it will be a greater
+secret than ours. Others will have been very near this hidden treasure;
+but he will happen right _on_ it, and unearth it, and bring it to light.
+
+I think I see him sitting at the key-board, so familiar of old to the
+feel of his consummate fingers; painfully dictating his score to some
+most patient and devoted friend--mother, sister, daughter, wife--that
+score that he will never see or hear.
+
+What a stammerer! Not only blind and deaf, but _mad_--mad in the
+world's eyes, for fifty, a hundred, a thousand years. Time is nothing;
+but that score will survive....
+
+He will die of it, of course; and when he dies and comes to us, there
+will be joy from here to Sirius, and beyond.
+
+And one day they will find out on earth that he was only deaf and
+blind--not mad at all. They will hear and _understand_--they will know
+that he saw and heard as none had ever heard or seen before!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For 'as we sow we reap'; that is a true saying, and all the sowing is
+done here on earth, and the reaping beyond. Man is a grub; his dead
+clay, as he lies coffined in his grave, is the left-off cocoon he has
+spun for himself during his earthly life, to burst open and soar from
+with all his memories about him, even his lost ones. Like the
+dragon-fly, the butterfly, the moth ... and when _they_ die it is the
+same, and the same with a blade of grass. We are all, _tous tant que
+nous sommes_, little bags of remembrance that never dies; that's what
+we're _for_. But we can only bring with us to the common stock what
+we've got. As Pere Francois used to say, 'La plus belle fille au monde
+ne peut donner que ce qu'elle a.'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Besides all this I am your earthly wife, Gogo--your loving, faithful,
+devoted wife, and I wish it to be known.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And then at last, in the fulness of time--a very few years--ah,
+then----
+
+"Once more shall Neuha lead her Torquil by the hand."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Oh, Mary!" I cried, "shall we be transcendently happy again? As happy
+as we were--_happier_ even?"
+
+Ah, Gogo, is a man happier than a mouse, or a mouse than a turnip, or
+a turnip than a lump of chalk? But what man would be a mouse or a
+turnip, or _vice versa_? What turnip would be a lump--of anything but
+itself? Are two people happier than one? You and I, yes; because we
+_are_ one; but who else? It is one and all. Happiness is like time
+and space--we make and measure it ourselves; it is a fancy--as big, as
+little, as you please; just a thing of contrasts and comparisons, like
+health or strength or beauty or any other good--that wouldn't even be
+noticed but for sad personal experience of its opposite!--or
+its greater!
+
+"I have forgotten all I know but this, which is for you and me: we are
+inseparable forever. Be sure we shall not want to go back again for
+a moment."
+
+"And is there no punishment or reward?"
+
+Oh, there again! What a detail! Poor little naughty perverse
+midges--who were _born_ so--and _can't_ keep straight! poor little
+exemplary midges who couldn't go wrong if they tried! Is it worth while?
+Isn't it enough for either punishment or reward that the secrets of all
+midges' hearts shall be revealed, and for all other midges to see?
+Think of it!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There are battles to be fought and races to be won, but no longer
+against '_each other_.' And strength and swiftness to win them; but no
+longer any strong and swift. There is weakness and cowardice, but no
+longer any cowards or weaklings. The good and the bad and the worst and
+the best--it is all mixed up. But the good comes to the top; the bad
+goes to the bottom--it is precipitated, as papa used to say. It is not
+an agreeable sediment, with its once useful cruelty at the lowest bottom
+of all--out of sight, out of mind--all but forgotten. _C'est deja
+le ciel_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"And the goal? The cause, the whither, and the why of it all? Ah!
+Gogo--as inscrutable, as unthinkable as ever, till the great guesser
+comes! At least so it seems to me, speaking as a fool, out of the depths
+of my poor ignorance; for I am a new arrival, and a complete outsider,
+with my chain and locket, waiting for you.
+
+"I have only picked up a few grains of sand on the shore of that sea--a
+few little shells, and I can't even show you what they are like. I see
+that it is no good even talking of it, alas! And I had promised myself
+_so_ much.
+
+"Oh! how my earthly education was neglected, and yours! and how I feel
+it now, with so much to say in words, mere words! Why, to tell you in
+words the little I can see, the very little--so that you could
+understand--would require that each of us should be the greatest poet
+and the greatest mathematician that ever were, rolled into one! How I
+pity you, Gogo--with your untrained, unskilled, innocent pen, poor
+scribe! having to write all this down--for you _must_--and do your poor
+little best, as I have done mine in telling you! You must let the heart
+speak, and not mind style or manner! Write _any_ how! write for the
+greatest need and the greatest number.
+
+"But do just try and see this, dearest, and make the best of it you can:
+as far as _I_ can make it out, everything everywhere seems to be an
+ever-deepening, ever-broadening stream that makes with inconceivable
+velocity for its own proper level, WHERE PERFECTION IS! ... and ever
+gets nearer and nearer, and never finds it, and fortunately never will!
+
+"Only that, unlike an earthly stream, and more like a fresh flowing tide
+up an endless, boundless, shoreless creek (if you can imagine that), the
+level it seeks is immeasurably higher than its source. And everywhere in
+it is Life, Life, Life! ever renewing and doubling itself, and ever
+swelling that mighty river which has no banks!
+
+"And everywhere in it like begets like, _plus_ a little better or a
+little worse; and the little worse finds its way into some backwater and
+sticks there, and finally goes to the bottom, and nobody cares. And the
+little better goes on bettering and bettering--not all man's folly or
+perverseness can hinder _that_, nor make that headlong torrent stay, or
+ebb, or roll backward for a moment--_c'est plus fort que nous_! ... The
+record goes on beating itself, the high-water-mark gets higher and
+higher till the highest on earth is reached that can be--and then, I
+suppose, the earth grows cold and the sun goes out--to be broken up into
+bits, and used all over again, perhaps! And betterness flies to warmer
+climes and higher systems, to better itself still! And so on, from
+better to better, from higher to higher, from warmer to warmer, and
+bigger to bigger--for ever and ever and ever!
+
+"But the final superlative of all, absolute all--goodness and
+all-highness, absolute all-wisdom, absolute omnipotence, beyond which
+there neither is nor can be anything more, will never be reached at
+all--since there are no such things; they are abstractions; besides
+which, attainment means rest, and rest stagnation, and stagnation an end
+of all! And there is no end, and never can be--no end to Time and all
+the things that are done in it--no end to Space and all the things that
+fill it, or all would come together in a heap and smash up in the
+middle--and there _is_ no middle!--no end, no beginning, no middle! _no
+middle_, Gogo! think of _that_! it is the most inconceivable thing
+of all!!!
+
+"So who shall say where Shakespeare and you and I come in--tiny links in
+an endless chain, so tiny that even Shakespeare is no bigger than we!
+And just a little way behind us, those little wriggling transparent
+things, all stomach, that we descend from; and far ahead of ourselves,
+but in the direct line of a long descent from _us_, an ever-growing
+conscious Power, so strong, so glad, so simple, so wise, so mild, and so
+beneficent, that what can we do, even now, but fall on our knees with
+our foreheads in the dust, and our hearts brimful of wonder, hope, and
+love, and tender shivering awe; and worship as a yet unborn, barely
+conceived, and scarce begotten _Child_--that which we have always been
+taught to worship as a _Father_--That which is not now, but _is_ to
+be--That which we shall all share in and be part and parcel of in the
+dim future--That which is slowly, surely, painfully weaving Itself out
+of us and the likes of us all through the limitless Universe, and Whose
+coming we can but faintly foretell by the casting of its shadow on our
+own slowly, surely, painfully awakening souls!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Then she went on to speak of earthly things, and ask questions in her
+old practical way. First of my bodily health, with the tenderest
+solicitude and the wisest advice--as a mother to a son. She even
+insisted on listening to my heart, like a doctor.
+
+Then she spoke at great length of the charities in which she had been
+interested, and gave me many directions which I was to write, as coming
+from myself, to certain people whose names and addresses she impressed
+upon me with great care.
+
+I have done as she wished, and most of these directions have been
+followed to the letter, with no little wonder on the world's part (as
+the world well knows) that such sagacious and useful reforms should have
+originated with the inmate of a criminal lunatic asylum.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At last the time came for us to part. She foresaw that I should have to
+wake in a few minutes, and said, rising----
+
+"And now, Gogo, the best beloved that ever was on earth, take me once
+more in your dear arms, and kiss me good-bye for a little while--_auf
+wiedersehen_. Come here to rest and think and remember when your body
+sleeps. My spirit will always be here with you. I may even be able to
+come back again myself--just this poor husk of me--hardly more to look
+at than a bundle of old clothes; but yet a world made up of love for
+_you_. Good-bye, good-bye, dearest and best. Time is nothing, but I
+shall count the hours. Good-bye...."
+
+Even as she strained me to her breast I awoke.
+
+[Illustration: "GOOD-BYE"]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I awoke, and knew that the dread black shadow of melancholia had passed
+away from me like a hideous nightmare--like a long and horrible winter.
+My heart was full of the sunshine of spring--the gladness of awaking to
+a new life.
+
+I smiled at my night attendant, who stared back at me in astonishment,
+and exclaimed----
+
+"Why, sir, blest if you ain't a new man altogether. There, now!"
+
+I wrung his hand, and thanked him for all his past patience, kindness,
+and forbearance with such effusion that his eyes had tears in them. I
+had not spoken for weeks, and he heard my voice for the first time.
+
+That day, also, without any preamble or explanation, I gave the doctor
+and the chaplain and the governor my word of honor that I would not
+attempt my life again, or any one else's, and was believed and trusted
+on the spot; and they unstrapped me.
+
+I was never so touched in my life.
+
+In a week I recovered much of my strength; but I was an old man. That
+was a great change.
+
+Most people age gradually and imperceptibly. To me old age had come of a
+sudden--in a night, as it were; but with it, and suddenly also, the
+resigned and cheerful acquiescence, the mild serenity, that are its
+compensation and more.
+
+My hope, my certainty to be one with Mary some day--that is my haven, my
+heaven--a consummation of completeness beyond which there is nothing to
+wish for or imagine. Come what else may, that is safe, and that is all I
+care for. She was able to care for me, and for many other things
+besides, and I love her all the more for it; but I can only care
+for _her_.
+
+Sooner or later--a year--ten years; it does not matter much. I also am
+beginning to disbelieve in the existence of time.
+
+That waking was the gladdest in my life--gladder even than the waking
+in my condemned cell the morning after my sentence of death, when
+another black shadow passed away--that of the scaffold.
+
+Oh, Mary! What has she not done for me--what clouds has she not
+dispelled!
+
+When night came round again I made once more, step by step, the journey
+from the Porte de la Muette to the Mare d'Auteuil, with everything the
+same--the gay wedding-feast, the blue and silver courier, the merry
+guests singing
+
+     _"Il etait un petit navire."_
+
+Nothing was altered, even to the dull gray weather. But, oh, the
+difference to me!
+
+I longed to play at _bouchon_ with the hackney coachmen, or at _la balle
+au camp_ with my old schoolfellows. I could have even waltzed with
+"Monsieur Lartigue" and "le petit Cazal."
+
+I looked in Mere Manette's little mirror and saw my worn, gray, haggard,
+old face again; and liked it, and thought it quite good-looking. I sat
+down and rested by the fortifications as I had done the night before,
+for I was still tired, but with a most delicious fatigue; my very
+shabbiness was agreeable to me--_pauvre, mais honnete_. A convict, a
+madman, but a prince among men--still the beloved of Mary!
+
+And when at last I reached the spot I had always loved the best on earth
+ever since I first saw it as a child, I fell on my knees and wept for
+sheer excess of joy. It was mine indeed; it belonged to me as no land or
+water had ever belonged to any man before.
+
+Mary was not there, of course; I did not expect her.
+
+But, strange and incomprehensible as it seems, she had forgotten her
+gloves; she had left them behind her. One was on the bench, one was on
+the ground; poor old gloves that had been mended, with the well-known
+shape of her dear hand in them; every fold and crease preserved as in a
+mould--the very cast of her finger-nails; and the scent of sandal-wood
+she and her mother had so loved.
+
+I laid them side by side, palms upward, on the bench where we had sat
+the night before. No dream-wind has blown them away; no dream-thief has
+stolen them; there they lie still, and will lie till the great change
+comes over me, and I am one with their owner.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I am there every night--in the lovely spring or autumn
+sunshine--meditating, remembering, taking notes--dream-notes to be
+learned by heard, and used next day for a real purpose.
+
+I walk round and round, or sit on the benches, or lie in the grass by
+the brink, and smoke cigarettes without end, and watch the old
+amphibious life I found so charming half a century ago, and find it
+charming still.
+
+Sometimes I dive into the forest (which has now been razed to the
+ground. Ever since 1870 there is an open space all round the Mare
+d'Auteuil. I had seen it since then in a dream with Mary, who went to
+Paris after the war, and mad pilgrimages by day to all the places so
+dear to our hearts, and so changed; and again, when the night came,
+with me for a fellow-pilgrim. It was a sad disenchantment for us both).
+
+_My_ Mare d'Auteuil, where I spend so many hours, is the Mare d'Auteuil
+of Louis Philippe, unchangeable except for such slight changes as _will_
+occur, now and then, between the years 1839 and 1846: a broken bench
+mended, a new barrier put up by the high-road, a small wooden dike
+where the brink is giving way.
+
+[Illustration: "I AM THERE EVERY NIGHT."]
+
+And the thicket beside and behind it is dark and dense for miles, with
+many tall trees and a rich, tangled undergrowth.
+
+There is a giant oak which it is difficult to find in that labyrinth (it
+now stands, for the world, alone in the open; an ornament to the Auteuil
+race-course) I have often climbed it as a boy, with Mimsey and the
+rest; I cannot climb it now, but I love to lie on the grass in its
+shade, and dream in my dream there, shut in on all sides by fragrant,
+impenetrable verdure; with birds and bees and butterflies and
+dragon-flies and strange beetles and little field-mice with bright eyes,
+and lithe spotted snakes and lively brown squirrels and beautiful green
+lizards for my company. Now and then a gentle roebuck comes and feeds
+close by me without fear, and the mole throws up his little mound of
+earth and takes an airing.
+
+It is a very charming solitude.
+
+It amuses me to think by day, when broad awake in my sad English prison,
+and among my crazy peers, how this nightly umbrageous French solitude of
+mine, so many miles and years away, is now but a common, bare, wide
+grassy plain, overlooked by a gaudy, beflagged grand-stand. It is
+Sunday, let us say--and for all I know a great race may be going on--all
+Paris is there, rich and poor. Little red-legged soldiers, big
+blue-legged gendarmes, keep the course clear; the sun shines, the
+tricolour waves, the gay, familiar language makes the summer breeze
+musical. I dare say it is all very bright and animated, but the whole
+place rings with the vulgar din of the bookmakers, and the air is full
+of dust and foul with the scent of rank tobacco, the reek of struggling
+French humanity; and the gaunt Eiffel Tower looks down upon it all from
+the sky over Paris (so, at least, I am told) like a skeleton at a feast.
+
+Then twilight comes, and the crowds have departed; on foot, on
+horseback, on bicycles and tricycles, in every kind of vehicle; many by
+the _chemin de fer de ceinture_, the Auteuil station of which is close
+by ... all is quiet and bare and dull.
+
+Then down drops the silent night like a curtain, and beneath its
+friendly cover the strange transformation effects itself quickly, and
+all is made ready for _me_. The grand-stand evaporates, the railway
+station melts away into thin air; there is no more Eiffel Tower with its
+electric light! The sweet forest of fifty years ago rises suddenly out
+of the ground, and all the wild live things that once lived in it wake
+to their merry life again.
+
+A quiet deep old pond in a past French forest, hallowed by such
+memories! What _can_ be more enchanting? Oh, soft and sweet nostalgia,
+so soon to be relieved!
+
+Up springs the mellow sun, the light of other days, to its appointed
+place in the heavens--zenith, or east or west, according to order. A
+light wind blows from the south--everything is properly disinfected, and
+made warm and bright and comfortable--and lo! old Peter Ibbetson appears
+upon the scene, absolute monarch of all he surveys for the next eight
+hours--one whose right there are literally none to dispute.
+
+I do not encourage noisy gatherings there as a rule, nor by the pond; I
+like to keep the sweet place pretty much to myself; there is no
+selfishness in this, for I am really depriving nobody. Whoever comes
+there now, comes there nearly fifty years ago and does not know it; they
+must have all died long since.
+
+Sometimes it is a _garde champetre_ in Louis Philippe's blue and silver,
+with his black pipe, his gaiters, his old flint gun, and his
+embroidered game-bag. He does well in the landscape.
+
+Sometimes it is a pair of lovers, if they are good-looking and
+well-behaved, or else the boys from Saindou's school to play fly the
+garter--_la raie_.
+
+Sometimes it is Monsieur le Cure, peacefully conning his "Hours," as
+with slow and thoughtful step he paces round and round. I can now read
+his calm, benevolent face by the light of half a century's experience of
+life, and have learned to love that still, black, meditative aspect
+which I found so antipathetic as a small boy--_he_ is no burner alive of
+little heretics! This world is big enough for us both--and so is the
+world to come! And he knows it. Now, at all events!
+
+[Illustration: "THIS WORLD IS BIG ENOUGH FOR US BOTH"]
+
+Sometimes even a couple of Prendergasts are admitted, or even three;
+they are not so bad, after all; they have the qualities of their faults,
+although you might not think it.
+
+But very often the old beloved shades arrive with their fishing-nets,
+and their high spirits, and their ringing Anglo-French--Charlie, and
+Alfred, and Madge, and the rest, and the grinning, barking, gyrating
+Medor, who dives after stones.
+
+Oh, how it does my heart good to see and hear them!
+
+They make me feel like a grandfather. Even Monsieur le Major is younger
+than I--his mustache less white than mine. He only comes to my chin; but
+I look up to him still, and love and revere him as when I was a
+little child.
+
+And Dr. Seraskier! I place myself between him and what he is looking at,
+so that he seems to be looking straight at me; but with a far-away look
+in his eyes, as is only natural. Presently something amuses him, and he
+smiles, and his eyes crinkle up as his daughter's used to do when she
+was a woman, and his majestic face becomes as that of an angel,
+like hers.
+
+_L'ange du sourire!_
+
+And my gay, young, light-hearted father, with his vivacity and
+rollicking laugh and eternal good-humor! He is just like a boy to me
+now, le beau Pasquier! He has got a new sling of his own invention; he
+pulls it out of his pocket, and slings stones high over the tree-tops
+and far away out of sight--to the joy of himself and everybody else--and
+does not trouble much as to where they will fall.
+
+My mother is young enough now to be my daughter; it is as a daughter, a
+sweet, kind, lovely daughter, that I love her now--a happily-married
+daughter with a tall, handsome husband who yodles divinely and slings
+stones, and who has presented me with a grandson--_beau comme le
+jour_--for whatever Peter Ibbetson may have been in his time, there is
+no gainsaying the singular comeliness of little Gogo Pasquier.
+
+And Mimsey is just a child angel! Monsieur le Major is infallible.
+
+"Elle a toutes les intelligences de la tete et du coeur! Vous verrez un
+jour, quand ca ira mieux; vous verrez!"
+
+That day has long come and gone; it is easy to see all that now--to have
+the eyes of Monsieur le Major.
+
+Ah, poor little Mimsey, with her cropped head and her pale face, and
+long, thin arms and legs, and grave, kind, luminous eyes, that have not
+yet learned to smile. What she is to _me!!!!_
+
+And Madame Seraskier, in all the youthful bloom and splendor of her
+sacred beauty! A chosen lily among women--the mother of Mary!
+
+She sits on the old bench by the willow, close to her daughter's gloves.
+Sometimes (a trivial and almost comic detail!) she actually seems to sit
+_upon_ them, to my momentary distress; but when she goes away, there
+they are still, not flattened a bit--the precious mould of those
+beautiful, generous hands to which I owe everything here and hereafter.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have not been again to my old home. I dread the sight of the avenue. I
+cannot face "Parva sed Apta."
+
+But I have seen Mary again--seven times.
+
+And every time she comes she brings a book with her, gilt-edged and
+bound in green morocco like the Byron we read when we were children, or
+in red morocco like the _Elegant Extracts_ out of which we used to
+translate Gray's "Elegy," and the "Battle of Hohenlinden," and
+Cunningham's "Pastorals" into French.
+
+Such is her fancy!
+
+But inside these books are very different. They are printed in cipher,
+and in a language I can only understand in my dream. Nothing that I, or
+any one else, has ever read in any living book can approach, for
+interest and importance, what I read in these. There are seven of them.
+
+I say to myself when I read them: it is perhaps well that I shall not
+remember this when I wake, after all!
+
+For I might be indiscreet and injudicious, and either say too much or
+not enough; and the world might come to a stand-still, all through me.
+For who would fardels bear, as Mary said! No! The world must be content
+to wait for the great guesser!
+
+Thus my lips are sealed.
+
+All I know is this: _that all will be well for us all, and of such a
+kind that all who do not sigh for the moon will be well content_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In such wise have I striven, with the best of my ability, to give some
+account of my two lives and Mary's. We have lived three lives between
+us--three lives in one.
+
+It has been a happy task, however poorly performed, and all the
+conditions of its performance have been singularly happy also.
+
+A cell in a criminal lunatic asylum! That does not sound like a bower in
+the Elysian Fields! It is, and has been for me.
+
+Besides the sun that lights and warms my inner life, I have been treated
+with a kindness and sympathy and consideration by everybody here, from
+the governor downward, that fills me with unspeakable gratitude.
+
+Most especially do I feel grateful to my good friends, the doctor, the
+chaplain, and the priest--best and kindest of men--each of whom has made
+up his mind about everything in heaven and earth and below, and each in
+a contrary sense to the two others!
+
+There is but one thing they are neither of them quite cocksure about,
+and that is whether I am mad or sane.
+
+And there is one thing--the only one on which they are agreed; namely,
+that, mad or sane, I am a great undiscovered genius!
+
+My little sketches, plain or colored, fill them with admiration and
+ecstasy. Such boldness and facility and execution, such an overwhelming
+fertility in the choice of subjects, such singular realism in the
+conception and rendering of past scenes, historical and otherwise, such
+astounding knowledge of architecture, character, costume, and what not,
+such local color--it is all as if I had really been there to see!
+
+I have the greatest difficulty in keeping my fame from spreading beyond
+the walls of the asylum. My modesty is as great as my talent!
+
+No, I do not wish this great genius to be discovered just yet. It must
+all go to help and illustrate and adorn the work of a much greater
+genius, from which it has drawn every inspiration it ever had.
+
+It is a splendid and delightful task I have before me: to unravel and
+translate and put in order these voluminous and hastily-penned
+reminiscences of Mary's, all of them written in the cipher we invented
+together in our dream--a very transparent cipher when once you have
+got the key!
+
+It will take five years at least, and I think that, without presumption,
+I can count on that, strong and active as I feel, and still so far from
+the age of the Psalmist.
+
+First of all, I intend
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Note_.--Here ends my poor cousin's memoir. He was found dead from
+effusion of blood on the brain, with his pen still in his hand, and his
+head bowed down on his unfinished manuscript, on the margin of which he
+had just sketched a small boy wheeling a toy wheelbarrow full of stones
+from one open door to another. One door is labelled _Passe_, the
+other _Avenir_.
+
+I arrived in England, after a long life spent abroad, at the time his
+death occurred, but too late to see him alive. I heard much about him
+and his latter days. All those whose duties brought them into contact
+with him seemed to have regarded him with a respect that bordered on
+veneration.
+
+I had the melancholy satisfaction of seeing him in his coffin. I had
+not seen him since he was twelve years old.
+
+As he lay there, in his still length and breadth, he appeared
+gigantic--the most magnificent human being I ever beheld; and the
+splendor of his dead face will haunt my memory till I die.
+
+MADGE PLUNKET.
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, PETER IBBETSON ***
+
+This file should be named 7pibb10.txt or 7pibb10.zip
+Corrected EDITIONS of our eBooks get a new NUMBER, 7pibb11.txt
+VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, 7pibb10a.txt
+
+Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we usually do not
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+We are now trying to release all our eBooks one year in advance
+of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
+Please be encouraged to tell us about any error or corrections,
+even years after the official publication date.
+
+Please note neither this listing nor its contents are final til
+midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
+The official release date of all Project Gutenberg eBooks is at
+Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
+preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
+and editing by those who wish to do so.
+
+Most people start at our Web sites at:
+http://gutenberg.net or
+http://promo.net/pg
+
+These Web sites include award-winning information about Project
+Gutenberg, including how to donate, how to help produce our new
+eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter (free!).
+
+
+Those of you who want to download any eBook before announcement
+can get to them as follows, and just download by date.  This is
+also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the
+indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an
+announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter.
+
+http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext05 or
+ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext05
+
+Or /etext04, 03, 02, 01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92,
+91 or 90
+
+Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want,
+as it appears in our Newsletters.
+
+
+Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
+
+We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
+time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
+to get any eBook selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
+searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.   Our
+projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If the value
+per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
+million dollars per hour in 2002 as we release over 100 new text
+files per month:  1240 more eBooks in 2001 for a total of 4000+
+We are already on our way to trying for 2000 more eBooks in 2002
+If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total
+will reach over half a trillion eBooks given away by year's end.
+
+The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away 1 Trillion eBooks!
+This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
+which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users.
+
+Here is the briefest record of our progress (* means estimated):
+
+eBooks Year Month
+
+    1  1971 July
+   10  1991 January
+  100  1994 January
+ 1000  1997 August
+ 1500  1998 October
+ 2000  1999 December
+ 2500  2000 December
+ 3000  2001 November
+ 4000  2001 October/November
+ 6000  2002 December*
+ 9000  2003 November*
+10000  2004 January*
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created
+to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+As of February, 2002, contributions are being solicited from people
+and organizations in: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut,
+Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois,
+Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts,
+Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New
+Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio,
+Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South
+Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West
+Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
+
+We have filed in all 50 states now, but these are the only ones
+that have responded.
+
+As the requirements for other states are met, additions to this list
+will be made and fund raising will begin in the additional states.
+Please feel free to ask to check the status of your state.
+
+In answer to various questions we have received on this:
+
+We are constantly working on finishing the paperwork to legally
+request donations in all 50 states.  If your state is not listed and
+you would like to know if we have added it since the list you have,
+just ask.
+
+While we cannot solicit donations from people in states where we are
+not yet registered, we know of no prohibition against accepting
+donations from donors in these states who approach us with an offer to
+donate.
+
+International donations are accepted, but we don't know ANYTHING about
+how to make them tax-deductible, or even if they CAN be made
+deductible, and don't have the staff to handle it even if there are
+ways.
+
+Donations by check or money order may be sent to:
+
+ PROJECT GUTENBERG LITERARY ARCHIVE FOUNDATION
+ 809 North 1500 West
+ Salt Lake City, UT 84116
+
+Contact us if you want to arrange for a wire transfer or payment
+method other than by check or money order.
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been approved by
+the US Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) organization with EIN
+[Employee Identification Number] 64-622154.  Donations are
+tax-deductible to the maximum extent permitted by law.  As fund-raising
+requirements for other states are met, additions to this list will be
+made and fund-raising will begin in the additional states.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+You can get up to date donation information online at:
+
+http://www.gutenberg.net/donation.html
+
+
+***
+
+If you can't reach Project Gutenberg,
+you can always email directly to:
+
+Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>
+
+Prof. Hart will answer or forward your message.
+
+We would prefer to send you information by email.
+
+
+**The Legal Small Print**
+
+
+(Three Pages)
+
+***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS**START***
+Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers.
+They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
+your copy of this eBook, even if you got it for free from
+someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
+fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
+disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how
+you may distribute copies of this eBook if you want to.
+
+*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS EBOOK
+By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+eBook, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
+this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive
+a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this eBook by
+sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
+you got it from. If you received this eBook on a physical
+medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
+
+ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM EBOOKS
+This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBooks,
+is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart
+through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project").
+Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
+on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
+distribute it in the United States without permission and
+without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth
+below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this eBook
+under the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
+
+Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market
+any commercial products without permission.
+
+To create these eBooks, the Project expends considerable
+efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
+works. Despite these efforts, the Project's eBooks and any
+medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other
+things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
+disk or other eBook medium, a computer virus, or computer
+codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
+[1] Michael Hart and the Foundation (and any other party you may
+receive this eBook from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook) disclaims
+all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
+legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
+UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
+INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
+OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
+POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+If you discover a Defect in this eBook within 90 days of
+receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
+you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
+time to the person you received it from. If you received it
+on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
+such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
+copy. If you received it electronically, such person may
+choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
+receive it electronically.
+
+THIS EBOOK IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
+TO THE EBOOK OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
+the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
+above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
+may have other legal rights.
+
+INDEMNITY
+You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation,
+and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated
+with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including
+legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the
+following that you do or cause:  [1] distribution of this eBook,
+[2] alteration, modification, or addition to the eBook,
+or [3] any Defect.
+
+DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
+You may distribute copies of this eBook electronically, or by
+disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
+"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
+or:
+
+[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
+     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
+     eBook or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
+     if you wish, distribute this eBook in machine readable
+     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
+     including any form resulting from conversion by word
+     processing or hypertext software, but only so long as
+     *EITHER*:
+
+     [*]  The eBook, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
+          does *not* contain characters other than those
+          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
+          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
+          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
+          author, and additional characters may be used to
+          indicate hypertext links; OR
+
+     [*]  The eBook may be readily converted by the reader at
+          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
+          form by the program that displays the eBook (as is
+          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
+          OR
+
+     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
+          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
+          eBook in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
+          or other equivalent proprietary form).
+
+[2]  Honor the eBook refund and replacement provisions of this
+     "Small Print!" statement.
+
+[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Foundation of 20% of the
+     gross profits you derive calculated using the method you
+     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
+     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
+     payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation"
+     the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were
+     legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
+     periodic) tax return.  Please contact us beforehand to
+     let us know your plans and to work out the details.
+
+WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
+Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of
+public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed
+in machine readable form.
+
+The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time,
+public domain materials, or royalty free copyright licenses.
+Money should be paid to the:
+"Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or
+software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at:
+hart@pobox.com
+
+[Portions of this eBook's header and trailer may be reprinted only
+when distributed free of all fees.  Copyright (C) 2001, 2002 by
+Michael S. Hart.  Project Gutenberg is a TradeMark and may not be
+used in any sales of Project Gutenberg eBooks or other materials be
+they hardware or software or any other related product without
+express permission.]
+
+*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS*Ver.02/11/02*END*
+
diff --git a/old/7pibb10.zip b/old/7pibb10.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1b98f26
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/7pibb10.zip
diff --git a/old/8pibb10.txt b/old/8pibb10.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ab52705
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/8pibb10.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,10582 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Peter Ibbetson, by George du Marier et al
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
+copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
+this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
+
+This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
+Gutenberg file.  Please do not remove it.  Do not change or edit the
+header without written permission.
+
+Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
+eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file.  Included is
+important information about your specific rights and restrictions in
+how the file may be used.  You can also find out about how to make a
+donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.
+
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+
+Title: Peter Ibbetson
+
+Author: George du Marier et al
+
+Release Date: February, 2006  [EBook #9817]
+[This file was first posted on October 20, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, PETER IBBETSON ***
+
+
+
+
+E-text prepared by Charles Aldarondo, Keren Vergon, Charlie Kirschner, and
+Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PETER IBBETSON
+
+by George du Maurier
+
+With an Introduction by His Cousin Lady **** ("Madge Plunket")
+
+Edited and Illustrated by George Du Maurier
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Part One
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+The writer of this singular autobiography was my cousin, who died at
+the ----- Criminal Lunatic Asylum, of which he had been an inmate
+three years.
+
+He had been removed thither after a sudden and violent attack of
+homicidal mania (which fortunately led to no serious consequences),
+from ----- Jail, where he had spent twenty-five years, having been
+condemned to penal servitude for life, for the murder of ---- ----,
+his relative.
+
+He had been originally sentenced to death.
+
+It was at ---- Lunatic Asylum that he wrote these memoirs, and I received
+the MS. soon after his decease, with the most touching letter, appealing
+to our early friendship, and appointing me his literary executrix.
+
+It was his wish that the story of his life should be published just as
+he had written it.
+
+I have found it unadvisable to do this. It would revive, to no useful
+purpose, an old scandal, long buried and forgotten, and thereby give
+pain or annoyance to people who are still alive.
+
+Nor does his memory require rehabilitation among those who knew him, or
+knew anything of him--the only people really concerned. His dreadful
+deed has long been condoned by all (and they are many) who knew the
+provocation he had received and the character of the man who had
+provoked him.
+
+On mature consideration, and with advice, I resolved (in order that his
+dying wishes should not be frustrated altogether) to publish the memoir
+with certain alterations and emendations.
+
+I have nearly everywhere changed the names of people and places;
+suppressed certain details, and omitted some passages of his life (most
+of the story of his school-days, for instance, and that of his brief
+career as a private in the Horse Guards) lest they should too easily
+lead to the identification and annoyance of people still alive, for he
+is strongly personal at times, and perhaps not always just; and some
+other events I have carefully paraphrased (notably his trial at the Old
+Bailey), and given for them as careful an equivalent as I could manage
+without too great a loss of verisimilitude.
+
+I may as well state at once that, allowing for these alterations, every
+incident of his _natural_ life as described by himself is absolutely
+true, to the minutest detail, as I have been able to ascertain.
+
+For the early part of it--the life at Passy he describes with such
+affection--I can vouch personally; I am the Cousin "Madge" to whom he
+once or twice refers.
+
+I well remember the genial abode where he lived with his parents (my
+dear uncle and aunt); and the lovely "Madame Seraskier," and her husband
+and daughter, and their house, "Parva sed Apta," and "Major Duquesnois,"
+and the rest.
+
+And although I have never seen him since he was twelve years old, when
+his parents died and he went to London (as most of my life has been
+spent abroad), I received occasional letters from him.
+
+I have also been able to obtain much information about him from others,
+especially from a relative of the late "Mr. and Mrs. Lintot," who knew
+him well, and from several officers in his regiment who remembered him;
+also from the "Vicar's daughter," whom he met at "Lady Cray's" and who
+perfectly recollects the conversation she had with him at dinner, his
+sudden indisposition, and his long interview with the "Duchess of
+Towers," under the ash-tree next morning; she was one of the
+croquet-players.
+
+He was the most beautiful boy I ever saw, and so charming, lively, and
+amiable that everybody was fond of him. He had a horror of cruelty,
+especially to animals (quite singular in a boy of his age), and was very
+truthful and brave.
+
+According to all accounts (and from a photograph in my possession), he
+grew up to be as handsome as a man can well be, a personal gift which he
+seems to have held of no account whatever, though he thought so much of
+it in others. But he also became singularly shy and reserved in manner,
+over-diffident and self-distrustful; of a melancholy disposition, loving
+solitude, living much alone, and taking nobody into his confidence; and
+yet inspiring both affection and respect. For he seems to have always
+been thoroughly gentlemanlike in speech, bearing, manner, and aspect.
+
+It is possible, although he does not say so, that having first enlisted,
+and then entered upon a professional career under somewhat inauspicious
+conditions, he felt himself to have fallen away from the social rank
+(such as it was) that belonged to him by birth; and he may have found
+his associates uncongenial.
+
+His old letters to me are charmingly open and effusive.
+
+Of the lady whom (keeping her title and altering her name) I have called
+the "Duchess of Towers," I find it difficult to speak. That they only
+met twice, and in the way he describes, is a fact about which there can
+be no doubt.
+
+It is also indubitable that he received in Newgate, on the morning after
+his sentence to death, an envelope containing violets, and the strange
+message he mentions. Both letter and violets are in my possession, and
+the words are in her handwriting; about that there can be no mistake.
+
+It is certain, moreover, that she separated from her husband almost
+immediately after my cousin's trial and condemnation, and lived in
+comparative retirement from the world, as it is certain that he went
+suddenly mad, twenty-five years later, in ---- Jail, a few hours after
+her tragic death, and before he could possibly have heard of it by the
+ordinary channels; and that he was sent to ---- Asylum, where, after his
+frenzy had subsided, he remained for many days in a state of suicidal
+melancholia, until, to the surprise of all, he rose one morning in high
+spirits, and apparently cured of all serious symptoms of insanity; so he
+remained until his death. It was during the last year of his life that
+he wrote his autobiography, in French and English.
+
+There is nothing to be surprised at, taking all the circumstances into
+consideration, that even so great a lady, the friend of queens and
+empresses, the bearer of a high title and an illustrious name, justly
+celebrated for her beauty and charm (and her endless charities), of
+blameless repute, and one of the most popular women in English society,
+should yet have conceived a very warm regard for my poor cousin; indeed,
+it was an open secret in the family of "Lord Cray" that she had done so.
+But for them she would have taken the whole world into her confidence.
+
+After her death she left him what money had come to her from her father,
+which he disposed of for charitable ends, and an immense quantity of MS.
+in cipher--a cipher which is evidently identical with that he used
+himself in the annotations he put under innumerable sketches he was
+allowed to make during his long period of confinement, which (through
+her interest, and no doubt through his own good conduct) was rendered as
+bearable to him as possible. These sketches (which are very
+extraordinary) and her Grace's MS. are now in my possession.
+
+They constitute a mystery into which I have not dared to pry.
+
+From papers belonging to both I have been able to establish beyond doubt
+the fact (so strangely discovered) of their descent from a common French
+ancestress, whose name I have but slightly modified and the tradition of
+whom still lingers in the "Departement de la Sarthe," where she was a
+famous person a century ago; and her violin, a valuable Amati, now
+belongs to me.
+
+Of the non-natural part of his story I will not say much.
+
+It is, of course, a fact that he had been absolutely and, to all
+appearance, incurably insane before he wrote his life.
+
+There seems to have been a difference of opinion, or rather a doubt,
+among the authorities of the asylum as to whether he was mad after the
+acute but very violent period of his brief attack had ended.
+
+Whichever may have been the case, I am at least convinced of this: that
+he was no romancer, and thoroughly believed in the extraordinary mental
+experience he has revealed.
+
+At the risk of being thought to share his madness--if he _was_ mad--I
+will conclude by saying that I, for one, believe him to have been sane,
+and to have told the truth all through.
+
+MADGE PLUNKET
+
+
+
+
+
+I am but a poor scribe; ill-versed in the craft of wielding words and
+phrases, as the cultivated reader (if I should ever happen to have one)
+will no doubt very soon find out for himself.
+
+[Illustration:]
+
+I have been for many years an object of pity and contempt to all who
+ever gave me a thought--to all but _one_! Yet of all that ever lived on
+this earth I have been, perhaps, the happiest and most privileged, as
+that reader will discover if he perseveres to the end.
+
+My outer and my inner life have been as the very poles--asunder; and if,
+at the eleventh hour, I have made up my mind to give my story to the
+world, it is not in order to rehabilitate myself in the eyes of my
+fellow-men, deeply as I value their good opinion; for I have always
+loved them and wished them well, and would fain express my goodwill and
+win theirs, if that were possible.
+
+It is because the regions where I have found my felicity are accessible
+to all, and that many, better trained and better gifted, will explore
+them to far better purpose than I, and to the greater glory and benefit
+of mankind, when once I have given them the clew. Before I can do this,
+and in order to show how I came by this clew myself, I must tell, as
+well as I may, the tale of my checkered career--in telling which,
+moreover, I am obeying the last behest of one whose lightest wish was
+my law.
+
+If I am more prolix than I need be, it must be set down to my want of
+experience in the art of literary composition--to a natural wish I have
+to show myself neither better nor worse than I believe myself to be; to
+the charm, the unspeakable charm, that personal reminiscences have for
+the person principally concerned, and which he cannot hope to impart,
+however keenly he may feel it, without gifts and advantages that have
+been denied to me.
+
+And this leads me to apologize for the egotism of this Memoir, which is
+but an introduction to another and longer one that I hope to publish
+later. To write a story of paramount importance to mankind, it is true,
+but all about one's outer and one's inner self, to do this without
+seeming somewhat egotistical, requires something akin to genius--and I
+am but a poor scribe.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     "_Combien j'ai douce souvenance
+     Du joli lieu de ma naissance_!"
+
+These quaint lines have been running in my head at intervals through
+nearly all my outer life, like an oft-recurring burden in an endless
+ballad--sadly monotonous, alas! the ballad, which is mine; sweetly
+monotonous the burden, which is by Châteaubriand.
+
+I sometimes think that to feel the full significance of this refrain one
+must have passed one's childhood in sunny France, where it was written,
+and the remainder of one's existence in mere London--or worse than mere
+London--as has been the case with me. If I had spent all my life from
+infancy upward in Bloomsbury, or Clerkenwell, or Whitechapel, my early
+days would be shorn of much of their retrospective glamour as I look
+back on them in these my after-years.
+
+     _"Combien j'ai douce souvenance!"_
+
+It was on a beautiful June morning in a charming French garden, where
+the warm, sweet atmosphere was laden with the scent of lilac and
+syringa, and gay with butterflies and dragon-flies and humblebees, that
+I began my conscious existence with the happiest day of all my
+outer life.
+
+It is true that I had vague memories (with many a blank between) of a
+dingy house in the heart of London, in a long street of desolating
+straightness, that led to a dreary square and back again, and nowhere
+else for me; and then of a troubled and exciting journey that seemed of
+jumbled days and nights. I could recall the blue stage-coach with the
+four tall, thin, brown horses, so quiet and modest and well-behaved; the
+red-coated guard and his horn; the red-faced driver and his husky voice
+and many capes.
+
+Then the steamer with its glistening deck, so beautiful and white it
+seemed quite a desecration to walk upon it--this spotlessness did not
+last very long; and then two wooden piers with a light-house on each,
+and a quay, and blue-bloused workmen and red-legged little soldiers with
+mustaches, and bare-legged fisher-women, all speaking a language that I
+knew as well as the other commoner language I had left behind; but which
+I had always looked upon as an exclusive possession of my father's and
+mother's and mine for the exchange of sweet confidence and the
+bewilderment of outsiders; and here were little boys and girls in the
+street, quite common children, who spoke it as well and better than I
+did myself.
+
+After this came the dream of a strange, huge, top-heavy vehicle, that
+seemed like three yellow carriages stuck together, and a mountain of
+luggage at the top under an immense black tarpaulin, which ended in a
+hood; and beneath the hood sat a blue-bloused man with a singular cap,
+like a concertina, and mustaches, who cracked a loud whip over five
+squealing, fussy, pugnacious white and gray horses, with bells on their
+necks and bushy fox-tails on their foreheads, and their own tails
+carefully tucked up behind.
+
+From the _coupé_ where I sat with my father and mother I could watch
+them well as they led us through dusty roads with endless apple-trees or
+poplars on either side. Little barefooted urchins (whose papas and
+mammas wore wooden shoes and funny white nightcaps) ran after us for
+French half-pennies, which were larger than English ones, and pleasanter
+to have and to hold! Up hill and down we went; over sounding wooden
+bridges, through roughly paved streets in pretty towns to large
+court-yards, where five other quarrelsome steeds, gray and white, were
+waiting to take the place of the old ones--worn out, but
+quarreling still!
+
+And through the night I could hear the gay music of the bells and hoofs,
+the rumbling of the wheels the cracking of the eternal whip, as I
+fidgeted from one familiar lap to the other in search of sleep; and
+waking out of a doze I could see the glare of the red lamps on the five
+straining white and gray backs that dragged us so gallantly through the
+dark summer night.
+
+[Illustration: "A STRANGE, HUGE, TOP-HEAVY VEHICLE."]
+
+Then it all became rather tiresome and intermittent and confused, till
+we reached at dusk next day a quay by a broad river; and as we drove
+along it, under thick trees, we met other red and blue and green lamped
+five-horsed diligences starting on their long journey just as ours was
+coming to an end.
+
+Then I knew (because I was a well-educated little boy, and heard my
+father exclaim, "Here's Paris at last!") that we had entered the capital
+of France--a fact that impressed me very much--so much, it seems, that I
+went to sleep for thirty-six hours at a stretch, and woke up to find
+myself in the garden I have mentioned, and to retain possession of that
+self without break or solution of continuity (except when I went to
+sleep again) until now.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The happiest day in all my outer life!
+
+For in an old shed full of tools and lumber at the end of the garden,
+and half-way between an empty fowl-house and a disused stable (each an
+Eden in itself) I found a small toy-wheelbarrow--quite the most
+extraordinary, the most unheard of and undreamed of, humorously,
+daintily, exquisitely fascinating object I had ever come across in all
+my brief existence.
+
+I spent hours--enchanted hours--in wheeling brick-bats from the stable
+to the fowl-house, and more enchanted hours in wheeling them all back
+again, while genial French workmen, who were busy in and out of the
+house where we were to live, stopped every now and then to ask
+good-natured questions of the "p'tit Anglais," and commend his knowledge
+of their tongue, and his remarkable skill in the management of a
+wheelbarrow. Well I remember wondering, with newly-aroused
+self-consciousness, at the intensity, the poignancy, the extremity of my
+bliss, and looking forward with happy confidence to an endless
+succession of such hours in the future.
+
+But next morning, though the weather was as fine, and the wheelbarrow
+and the brick-bats and the genial workmen were there, and all the scents
+and sights and sounds were the same, the first fine careless rapture was
+not to be caught again, and the glory and the freshness had departed.
+
+Thus did I, on the very dawning of life, reach at a single tide the
+high-water-mark of my earthly bliss--never to be reached again by me on
+this side of the ivory gate--and discover that to make the perfection of
+human happiness endure there must be something more than a sweet French
+garden, a small French wheelbarrow, and a nice little English boy who
+spoke French and had the love of approbation--a fourth dimension
+is required.
+
+I found it in due time.
+
+But if there were no more enchanted hours like the first, there were to
+be seven happy years that have the quality of enchantment as I look
+back on them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Oh, the beautiful garden! Roses, nasturtiums and convolvulus,
+wallflowers, sweet-pease and carnations, marigolds and sunflowers,
+dahlias and pansies and hollyhocks and poppies, and Heaven knows what
+besides! In my fond recollection they all bloom at once, irrespective of
+time and season.
+
+To see and smell and pick all these for the first time at the
+susceptible age of five! To inherit such a kingdom after five years of
+Gower Street and Bedford Square! For all things are relative, and
+everything depends upon the point of view. To the owner of Chatsworth
+(and to his gardeners) my beautiful French Garden would have seemed a
+small affair.
+
+[Illustration: LE P'TIT ANGLAIS.]
+
+And what a world of insects--Chatsworth could not beat _these_ (indeed,
+is no doubt sadly lacking in them)--beautiful, interesting, comic,
+grotesque, and terrible; from the proud humble-bee to the earwig and his
+cousin, the devil's coach-horse; and all those rampant, many footed
+things that pullulate in damp and darkness under big flat stones. To
+think that I have been friends with all these--roses and centipedes and
+all--and then to think that most of my outer life has been spent between
+bare whitewashed walls, with never even a flea or a spider to be friends
+with again!
+
+Our house (where, by-the-way, I had been born five years before), an old
+yellow house with green shutters and Mansard-roofs of slate, stood
+between this garden and the street--a long winding street, roughly
+flagged, with oil-lamps suspended across at long intervals; these lamps
+were let down with pulleys at dusk, replenished and lit, and then hauled
+up again to make darkness visible for a few hours on nights when the
+moon was away.
+
+Opposite to us was a boys' school--"Maison d'Éducation, Dirigée par M.
+Jules Saindou, Bachelier et Maître ès Lettres et ès Sciences," and
+author of a treatise on geology, with such hauntingly terrific pictures
+of antediluvian reptiles battling in the primeval slime that I have
+never been able to forget them. My father, who was fond of science, made
+me a present of it on my sixth birthday. It cost me many a nightmare.
+
+From our windows we could see and hear the boys at play--at a proper
+distance French boys sound just like English ones, though they do not
+look so, on account of their blue blouses and dusky, cropped heads--and
+we could see the gymnastic fixtures in the play-ground, M. Saindou's
+pride. "Le portique! la poutre! le cheval! et les barres parallèles!"
+Thus they were described in M. Saindou's prospectus.
+
+On either side of the street (which was called "the Street of the
+Pump"), as far as eye could reach looking west, were dwelling-houses
+just like our own, only agreeably different; and garden walls overtopped
+with the foliage of horse-chestnut, sycamore, acacia, and lime; and here
+and there huge portals and iron gates defended by posts of stone gave
+ingress to mysterious abodes of brick and plaster and granite,
+many-shuttered, and embosomed in sun-shot greenery.
+
+Looking east one could see in the near distance unsophisticated shops
+with old-fashioned windows of many panes--Liard, the grocer; Corbin, the
+poulterer; the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker.
+
+And this delightful street, as it went on its winding way, led not to
+Bedford Square or the new University College Hospital, but to Paris
+through the Arc de Triomphe at one end, and to the river Seine at the
+other; or else, turning to the right, to St. Cloud through the Bois de
+Boulogne of Louis Philippe Premier, Roi des Français--as different from
+the Paris and the Bois de Boulogne of to-day as a diligence from an
+express train.
+
+On one side of the beautiful garden was another beautiful garden,
+separated from ours by a high wall covered with peach and pear and plum
+and apricot trees; on the other, accessible to us through a small door
+in another lower wall clothed with jasmine, clematis, convolvulus, and
+nasturtium, was a long, straight avenue of almond-trees, acacia,
+laburnum, lilac, and may, so closely planted that the ivy-grown walls
+on either side could scarcely be seen. What lovely patches they made on
+the ground when the sun shone! One end of this abutted on "the Street of
+the Pump," from which it was fenced by tall, elaborately-carved iron
+gates between stone portals, and at the side was a "porte bâtarde,"
+guarded by le Père et la Mère François, the old concierge and his old
+wife. Peace to their ashes, and Heaven rest their kindly, genial souls!
+
+The other end of the avenue, where there was also an iron gate, admitted
+to a large private park that seemed to belong to nobody, and of which we
+were free--a very wilderness of delight, a heaven, a terror of tangled
+thickets and not too dangerous chalk cliffs, disused old quarries and
+dark caverns, prairies of lush grass, sedgy pools, turnip fields,
+forests of pine, groves and avenues of horse-chestnut, dank valleys of
+walnut-trees and hawthorn, which summer made dark at noon; bare,
+wind-swept mountainous regions whence one could reconnoitre afar; all
+sorts of wild and fearsome places for savages and wild beasts to hide
+and small boys to roam quite safely in quest of perilous adventure.
+
+All this vast enclosure (full of strange singing, humming, whistling,
+buzzing, twittering, cooing, booming, croaking, flying, creeping,
+crawling, jumping, climbing, burrowing, splashing, diving things) had
+been neglected for ages--an Eden where one might gather and eat of the
+fruit of the tree of knowledge without fear, and learn lovingly the ways
+of life without losing one's innocence; a forest that had remade for
+itself a new virginity, and become primeval once more; where beautiful
+Nature had reasserted her own sweet will, and massed and tangled
+everything together as though a Beauty had been sleeping there
+undisturbed for close on a hundred years, and was only waiting for the
+charming Prince--or, as it turned out a few years later, alas! the
+speculative builder and the railway engineer--those princes of our day.
+
+My fond remembrance would tell me that this region was almost boundless,
+well as I remember its boundaries. My knowledge of physical geography,
+as applied to this particular suburb of Paris, bids me assign more
+modest limits to this earthly paradise, which again was separated by an
+easily surmounted fence from Louis Philippe's Bois de Boulogne; and to
+this I cannot find it in my heart to assign any limits whatever, except
+the pretty old town from which it takes its name, and whose principal
+street leads to that magical combination of river, bridge, palace,
+gardens, mountain, and forest, St. Cloud.
+
+What more could be wanted for a small boy fresh (if such be freshness)
+from the very heart of Bloomsbury?
+
+That not a single drop should be lacking to the full cup of that small
+boy's felicity, there was a pond on the way from Passy to St. Cloud--a
+memorable pond, called "La Mare d'Auteuil," the sole aquatic treasure
+that Louis Philippe's Bois de Boulogne could boast. For in those
+ingenuous days there existed no artificial lake fed by an artificial
+stream, no pré-Catelan, no Jardin d'Acclimatation. The wood was just a
+wood, and nothing more--a dense, wild wood, that covered many hundreds
+of acres, and sheltered many thousands of wild live things. Though
+mysteriously deep in the middle, this famous pond (which may have been
+centuries old, and still exists) was not large; you might almost fling a
+stone across it anywhere.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Bounded on three sides by the forest (now shorn away), it was just
+hidden from the dusty road by a fringe of trees; and one could have it
+all to one's self, except on Sunday and Thursday afternoons, when a few
+love-sick Parisians remembered its existence, and in its loveliness
+forgot their own.
+
+To be there at all was to be happy; for not only was it quite the most
+secluded, picturesque, and beautiful pond in all the habitable
+globe--that pond of ponds, the _only_ pond--but it teemed with a far
+greater number and variety of wonderful insects and reptiles than any
+other pond in the world. Such, at least, I believed must be the case,
+for they were endless.
+
+To watch these creatures, to learn their ways, to catch them (which we
+sometimes did), to take them home and be kind to them, and try to tame
+them, and teach them our ways (with never varying non-success, it is
+true, but in, oh, such jolly company!) became a hobby that lasted me, on
+and off, for seven years.
+
+La Mare d'Auteuil! The very name has a magic, from all the associations
+that gathered round it during that time, to cling forever.
+
+How I loved it! At night, snoozing in my warm bed, I would awesomely
+think of it, and how solemn it looked when I had reluctantly left it at
+dusk, an hour or two before; then I would picture it to myself, later,
+lying deep and cold and still under the stars, in the dark thicket, with
+all that weird, uncanny lite seething beneath its stagnant surface.
+
+Then gradually the water would sink, and the reeds, left naked, begin to
+move and rustle ominously, and from among their roots in the uncovered
+slush everything alive would make for the middle--hopping, gliding,
+writhing frantically....
+
+Down shrank the water; and soon in the slimy bottom, yards below, huge
+fat salamanders, long-lost and forgotten tadpoles as large as rats,
+gigantic toads, enormous flat beetles, all kinds of hairy, scaly, spiny,
+blear-eyed, bulbous, shapeless monsters without name, mud-colored
+offspring of the mire that had been sleeping there for hundreds of
+years, woke up, and crawled in and out, and wallowed and interwriggled,
+and devoured each other, like the great saurians and batrachians in my
+_Manuel de Géologie Élémentaire_. Édition illustrée à l'usage des
+enfants. Par Jules Saindou, Bachelier et Maître ès Lettres et
+ès Sciences.
+
+Then would I wake up with a start, in a cold perspiration, an icy chill
+shooting through me that roughed my skin and stirred the roots of my
+hair, and ardently wish for to-morrow morning.
+
+In after-years, and far away among the cold fogs of Clerkenwell, when
+the frequent longing would come over me to revisit "the pretty place of
+my birth," it was for the Mare d'Auteuil I longed the most; _that_ was
+the loadstar, the very pole of my home-sick desires; always thither the
+wings of my hopeless fancy bore me first of all; it was, oh! to tread
+that sunlit grassy brink once more, and to watch the merry tadpoles
+swarm, and the green frog takes its header like a little man, and the
+water-rat swim to his hole among the roots of the willow, and the
+horse-leech thread his undulating way between the water-lily stems; and
+to dream fondly of the delightful, irrevocable past, on the very spot of
+all where I and mine were always happiest!
+
+     "...Qu'ils étaient beaux, les jours De France!"
+
+In the avenue I have mentioned (_the_ avenue, as it is still to me, and
+as I will always call it) there was on the right hand, half the way up,
+a _maison de santé_, or boarding-house, kept by one Madame Pelé; and
+there among others came to board and lodge, a short while after our
+advent, four or five gentlemen who had tried to invade France, with a
+certain grim Pretender at their head, and a tame eagle as a symbol of
+empire to rally round.
+
+The expedition had failed; the Pretender had been consigned to a
+fortress; the eagle had found a home in the public slaughter-house of
+Boulogne-sur-Mer, which it adorned for many years, and where it fed as
+it had never probably fed before; and these, the faithful followers, le
+Colonel Voisil, le Major Duquesnois, le Capitaine Audenis, le Docteur
+Lombal (and one or two others whose names I have forgotten), were
+prisoners on parole at Madame Pelé's, and did not seem to find their
+durance very vile.
+
+[Illustration: (no caption)]
+
+I grew to know and love them all, especially the Major Duquesnois, an
+almost literal translation into French of Colonel Newcome. He took to
+me at once, in spite of my Englishness, and drilled me, and taught me
+the exercise as it was performed in the Vieille Garden and told me a new
+fairy-tale, I verily believe, every afternoon for seven years.
+Scheherezade could do no more for a Sultan, and to save her own neck
+from the bowstring!
+
+Cher et bien amé "Vieux de la Vieille!" with his big iron-gray mustache,
+his black satin stock, his spotless linen, his long green frock-coat so
+baggy about the skirts, and the smart red ribbon in his button-hole! He
+little foresaw with what warm and affectionate regard his memory would
+be kept forever sweet and green in the heart of his hereditary foe and
+small English tyrant and companion!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Opposite Madame Pelé's, and the only other dwelling besides hers and
+ours in the avenue, was a charming little white villa with a Grecian
+portico, on which were inscribed in letters of gold the words "Parva sed
+Apta"; but it was not tenanted till two or three years after
+our arrival.
+
+In the genial French fashion of those times we soon got on terms of
+intimacy with these and other neighbors, and saw much of each other at
+all times of the day.
+
+My tall and beautiful young mother (la belle Madame Pasquier, as she was
+gallantly called) was an Englishwoman who had been born and partly
+brought up in Paris.
+
+My gay and jovial father (le beau Pasquier, for he was also tall and
+comely to the eye) was a Frenchman, although an English subject, who had
+been born and partly brought up in London; for he was the child of
+emigres from France during the Reign of Terror.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+     "When in death I shall calm recline,
+        Oh take my heart to my mistress dear!
+      Tell her it lived upon smiles and wine
+       Of the brightest hue while it lingered here!"
+
+He was gifted with a magnificent, a phenomenal voice--a barytone and
+tenor rolled into one; a marvel of richness, sweetness, flexibility, and
+power--and had intended to sing at the opera; indeed, he had studied for
+three years at the Paris Conservatoire to that end; and there he had
+carried all before him, and given rise to the highest hopes. But his
+family, who were Catholics of the blackest and Legitimists of the
+whitest dye--and as poor as church rats had objected to such a godless
+and derogatory career; so the world lost a great singer, and the great
+singer a mine of wealth and fame.
+
+However, he had just enough to live upon, and had married a wife (a
+heretic!) who had just about as much, or as little; and he spent his
+time, and both his money and hers, in scientific inventions--to little
+purpose, for well as he had learned how to sing, he had not been to any
+conservatoire where they teach one how to invent.
+
+So that, as he waited "for his ship to come home," he sang only to amuse
+his wife, as they say the nightingale does; and to ease himself of
+superfluous energy, and to charm the servants, and le Père et la Mère
+François, and the five followers of Napoleon, and all and everybody who
+cared to listen, and last and least (and most!), myself.
+
+For this great neglected gift of his, on which he set so little store,
+was already to me the most beautiful and mysterious thing in the world;
+and next to this, my mother's sweet playing on the harp and piano, for
+she was an admirable musician.
+
+It was her custom to play at night, leaving the door of my bedroom ajar,
+and also the drawing-room door, so that I could hear her till I fell
+asleep.
+
+Sometimes, when my father was at home, the spirit would move him to hum
+or sing the airs she played, as he paced up and down the room on the
+track of a new invention.
+
+And though he sang and hummed "pian-piano," the sweet, searching, manly
+tones seemed to fill all space.
+
+The hushed house became a sounding-board, the harp a mere subservient
+tinkle, and my small, excitable frame would thrill and vibrate under the
+waves of my unconscious father's voice; and oh, the charming airs
+he sang!
+
+His stock was inexhaustible, and so was hers; and thus an endless
+succession of lovely melodies went ringing through that happy period.
+
+And just as when a man is drowning, or falling from a height, his whole
+past life is said to be mapped out before his mental vision as in a
+single flash, so seven years of sweet, priceless home love--seven times
+four changing seasons of simple, genial, prae-imperial Frenchness; an
+ideal house, with all its pretty furniture, and shape, and color; a
+garden full of trees and flowers; a large park, and all the wild live
+things therein; a town and its inhabitants; a mile or two of historic
+river; a wood big enough to reach from the Arc de Triomphe to St. Cloud
+(and in it the pond of ponds); and every wind and weather that the
+changing seasons can bring--all lie embedded and embalmed for me in
+every single bar of at least a hundred different tunes, to be evoked at
+will for the small trouble and cost of just whistling or humming the
+same, or even playing it with one finger on the piano--when I had a
+piano within reach.
+
+Enough to last me for a lifetime--with proper economy, of course--it
+will not do to exhaust, by too frequent experiment, the strange capacity
+of a melodic bar for preserving the essence of by-gone things, and days
+that are no more.
+
+Oh, Nightingale! whether thou singest thyself or, better still, if thy
+voice by not in thy throat, but in thy fiery heart and subtle brain, and
+thou makest songs for the singing of many others, blessed be thy name!
+The very sound of it is sweet in every clime and tongue: Nightingale,
+Rossignol, Usignuolo, Bulbul! Even Nachtigall does not sound amiss in
+the mouth of a fair English girl who has had a Hanoverian for a
+governess! and, indeed, it is in the Nachtigall's country that the best
+music is made!
+
+[Illustration: "OH, NIGHTINGALE!"]
+
+And oh, Nightingale! never, never grudge thy song to those who love
+it--nor waste it upon those who do not....
+
+Thus serenaded, I would close my eyes, and lapped in darkness and
+warmth and heavenly sound, be lulled asleep--perchance to dream!
+
+For my early childhood was often haunted by a dream, which at first I
+took for a reality--a transcendant dream of some interest and importance
+to mankind, as the patient reader will admit in time. But many years of
+my life passed away before I was able to explain and account for it.
+
+I had but to turn my face to the wall, and soon I found myself in
+company with a lady who had white hair and a young face--a very
+beautiful young face.
+
+Sometimes I walked with her, hand in hand--I being quite a small
+child--and together we fed innumerable pigeons who lived in a tower by a
+winding stream that ended in a water-mill. It was too lovely, and I
+would wake.
+
+Sometimes we went into a dark place, where there was a fiery furnace
+with many holes, and many people working and moving about--among them a
+man with white hair and a young face, like the lady, and beautiful red
+heels to his shoes. And under his guidance I would contrive to make in
+the furnace a charming little cocked hat of colored glass--a treasure!
+And the sheer joy thereof would wake me.
+
+Sometimes the white-haired lady and I would sit together at a square
+box from which she made lovely music, and she would sing my favorite
+song--a song that I adored. But I always woke before this song came to
+an end, on account of the too insupportably intense bliss I felt on
+hearing it; and all I could remember when awake were the words
+"triste--comment--sale." The air, which I knew so well in my dream, I
+could not recall.
+
+It seemed as though some innermost core of my being, some childish holy
+of holies, secreted a source of supersubtle reminiscence, which, under
+some stimulus that now and again became active during sleep, exhaled
+itself in this singular dream--shadowy and slight, but invariably
+accompanied by a sense of felicity so measureless and so penetrating
+that I would always wake in a mystic flutter of ecstasy, the bare
+remembrance of which was enough to bless and make happy many a
+succeeding hour.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Besides this happy family of three, close by (in the Street of the
+Tower) lived my grandmother Mrs. Biddulph, and my Aunt Plunket, a widow,
+with her two sons, Alfred and Charlie, and her daughter Madge. They also
+were fair to look at--extremely so--of the gold-haired, white-skinned,
+well-grown Anglo-Saxon type, with frank, open, jolly manners, and no
+beastly British pride.
+
+So that physically, at least, we reflected much credit on the English
+name, which was not in good odor just then at Passy-lès-Paris, where
+Waterloo was unforgotten. In time, however, our nationality was condoned
+on account of our good looks--"non Angli sed angeli!" as M. Saindou was
+gallantly pleased to exclaim when he called (with a prospectus of his
+school) and found us all gathered together under the big apple-tree
+on our lawn.
+
+But English beauty in Passy was soon to receive a memorable addition to
+its ranks in the person of a certain Madame Seraskier, who came with an
+invalid little daughter to live in the house so modestly described in
+gold as "Parva sed Apta."
+
+She was the English, or rather the Irish, wife of a Hungarian patriot
+and man of science, Dr. Seraskier (son of the famous violinist); an
+extremely tall, thin man, almost gigantic, with a grave, benevolent
+face, and a head like a prophet's; who was, like my father, very much
+away from his family--conspiring perhaps--or perhaps only inventing
+(like my father), and looking out "for his ship to come home!"
+
+[Illustration: "SHE TOPPED MY TALL MOTHER."]
+
+This fair lady's advent was a sensation--to me a sensation that never
+palled or wore itself away; it was no longer now "la belle Madame
+Pasquier," but "la divine Madame Seraskier"--beauty-blind as the French
+are apt to be.
+
+She topped my tall mother by more than half a head; as was remarked by
+Madame Pelé, whose similes were all of the kitchen and dining-room,
+"elle lui mangerait des petits pâtés sur la tête!" And height, that
+lends dignity to ugliness, magnifies beauty on a scale of geometrical
+progression--2, 4, 8, 16, 32--for every consecutive inch, between five
+feet five, let us say, and five feet ten or eleven (or thereabouts),
+which I take to have been Madame Seraskier's measurement.
+
+She had black hair and blue eyes--of the kind that turns violet in a
+novel--and a beautiful white skin, lovely hands and feet, a perfect
+figure, and features chiselled and finished and polished and turned out
+with such singular felicitousness that one gazed and gazed till the
+heart was full of a strange jealous resentment at any one else having
+the right to gaze on something so rare, so divinely, so sacredly
+fair--any one in the world but one's self!
+
+But a woman can be all this without being Madame Seraskier--she was much
+more.
+
+For the warmth and genial kindness of her nature shone through her eyes
+and rang in her voice. All was of a piece with her--her simplicity, her
+grace, her naturalness and absence of vanity; her courtesy, her
+sympathy, her mirthfulness.
+
+I do not know which was the most irresistible: she had a slight Irish
+accent when she spoke English, a less slight English accent when she
+spoke French!
+
+I made it my business to acquire both.
+
+Indeed, she was in heart and mind and body what we should _all_ be but
+for the lack of a little public spirit and self-denial (under proper
+guidance) during the last few hundred years on the part of a few
+thousand millions of our improvident fellow-creatures.
+
+There should be no available ugly frames for beautiful souls to be
+hurried into by carelessness or mistake, and no ugly souls should be
+suffered to creep, like hermit-crabs, into beautiful shells never
+intended for them. The outward and visible form should mark the inward
+and spiritual grace; that it seldom does so is a fact there is no
+gainsaying. Alas! such beauty is such an exception that its possessor,
+like a prince of the blood royal, is pampered and spoiled from the very
+cradle, and every good and generous and unselfish impulse is corroded by
+adulation--that spontaneous tribute so lightly won, so quickly paid, and
+accepted so royally as a due.
+
+So that only when by Heaven's grace the very beautiful are also very
+good, is it time for us to go down on our knees, and say our prayers in
+thankfulness and adoration; for the divine has been permitted to make
+itself manifest for a while in the perishable likeness of our
+poor humanity.
+
+A beautiful face! a beautiful tune! Earth holds nothing to beat these,
+and of such, for want of better materials, we have built for ourselves
+the kingdom of Heaven.
+
+     _"Plus oblige, et peut davantage
+       Un beau visage
+     Qu'un homme armé--
+       Et rien n'est meilleur que d'entendre
+     Air doux et tendre
+     Jadis aimé!"_
+
+My mother soon became the passionately devoted friend of the divine
+Madame Seraskier; and I, what would I not have done--what danger would I
+not have faced--what death would I not have died for her!
+
+I did not die; I lived her protestant to be, for nearly fifty years. For
+nearly fifty years to recollect the rapture and the pain it was to look
+at her; that inexplicable longing ache, that dumb, delicious, complex,
+innocent distress, for which none but the greatest poets have ever found
+expression; and which, perhaps, they have not felt half so acutely,
+these glib and gifted ones, as _I_ did, at the susceptible age of seven,
+eight, nine, ten, eleven, and twelve.
+
+She had other slaves of my sex. The five Napoleonic heroes did homage
+each after his fashion: the good Major with a kind of sweet fatherly
+tenderness touching to behold; the others with perhaps less unselfish
+adoration; notably the brave Capitaine Audenis, of the fair waxed
+mustache and beautiful brown tail coat, so tightly buttoned with gilt
+buttons across his enormous chest, and imperceptible little feet so
+tightly imprisoned in shiny tipped female cloth boots, with buttons of
+mother-of-pearl; whose hobby was, I believe, to try and compensate
+himself for the misfortunes of war by more successful attempts in
+another direction. Anyhow he betrayed a warmth that made my small bosom
+a Gehenna, until she laughed and snubbed him into due propriety and
+shamefaced self-effacement.
+
+It soon became evident that she favored two, at least, out of all this
+little masculine world--the Major myself; and a strange trio we made.
+
+Her poor little daughter, the object of her passionate solicitude, a
+very clever and precocious child, was the reverse of beautiful, although
+she would have had fine eyes but for her red lashless lids. She wore her
+thick hair cropped short, like a boy, and was pasty and sallow in
+complexion, hollow-cheeked, thick-featured, and overgrown, with long
+thin hands and feet, and arms and legs of quite pathetic length and
+tenuity; a silent and melancholy little girl, who sucked her thumb
+perpetually, and kept her own counsel. She would have to lie in bed for
+days together, and when she got well enough to sit up, I (to please her
+mother) would read to her _Le Robinson Suisse_, _Sandford and Merton_,
+_Evenings at Home_, _Les Contes de Madame Perrault_, the shipwreck from
+"Don Juan," of which we never tired, and the "Giaour," the "Corsair,"
+and "Mazeppa"; and last, but not least, _Peter Parleys Natural History_,
+which we got to know by heart.
+
+And out of this latter volume I would often declaim for her benefit what
+has always been to me the most beautiful poem in the world, possibly
+because it was the first I read for myself, or else because it is so
+intimately associated with those happy days. Under an engraving of a
+wild duck (after Bewick, I believe) were quoted W.C. Bryant's lines "To
+a Water-fowl." They charmed me then and charm me now as nothing else has
+quite charmed me; I become a child again as I think of them, with a
+child's virgin subtlety of perception and magical susceptibility to
+vague suggestions of the Infinite.
+
+Poor little Mimsey Seraskier would listen with distended eyes and quick
+comprehension. She had a strange fancy that a pair of invisible beings,
+"La fée Tarapatapoum," and "Le Prince Charmant" (two favorite characters
+of M. le Major's) were always in attendance upon us--upon her and
+me--and were equally fond of us both; that is, "La fée Tarapatapoum" of
+me, and "Le Prince Charmant" of her--and watched over us and would
+protect us through life.
+
+"O! ils sont joliment bien ensemble, tous les deux--ils sont
+inséparables!" she would often exclaim, _apropos_ of these visionary
+beings; and _apropos_ of the water-fowl she would say--
+
+"Il aime beaucoup cet oiseau-là, le Prince Charmant! dis encore, quand
+il vole si haut, et qu'il fait froid, et qu'il est fatigué, et que la
+nuit vient, mais qu'il ne veut pas descendre!"
+
+And I would re-spout--
+
+        _"'All day thy wings have fanned,
+     At that far height, the cold, thin atmosphere,
+     Yet stoop not, weary, to the welcome land,
+           Though the dark night be near!'"_
+
+And poor, morbid, precocious, overwrought Mimsey's eyes would fill, and
+she would meditatively suck her thumb and think unutterable things.
+
+And then I would copy Bewick's wood-cuts for her, as she sat on the arm
+of my chair and patiently watched; and she would say: "La fée
+Tarapatapoum trouve que tu dessines dans la perfection!" and treasure up
+these little masterpieces--"pour l'album de la fée Tarapatapoum!"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+There was one drawing she prized above all others--a steel engraving
+in a volume of Byron, which represented two beautiful beings of either
+sex, walking hand in hand through a dark cavern. The man was in sailor's
+garb; the lady, who went barefoot and lightly clad, held a torch; and
+underneath was written--
+
+     _"And Neuha led her Torquil by the hand,
+     And waved along the vaults her flaming brand."_
+
+I spent hours in copying it for her, and she preferred the copy to the
+original, and would have it that the two figures were excellent
+portraits of her Prince and Fairy.
+
+Sometimes during these readings and sketchings under the apple-tree on
+the lawn, the sleeping Médor (a huge nondescript sort of dog, built up
+of every breed in France, with the virtues of all and the vices of none)
+would wag his three inches of tail, and utter soft whimperings of
+welcome in his dream; and she would say--
+
+"C'est le Prince Charmant qui lui dit; 'Médor donne la patte!'"
+
+Or our old tomcat would rise from his slumbers with his tail up, and rub
+an imaginary skirt; and it was--
+
+"Regarde Mistigris! La fée Tarapatapoum est en train de lui frotter les
+oreilles!'"
+
+We mostly spoke French, in spite of strict injunctions to the contrary
+from our fathers and mothers, who were much concerned lest we should
+forget our English altogether.
+
+In time we made a kind of ingenious compromise; for Mimsey, who was
+full of resource, invented a new language, or rather two, which we
+called Frankingle and Inglefrank, respectively. They consisted in
+anglicizing French nouns and verbs and then conjugating and pronouncing
+them Englishly, or _vice versâ_.
+
+For instance, it was very cold, and the school-room window was open, so
+she would say in Frankingle--
+
+"Dispeach yourself to ferm the feneeter, Gogo. It geals to pier-fend! we
+shall be inrhumed!" or else, if I failed to immediately
+understand--"Gogo, il frise a splitter les stonnes--maque aste et chute
+le vindeau; mais chute--le donc vite! Je snize déjà!" which was
+Inglefrank.
+
+With this contrivance we managed to puzzle and mystify the uninitiated,
+English and French alike. The intelligent reader, who sees it all in
+print, will not be so easily taken in.
+
+When Mimsey was well enough, she would come with my cousins and me into
+the park, where we always had a good time--lying in ambush for red
+Indians, rescuing Madge Plunket from a caitiff knight, or else hunting
+snakes and field-mice and lizards, and digging for lizard's eggs, which
+we would hatch at home--that happy refuge for all manner of beasts, as
+well as little boys and girls. For there were squirrels, hedgehogs, and
+guinea-pigs; an owl, a raven, a monkey, and white mice; little birds
+that had strayed from the maternal nest before they could fly (they
+always died!), the dog Médor, and any other dog who chose; not to
+mention a gigantic rocking-horse made out of a real stuffed pony--the
+smallest pony that had ever been!
+
+Often our united high spirits were too boisterous for Mimsey. Dreadful
+headaches would come on, and she would sit in a corner, nursing a
+hedgehog with one arm and holding her thumb in her mouth with the other.
+Only when we were alone together was she happy, and then, _moult
+tristement!_
+
+On summer evenings whole parties of us, grown-up and small, would walk
+through the park and the Bois de Boulogne to the "Mare d'Auteuil"; as we
+got near enough for Médor to scent the water, he would bark and grin and
+gyrate, and go mad with excitement, for he had the gift of diving after
+stones, and liked to show it off.
+
+There we would catch huge olive-colored water-beetles, yellow
+underneath; red-bellied newts; green frogs, with beautiful spots and a
+splendid parabolic leap; gold and silver fish, pied with purply brown. I
+mention them in the order of their attractiveness. The fish were too
+tame and easily caught, and their beauty of too civilized an order; the
+rare, flat, vicious dytiscus "took the cake."
+
+Sometimes, even, we would walk through Boulogne to St. Cloud, to see the
+new railway and the trains--an inexhaustible subject of wonder and
+delight--and eat ices at the "Tête Noire" (a hotel which had been the
+scene of a terrible murder, that led to a cause célèbre); and we would
+come back through the scented night, while the glowworms were shining in
+the grass, and the distant frogs were croaking in the Mare d'Auteuil.
+Now and then a startled roebuck would gallop in short bounds across
+the path, from thicket to thicket, and Médor would go mad again and wake
+the echoes of the new Paris fortification, which were still in the
+course of construction.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+He had not the gift of catching roebucks!
+
+If my father were of the party, he would yodel Tyrolese melodies, and
+sing lovely songs of Boieldieu, Hérold, and Grétry; or "Drink to me only
+with thine eyes," or else the "Bay of Dublin" for Madame Seraskier, who
+had the nostalgia of her beloved country whenever her beloved
+husband was away.
+
+Or else we would break out into a jolly chorus and march to the tune--
+
+          _"Marie, trempe ton pain,
+            Marie, trempe ton pain,
+     Marie, trempe ton pain dans la soupe;
+            Marie, trempe ton pain,
+            Marie, trempe ton pain,
+     Marie, trempe ton pain dans le vin!"_
+
+Or else--
+
+     _"La--soupe aux choux--se fait dans la marmite;
+     Dans--la marmite--se fait la soupe aux choux."_
+
+which would give us all the nostalgia of supper.
+
+Or else, again, if it were too hot to sing, or we were too tired, M. le
+Major, forsaking the realms of fairy-land, and uncovering his high bald
+head as he walked, would gravely and reverently tell us of his great
+master, of Brienne, of Marengo, and Austerlitz; of the farewells at
+Fontainebleau, and the Hundred Days--never of St. Helena; he would not
+trust himself to speak to us of that! And gradually working his way to
+Waterloo, he would put his hat on, and demonstrate to us, by A+B, how,
+virtually, the English had lost the day, and why and wherefore. And on
+all the little party a solemn, awe-struck stillness would fall as we
+listened, and on some of us the sweet nostalgia of bed!
+
+Oh, the good old time!
+
+The night was consecrated for me by the gleam and scent and rustle of
+Madame Seraskier's gown, as I walked by her side in the deepening dusk--a
+gleam of yellow, or pale blue, or white--a scent of sandalwood--a rustle
+that told of a light, vigorous tread on firm, narrow, high-arched feet,
+that were not easily tired; of an anxious, motherly wish to get back to
+Mimsey, who was not strong enough for these longer expeditions.
+
+On the shorter ones I used sometimes to carry Mimsey on my back most of
+the way home (to please her mother)--a frail burden, with her poor,
+long, thin arms round my neck, and her pale, cold cheek against my
+ear--she weighed nothing! And when I was tired M. le Major would relieve
+me, but not for long. She always wanted to be carried by Gogo (for so I
+was called, for no reason whatever, unless it was that my name
+was Peter).
+
+She would start at the pale birches that shone out against the gloom,
+and shiver if a bough scraped her, and tell me all about the
+Erl-king--"mais comme ils sont là tous les deux" (meaning the Prince and
+the Fairy) "il n'y a absolument rien à craindre."
+
+And Mimsey was _si bonne camarade_, in spite of her solemnity and poor
+health and many pains, so grateful for small kindnesses, so appreciative
+of small talents, so indulgent to small vanities (of which she seemed to
+have no more share than her mother), and so deeply humorous in spite of
+her eternal gravity--for she was a real tomboy at heart--that I soon
+carried her, not only to please her mother, but to please herself, and
+would have done anything for her.
+
+As for M. le Major, he gradually discovered that Mimsey was half a
+martyr and half a saint, and possessed all the virtues under the sun.
+
+"Ah, vous ne la comprenez pas, cette enfant; vous verrez un jour quand
+ça ira mieux! vous verrez! elle est comme sa mère ... elle a toutes les
+intelligences de la tête et du coeur!" and he would wish it had pleased
+Heaven that he should be her grandfather--on the maternal side.
+
+_L'art d'être grandpère!_ This weather-beaten, war-battered old soldier
+had learned it, without ever having had either a son or a daughter of
+his own. He was a _born_ grandfather!
+
+Moreover, Mimsey and I had many tastes and passions in common--music,
+for instance, as well as Bewick's wood-cuts and Byron's poetry, and
+roast chestnuts and domestic pets; and above all, the Mare d'Auteuil,
+which she preferred in the autumn, when the brown and yellow leaves were
+eddying and scampering and chasing each other round its margin, or
+drifting on its troubled surface, and the cold wet wind piped through
+the dishevelled boughs of the forest, under the leaden sky.
+
+She said it was good to be there then, and think of home and the
+fireside; and better still, when home was reached at last, to think of
+the desolate pond we had left; and good, indeed, it was to trudge home
+by wood and park and avenue at dusk, when the bats were about, with
+Alfred and Charlie and Mimsey and Madge and Médor; swishing our way
+through the lush, dead leaves, scattering the beautiful, ripe
+horse-chestnut out of its split creamy case, or picking up acorns and
+beechnuts here and there as we went.
+
+And, once home, it was good, very good, to think how dark and lonesome
+and shivery it must be out there by the _mare_, as we squatted and
+chatted and roasted chestnuts by the wood fire in the school-room before
+the candles were lit--_entre chien et loup_, as was called the French
+gloaming--while Thérèse was laying the tea-things, and telling us the
+news, and cutting bread and butter; and my mother played the harp in the
+drawing-room above; till the last red streak died out of the wet west
+behind the swaying tree-tops, and the curtains were drawn, and there was
+light, and the appetites were let loose.
+
+I love to sit here, in my solitude and captivity, and recall every
+incident of that sweet epoch--to ache with the pangs of happy
+remembrance; than which, for the likes of me, great poets tell us there
+is no greater grief. This sorrow's crown of sorrow is my joy and my
+consolation, and ever has been; and I would not exchange it for youth,
+health, wealth, honor, and freedom; only for thrice happy childhood
+itself once more, over and over again, would I give up its thrice happy
+recollections.
+
+That it should not be all beer and skittles with us, and therefore apt
+to pall, my cousins and I had to work pretty hard. In the first place,
+my dear mother did all she could to make me an infant prodigy of
+learning. She tried to teach me Italian, which she spoke as fluently as
+English or French (for she had lived much in Italy), and I had to
+translate the "Gierusalemme Liberata" into both those latter
+languages--a task which has remained unfinished--and to render the
+"Allegro" and the "Penseroso" into Miltonian French prose, and "Le Cid"
+into Corneillian English. Then there were Pinnock's histories of Greece
+and Rome to master, and, of course, the Bible; and, every Sunday, the
+Collect, the Gospel, and the Epistle to get by heart. No, it was not all
+beer and skittles.
+
+It was her pleasure to teach, but, alas! not mine to learn; and we cost
+each other many a sigh, but loved each other all the more, perhaps.
+
+Then we went in the mornings, my cousins and I, to M. Saindou's,
+opposite, that we might learn French grammar and French-Latin and
+French-Greek. But on three afternoons out of the weekly six Mr. Slade, a
+Cambridge sizar stranded in Paris, came to anglicize (and neutralize)
+the Latin and Greek we had learned in the morning, and to show us what
+sorry stuff the French had made of them and of their quantities.
+
+Perhaps the Greek and Latin quantities are a luxury of English growth--a
+mere social test--a little pitfall of our own invention, like the letter
+_h_, for the tripping up of unwary pretenders; or else, French
+education being so deplorably cheap in those days, the school-masters
+there could not afford to take such fanciful superfluities into
+consideration; it was not to be done at the price.
+
+In France, be it remembered, the King and his greengrocer sent their
+sons to the same school (which did not happen to be M. Saindou's, by the
+way, where it was nearly all greengrocer and no King); and the fee for
+bed, board, and tuition, in all public schools alike, was something like
+thirty pounds a year.
+
+The Latin, in consequence, was without the distinction that comes of
+exclusiveness, and quite lacked that aristocratic flavor, so grateful
+and comforting to scholar and ignoramus alike, which the costly British
+public-school system (and the British accent) alone can impart to a dead
+language. When French is dead we shall lend it a grace it never had
+before; some of us even manage to do so already.
+
+That is (no doubt) why the best French writers so seldom point their
+morals and adorn their tales, as ours do, with the usual pretty,
+familiar, and appropriate lines out of Horace or Virgil; and why Latin
+is so little quoted in French talk, except here and there by a weary
+shop-walker, who sighs--
+
+"Varium et mutabile semper femina!" as he rolls up the unsold silk; or
+exclaims, "O rus! quando te aspiciam!" as he takes his railway ticket
+for Asnières on the first fine Sunday morning in spring.
+
+But this is a digression, and we have wandered far away from Mr. Slade.
+
+Good old Slade!
+
+We used to sit on the tone posts outside the avenue gate and watch for
+his appearance at a certain distant corner of the winding street.
+
+With his green tail coat, his stiff shirt collar, his flat thumbs stuck
+in the armholes of his nankeen waistcoat, his long flat feet turned
+inward, his reddish mutton-chop whiskers his hat on the back of his
+head, and his clean, fresh, blooming, virtuous, English face--the sight of
+him was not sympathetic when he appeared at last.
+
+[Illustration: "GOOD OLD SLADE"]
+
+Occasionally, in the course of his tuition, illness or domestic affairs
+would, to his great regret, detain him from our midst, and the beatitude
+we would experience when the conviction gradually dawned upon us that
+we were watching for him in vain was too deep for either words or deeds
+or outward demonstration of any sort. It was enough to sit on our stone
+posts and let it steal over us by degrees.
+
+These beatitudes were few and far between. It would be infelicitous,
+perhaps, to compare the occasional absences of a highly respectable
+English tutor to an angel's visits, but so we felt them.
+
+And then he would make up for it next afternoon, that conscientious
+Englishman; which was fair enough to our parents, but not to us. And
+then what extra severity, as interest for the beggarly loan of half an
+afternoon! What rappings on ink-stained knuckles with a beastly, hard,
+round, polished, heavy-wooded, business-like English ruler!
+
+It was our way in those days to think that everything English was
+beastly--an expression our parents thought we were much too fond
+of using.
+
+But perhaps we were not without some excuse for this unpardonable
+sentiment. For there was _another_ English family in Passy--the
+Prendergasts, an older family than ours--that is, the parents (and
+uncles and aunts) were middle-aged, the grandmother dead, and the
+children grown up. We had not the honor of their acquaintance. But
+whether that was their misfortune and our fault (or _vice versâ_) I
+cannot tell. Let us hope the former.
+
+They were of an opposite type to ours, and, though I say it, their type
+was a singularly unattractive one; perhaps it may have been the original
+of those caricatures of our compatriots by which French comic artists
+have sought to avenge Waterloo. It was stiff, haughty, contemptuous. It
+had prominent front teeth, a high nose, a long upper lip, a receding
+jaw; it had dull, cold, stupid, selfish green eyes, like a pike's, that
+swerved neither to right nor left, but looked steadily over peoples'
+heads as it stalked along in its pride of impeccable British
+self-righteousness.
+
+At the sudden sight of it (especially on Sundays) all the cardinal
+virtues became hateful on the spot and respectability a thing to run
+away from. Even that smooth, close-shaven cleanliness was so
+Puritanically aggressive as to make one abhor the very idea of soap.
+
+Its accent, when it spoke French (in shops), instead of being musical
+and sweet and sympathetic, like Madame Seraskier's, was barbarous and
+grotesque, with dreadful "ongs," and "angs," and "ows," and "ays"; and
+its manner overbearing, suspicious, and disdainful; and then we could
+hear its loud, insolent English asides; and though it was tall and
+straight and not outwardly deformed, it looked such a kill-joy skeleton
+at a feast, such a portentous carnival mask of solemn emptiness, such a
+dreary, doleful, unfunny figure of fun, that one felt Waterloo might
+some day be forgiven, even in Passy; but the Prendergasts, _never_!
+
+I have lived so long away from the world that, for all I know, this
+ancient British type, this "grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous
+bird of yore," may have become extinct, like another, but less
+unprepossessing bird--the dodo; whereby our state is the more gracious.
+
+But in those days, and generalizing somewhat hastily as young people
+are apt to do, we grew to think that England must be full of
+Prendergasts, and did not want to go there.
+
+To this universal English beastliness of things we made a few
+exceptions, it is true, but the list was not long: tea, mustard,
+pickles, gingerbread-nuts, and, of all things in the world, the English
+loaf of household bread that came to us once a week as a great treat and
+recompense for our virtues, and harmonized so well with Passy butter. It
+was too delicious! But there was always a difficulty, a dilemma--whether
+to eat it with butter alone, or with "cassonade" (French brown
+sugar) added.
+
+Mimsey knew her own mind, and loved it with French brown sugar, and if
+she were not there I would save for her half of my slices, and carefully
+cassonade them for her myself.
+
+On the other hand, we thought everything French the reverse of
+beastly--except all the French boys we knew, and at M. Saindou's there
+were about two hundred; then there were all the boys in Passy (whose
+name was legion, and who _did not_ go to M. Saindou's), and we knew all
+the boys in Passy. So that we were not utterly bereft of material for
+good, stodgy, crusty, patriotic English prejudice.
+
+Nor did the French boys fail to think us beastly in return, and
+sometimes to express the thought; especially the little vulgar boys,
+whose playground was the street--the _voyous de Passy_. They hated our
+white silk chimney-pot hats and large collars and Eton jackets, and
+called us "sacred godems," as their ancestors used to call ours in the
+days of Joan of Arc. Sometimes they would throw stones, and then there
+were collisions, and bleedings of impertinent little French noses, and
+runnings away of cowardly little French legs, and dreadful wails of "O
+là, là! O, là, là--maman!" when they were overtaken by English ones.
+
+Not but what _our_ noses were made to bleed now and then,
+unvictoriously, by a certain blacksmith--always the same young
+blacksmith--Boitard!
+
+It is always a young blacksmith who does these things--or a young
+butcher.
+
+Of course, for the honor of Great Britain, one of us finally licked him
+to such a tune that he has never been able to hold up his head since. It
+was about a cat. It came off at dusk, one Christmas Eve, on the "Isle of
+Swans," between Passy and Grenelle (too late to save the cat).
+
+I was the hero of this battle. "It's now or never," I thought, and saw
+scarlet, and went for my foe like a maniac. The ring was kept by Alfred
+and Charlie helped, oddly enough, by a couple of male Prendergasts, who
+so far forgot themselves as to take an interest in the proceedings.
+Madge and Mimsey looked on, terrified and charmed.
+
+It did not last long, and was worthy of being described by Homer, or
+even in _Bell's Life_. That is one of the reasons why I will not
+describe it. The two Prendergasts seemed to enjoy it very much while it
+lasted, and when it was over they remembered themselves again, and said
+nothing, and stalked away.
+
+As we grew older and wiser we had permission to extend our explorations
+to Meudon, Versailles, St. Germain, and other delightful places; to ride
+thither on hired horses, after having duly learned to ride at the famous
+"School of Equitation," in the Rue Duphot.
+
+[Illustration: "OMINOUS BIRDS OF YORE."]
+
+Also, we swam in those delightful summer baths in the Seine, that are so
+majestically called "Schools of Natation," and became past masters in
+"la coupe" (a stroke no other Englishman but ourselves has ever been
+quite able to manage), and in all the different delicate "nuances" of
+header-taking--"la coulante," "la hussarde," "la tête-bêche," "la tout
+ce que vous voudrez."
+
+Also, we made ourselves at home in Paris, especially old Paris.
+
+For instance, there was the island of St. Louis, with its stately old
+mansions _entre cour et jardin,_ behind grim stone portals and high
+walls where great magistrates and lawyers dwelt in dignified
+seclusion--the nobles of the rove: but where once had dwelt, in days
+gone by, the greater nobles of the sword-crusaders, perhaps, and knights
+templars, like Brian de Bois Guilbert.
+
+And that other more famous island, la Cité, where Paris itself was born,
+where Notre Dame reared its twin towers above the melancholy, gray,
+leprous walls and dirty brown roofs of the Hôtel-Dieu.
+
+Pathetic little tumble down old houses, all out of drawing and
+perspective, nestled like old spiders' webs between the buttresses of
+the great cathedral and on two sides of the little square in front (the
+Place du Parvis Notre Dame) stood ancient stone dwellings, with high
+slate roofs and elaborately wrought iron balconies. They seemed to have
+such romantic histories that I never tired of gazing at them, and
+wondering what the histories could be; and now I think of it, one of
+these very dwellings must have been the Hôtel de Gondelaurier, where,
+according to the most veracious historian that ever was, poor Esmeralda
+once danced and played the tambourine to divert the fair damsel
+Fleur-de-Lys de Gondelaurier and her noble friends, all of whom she so
+transcended in beauty, purity, goodness, and breeding (although she was
+but an untaught, wandering gypsy girl, out of the gutter); and there,
+before them all and the gay archer, she was betrayed to her final
+undoing by her goat, whom she had so imprudently taught how to spell
+the beloved name of "Phébus."
+
+Close by was the Morgue, that grewsome building which the great etcher
+Méryon has managed to invest with some weird fascination akin to that it
+had for me in those days--and has now, as I see it with the charmed
+eyes of Memory.
+
+La Morgue! what a fatal twang there is about the very name!
+
+[Illustration: SETTLING AN OLD SCORE.]
+
+After gazing one's fill at the horrors within (as became a
+healthy-minded English boy) it was but a step to the equestrian statue
+of Henri Quatre, on the Pont-Neuf (the oldest bridge in Paris, by the
+way); there, astride his long-tailed charger, he smiled, _le roy vert et
+galant,_ just midway between either bank of the historic river, just
+where it was most historic; and turned his back on the Paris of the
+Bourgeois King with the pear-shaped face and the mutton-chop whiskers.
+
+And there one stood, spellbound in indecision, like the ass of Buridan
+between two sacks of oats; for on either side, north or south of the
+Pont-Neuf, were to be found enchanting slums, all more attractive the
+ones than the others, winding up and down hill and roundabout and in and
+out, like haunting illustrations by Gustave Doré to _Drolatick Tales_ by
+Balzac (not seen or read by me till many years later, I beg to say).
+
+Dark, narrow, silent, deserted streets that would turn up afterwards in
+many a nightmare--with the gutter in the middle and towerlets and stone
+posts all along the sides; and high fantastic walls (where it was
+_défendre d'afficher_), with bits of old battlement at the top, and
+overhanging boughs of sycamore and lime, and behind them gray old
+gardens that dated from the days of Louis le Hutin and beyond! And
+suggestive names printed in old rusty iron letters at the street
+corners--"Rue Videgousset," "Rue Coupe-gorge," "Rue de la Vieille
+Truanderie," "Impasse de la Tour de Nesle," etc., that appealed to the
+imagination like a chapter from Hugo or Dumas.
+
+And the way to these was by long, tortuous, busy thoroughfares, most
+irregularly flagged, and all alive with strange, delightful people in
+blue blouses, brown woollen tricots, wooden shoes, red and white cotton
+nightcaps, rags and patches; most graceful girls, with pretty,
+self-respecting feet, and flashing eyes, and no head-dress but their own
+hair; gay, fat hags, all smile; thin hags, with faces of appalling
+wickedness or misery; precociously witty little gutter-imps of either
+sex; and such cripples! jovial hunchbacks, lusty blind beggars, merry
+creeping paralytics, scrofulous wretches who joked and punned about
+their sores; light-hearted, genial, mendicant monsters without arms or
+legs, who went ramping through the mud on their bellies from one
+underground wine-shop to another; and blue-chinned priests and
+barefooted brown monks and demure Sisters of Charity, and here and there
+a jolly chiffonnier with his hook, and his knap-basket behind; or a
+cuirassier, or a gigantic carbineer, or gay little "Hunter of Africa,"
+or a couple of bold gendarmes riding abreast, with their towering black
+_bonnets à poil;_ or a pair of pathetic little red-legged soldiers,
+conscripts just fresh from the country, with innocent light eyes and
+straw-coloured hair and freckled brown faces, walking hand in hand, and
+staring at all the pork-butchers' shops--and sometimes at the
+pork-butcher's wife!
+
+Then a proletarian wedding procession--headed by the bride and
+bridegroom, an ungainly pair in their Sunday best--all singing noisily
+together. Then a pauper funeral, or a covered stretcher, followed by
+sympathetic eyes on its way to the Hôtel-Dieu; or the last sacrament,
+with bell and candle, bound for the bedside of some humble agonizer _in
+extremis_--and we all uncovered as it went by.
+
+And then, for a running accompaniment of sound the clanging chimes, the
+itinerant street cries, the tinkle of the _marchand de coco,_ the drum,
+the _cor de chasse,_ the organ of Barbary, the ubiquitous pet parrot,
+the knife-grinder, the bawling fried-potato monger, and, most amusing of
+all, the poodle-clipper and his son, strophe and antistrophe, for every
+minute the little boy would yell out in his shrill treble that "his
+father clipped poodles for thirty sous, and was competent also to
+undertake the management of refractory tomcats," upon which the father
+would growl in his solemn bass, "My son speaks the truth"--_L'enfant
+dit vrai!_
+
+And rising above the general cacophony the din of the eternally cracking
+whip, of the heavy carwheel jolting over the uneven stones, the stamp
+and neigh of the spirited little French cart-horse and the music of his
+many bells, and the cursing and swearing and _hue! dià!_ of his driver!
+It was all entrancing.
+
+Thence home--to quite, innocent, suburban Passy--by the quays, walking
+on the top of the stone parapet all the way, so as to miss nothing (till
+a gendarme was in sight), or else by the Boulevards, the Rue de Rivoli,
+the Champs Élysées, the Avenue de St. Cloud, and the Chaussée de la
+Muette. What a beautiful walk! Is there another like it anywhere as it
+was then, in the sweet early forties of this worn-out old century, and
+before this poor scribe had reached his teens?
+
+Ah! it is something to have known that Paris, which lay at one's feet as
+one gazed from the heights of Passy, with all its pinnacles and spires
+and gorgeously-gilded domes, its Arch of Triumph, its Elysian Fields,
+its Field of Mars, its Towers of our Lady, its far-off Column of July,
+its Invalids, and Vale of Grace, and Magdalen, and Place of the Concord,
+where the obelisk reared its exotic peak by the beautiful unforgettable
+fountains.
+
+There flowed the many-bridged winding river, always the same way, unlike
+our tidal Thames, and always full; just beyond it was spread that
+stately, exclusive suburb, the despair of the newly rich and recently
+ennobled, where almost every other house bore a name which read like a
+page of French history; and farther still the merry, wicked Latin
+quarter and the grave Sorbonne, the Pantheon, the Garden of Plants; on
+the hither side, in the middle distance, the Louvre, where the kings of
+France had dwelt for centuries; the Tuileries, where "the King of the
+French" dwelt then, and just for a little while yet.
+
+Well I knew and loved it all; and most of all I loved it when the sun
+was setting at my back, and innumerable distant windows reflected the
+blood-red western flame. It seemed as though half Paris were on fire,
+with the cold blue east for a background.
+
+Dear Paris!
+
+Yes, it is something to have roamed over it as a small boy--a small
+English boy (that is, a small boy unattended by his mother or his
+nurse), curious, inquisitive, and indefatigable; full of imagination;
+all his senses keen with the keenness that belongs to the morning of
+life: the sight of a hawk, the hearing of a bat, almost the scent of
+a hound.
+
+Indeed, it required a nose both subtle and unprejudiced to understand
+and appreciate and thoroughly enjoy that Paris--not the Paris of M. le
+Baron Haussmann, lighted by gas and electricity, and flushed and drained
+by modern science; but the "good old Paris" of Balzac and Eugène Sue and
+_Les Mystères_--the Paris of dim oil-lanterns suspended from iron
+gibbets (where once aristocrats had been hung); of water-carriers who
+sold water from their hand-carts, and delivered it at your door (_au
+cinquème_) for a penny a pail--to drink of, and wash in, and cook
+with, and all.
+
+There were whole streets--and these by no means the least fascinating
+and romantic--where the unwritten domestic records of every house were
+afloat in the air outside it--records not all savory or sweet, but
+always full of interest and charm!
+
+One knew at a sniff as one passed the _porte cochère_ what kind of
+people lived behind and above; what they ate and what they drank, and
+what their trade was; whether they did their washing at home, and burned
+tallow or wax, and mixed chicory with their coffee, and were over-fond
+of Gruyère cheese--the biggest, cheapest, plainest, and most formidable
+cheese in the world; whether they fried with oil or butter, and liked
+their omelets overdone and garlic in their salad, and sipped
+black-currant brandy or anisette as a liqueur; and were overrun with
+mice, and used cats or mouse-traps to get rid of them, or neither; and
+bought violets, or pinks, or gillyflowers in season, and kept them too
+long; and fasted on Friday with red or white beans, or lentils, or had a
+dispensation from the Pope--or, haply, even dispensed with the Pope's
+dispensation.
+
+For of such a telltale kind were the overtones in that complex, odorous
+clang.
+
+I will not define its fundamental note--ever there, ever the same; big
+with a warning of quick-coming woe to many households; whose unheeded
+waves, slow but sure, and ominous as those that rolled on great
+occasions from le Bourdon de Notre Dame (the Big Ben of Paris), drove
+all over the gay city and beyond, night and day--penetrating every
+corner, overflowing the most secret recesses, drowning the very incense
+by the altar-steps.
+
+     "_Le pauvre en sa cabane où le chaume le couvre
+         Est sujet à ses lois;
+     Et la garde qui veille aux barrières du Louvre
+         N'en défend point nos rois_."
+
+And here, as I write, the faint, scarcely perceptible, ghost-like
+suspicion of a scent--a mere nostalgic fancy, compound, generic,
+synthetic and all-embracing--an abstract olfactory symbol of the "Tout
+Paris" of fifty years ago, comes back to me out of the past; and fain
+would I inhale it in all its pristine fulness and vigour. For scents,
+like musical sounds, are rare sublimaters of the essence of memory (this
+is a prodigious fine phrase--I hope it means something), and scents
+need not be seductive in themselves to recall the seductions of scenes
+and days gone by.
+
+Alas! scents cannot be revived at will, like an
+
+     "_Air doux et tendre
+         Jadis aimé_!"
+
+Oh, that I could hum or whistle an old French smell! I could evoke all
+Paris, sweet, prae-imperial Paris, in a single whiff!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In such fashion did we three small boys, like the three musketeers (the
+fame of whose exploits was then filling all France), gather and pile up
+sweet memories, to chew the cud thereof in after years, when far away
+and apart.
+
+Of all that _bande joyeuse_--old and young and middle-aged, from M. le
+Major to Mimsey Seraskier--all are now dead but me--all except dear
+Madge, who was so pretty and light-hearted; and I have never seen
+her since.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thus have I tried, with as much haste as I could command (being one of
+the plodding sort) to sketch that happy time, which came to an end
+suddenly and most tragically when I was twelve years old.
+
+My dear and jovial happy-go-lucky father was killed in a minute by the
+explosion of a safety lamp of his own invention, which was to have
+superseded Sir Humphry Davy's, and made our fortune! What a brutal
+irony of fate.
+
+So sanguine was he of success, so confident that his ship had come home
+at last, that he had been in treaty for a nice little old manor in Anjou
+(with a nice little old castle to match), called la Marière, which had
+belonged to his ancestors, and from which we took our name (for we were
+Pasquier de la Marière, of quite a good old family); and there we were
+to live on our own land, as _gentilshommes campagnards_, and be French
+for evermore, under a paternal, pear-faced bourgeois king as a temporary
+_pis-aller_ until Henri Cinq, Comte de Chambord, should come to his own
+again, and make us counts and barons and peers of France--Heaven
+knows what for!
+
+My mother, who was beside herself with grief, went over to London, where
+this miserable accident had occurred, and had barely arrived there when
+she was delivered of a still-born child, and died almost immediately;
+and I became an orphan in less than a week, and a penniless one. For it
+turned out that my father had by this time spent every penny of his own
+and my mother's capital, and had, moreover, died deeply in debt. I was
+too young and too grief-stricken to feel anything but the terrible
+bereavement, but it soon became patent to me that an immense alteration
+was to be made in my mode of life.
+
+A relative of my mother's, Colonel Ibbetson (who was well off) came to
+Passy to do his best for me, and pay what debts had been incurred in the
+neighborhood, and settle my miserable affairs.
+
+After a while it was decided by him and the rest of the family that I
+should go back with him to London, there to be disposed of for the
+best, according to his lights.
+
+And on a beautiful June Morning, redolent of lilac and syringa, gay with
+dragon-flies and butterflies and bumblebees, my happy childhood ended as
+it had begun. My farewells were heartrending (to me), but showed that I
+could inspire affection as well as feel it, and that was some
+compensation for my woe.
+
+"Adieu, cher Monsieur Gogo. Bonne chance, et le Bon Dieu vous bénisse,"
+said le Père et la Mère François. Tears trickled down the Major's hooked
+nose on to his mustache, now nearly white.
+
+Madame Seraskier strained me to her kind heart, and blessed and kissed
+me again and again, and rained her warm tears on my face; and hers was
+the last figure I saw as our fly turned into the Rue de la Tour on our
+way to London, Colonel Ibbetson exclaiming--
+
+"Gad! who's the lovely young giantess that seems so fond of you, you
+little rascal, hey? By George! you young Don Giovanni, I'd have given
+something to be in your place! And who's that nice old man with the long
+green coat and the red ribbon? A _vieille moustache_, I suppose: almost
+like a gentleman. Precious few Frenchmen can do that!"
+
+Such was Colonel Ibbetson.
+
+And then and there, even as he spoke, a little drop of sullen, chill
+dislike to my guardian and benefactor, distilled from his voice, his
+aspect, the expression of his face, and his way of saying things,
+suddenly trickled into my consciousness--never to be whiped away!
+
+As for so poor Mimsey, her grief was so overwhelming that she could not
+come out and wish me goodbye like the others; and it led, as I
+afterwards heard, to a long illness, the worst she ever had; and when
+she recovered it was to find that her beautiful mother was no more.
+
+[Illustration:]
+
+Madame Seraskier died of the cholera, and so did le Père et la Mère
+François, and Madame Pelé, and one of the Napoleonic prisoners (not M.
+le Major), and several other people we had known, including a servant of
+our own, Thérèse, the devoted Thérèse, to whom we were all devoted in
+return. That malodorous tocsin, which I have compared to the big bell of
+Notre Dame, had warned, and warned, and warned in vain.
+
+The _maison de santé_ was broken up. M. le Major and his friends went
+and roosted on parole elsewhere, until a good time arrived for them,
+when their lost leader came back and remained--first as President of the
+French Republic, then as Emperor of the French themselves. No more
+parole was needed after that.
+
+My grandmother and Aunt Plunket and her children fled in terror to
+Tours, and Mimsey went to Russia with her father.
+
+Thus miserably ended that too happy septennate, and so no more at
+present of
+
+     "_Le joli lieu de ma naissance_!"
+
+
+
+
+Part Two
+
+
+The next decade of my outer life is so uninteresting, even to myself,
+that I will hurry through it as fast as I can. It will prove dull
+reading, I fear.
+
+[Illustration:]
+
+My Uncle Ibbetson (as I now called him) took to me and arranged to
+educate and start me in life, and make "a gentleman" of me--an "English
+gentleman." But I had to change my name and adopt his; for some reason I
+did not know, he seemed to hate my father's very name. Perhaps it was
+because he had injured my father through life in many ways, and my
+father had always forgiven him; a very good reason! Perhaps it was
+because he had proposed to my mother three times when she was a girl,
+and had been thrice refused! (After the third time, he went to India for
+seven years, and just before his departure my father and mother were
+married, and a year after that I was born.)
+
+So Pierre Pasquier de la Marière, _alias_ Monsieur Gogo, became Master
+Peter Ibbetson, and went to Bluefriars, the gray-coat school, where he
+spent six years--an important slice out of a man's life, especially
+at that age.
+
+I hated the garb, I hated the surroundings--the big hospital at the
+back, and that reek of cruelty, drunkenness, and filth, the
+cattle-market--where every other building was either a slaughter-house,
+a gin-palace, or a pawnbroker's shop, more than all I hated the gloomy
+jail opposite, where they sometimes hanged a man in public on a Monday
+morning. This dismal prison haunted my dreams when I wanted to dream of
+Passy, of my dear dead father and mother and Madame Seraskier.
+
+For the first term or two they were ever in my thoughts, and I was
+always trying to draw their profiles on desks and slates and copybooks,
+till at last all resemblance seemed to fade out of them; and then I drew
+M. le Major till his side face became quite demoralized and impossible,
+and ceased to be like anything in life. Then I fell back on others: le
+Père François, with his eternal _bonnet de colon_ and sabots stuffed
+with straw; the dog Médor, the rocking-horse, and all the rest of the
+menagerie; the diligence that brought me away from Paris; the heavily
+jack-booted couriers in shiny hats and pigtails, and white breeches, and
+short-tailed blue coats covered with silver buttons, who used to ride
+through Passy, on their way to and fro between the Tuileries and St.
+Cloud, on little, neighing, gray stallions with bells round their necks
+and tucked-up tails, and beautiful heads like the horses' heads in the
+Elgin Marbles.
+
+In my sketches they always looked and walked and trotted the same way:
+to the left, or westward as it would be on the map. M. le Major, Madame
+Seraskier, Médor, the diligences and couriers, were all bound westward
+by common consent--all going to London, I suppose, to look after me, who
+was so dotingly fond of them.
+
+Some of the boys used to admire these sketches and preserve them--some
+of the bigger boys would value my idealized (!) profiles of Madame
+Seraskier, with eyelashes quite an inch in length, and an eye three
+times the size of her mouth; and thus I made myself an artistic
+reputation for a while. But it did not last long, for my vein was
+limited; and soon another boy came to the school, who surpassed me in
+variety and interest of subject, and could draw profiles looking either
+way with equal ease; he is now a famous Academician, and seems to have
+preserved much of his old facility.[A]
+
+[Footnote A: _Note_.--I have here omitted several pages, containing a
+description in detail of my cousin's life "at Bluefriars"; and also the
+portraits (not always flattering) which he has written of masters and
+boys, many of whom are still alive, and some of whom have risen to
+distinction; but these sketches would be without special interest unless
+the names were given as well, and that would be unadvisable for many
+reasons. Moreover, there is not much in what I have left out that has
+any bearing on his subsequent life, or the development of his character.
+MADGE PLUNKET.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thus, on the whole, my school career was neither happy nor unhappy, nor
+did I distinguish myself in any way, nor (though I think I was rather
+liked than otherwise) make any great or lasting friendships; on the
+other hand. I did not in any way disgrace myself, nor make a single
+enemy that I knew of. Except that I grew our of the common tall and
+very strong, a more commonplace boy than I must have seemed (after my
+artistic vein gad run itself dry) never went to a public school. So much
+for my outer life at Bluefriars.
+
+[Illustration: A DREAM OF CHIVALRY]
+
+But I had an inner world of my own, whose capital was Passy, whose fauna
+and flora were not to be surpassed by anything in Regent's Park or the
+Zoological Gardens.
+
+It was good to think of it by day, to dream of it by night, _although I
+had not yet learned how to dream!_
+
+There were soon other and less exclusive regions, however, which I
+shared with other boys of that bygone day. Regions of freedom and
+delight, where I heard the ominous crack of Deerslayer's rifle, and was
+friends with Chingachgook and his noble son--the last, alas! of the
+Mohicans: where Robin Hood and Friar Tuck made merry, and exchanged
+buffets with Lion-hearted Richard under the green-wood tree: where
+Quentin Durward, happy squire of dames, rode midnightly by their side
+through the gibbet-and-gipsy-haunted forests of Touraine.... Ah! I had
+my dream of chivalry!
+
+Happy times and climes! One must be a gray-coated school-boy, in the
+heart of foggy London, to know that nostalgia.
+
+Not, indeed, but what London has its merits. Sam Weller lived there, and
+Charley Bates, and the irresistible Artful Dodger--and Dick Swiveller,
+and his adorable Marchioness, who divided my allegiance with Rebecca of
+York and sweet Diana Vernon.
+
+It was good to be an English boy in those days, and care for such
+friends as these! But it was good to be a French boy also; to have known
+Paris, to possess the true French feel of things--and the language.
+
+Indeed, bilingual boys--boys double-tongued from their very birth
+(especially in French and English)--enjoy certain rare privileges. It is
+not a bad thing for a school-boy (since a school-boy he must be) to hail
+from two mother-countries if he can, and revel now and then in the
+sweets of homesickness for that of his two mother-countries in which he
+does not happen to be; and read _Les Trois Mousquetaires_ in the
+cloisters of Bluefriars, or _Ivanhoe_ in the dull, dusty prison-yard
+that serves for a playground in so many a French _lycée_!
+
+Without listening, he hears all round him the stodgy language of every
+day, and the blatant shouts of his school-fellows, in the voices he
+knows so painfully well--those shrill trebles, those cracked barytones
+and frog-like early basses! There they go, bleating and croaking and
+yelling; Dick, Tom, and Harry, or Jules, Hector, and Alphonse! How
+vaguely tiresome and trivial and commonplace they are--those too
+familiar sounds; yet what an additional charm they lend to that so
+utterly different but equally familiar word-stream that comes silently
+flowing into his consciousness through his rapt eyes! The luxurious
+sense of mental exclusiveness and self-sequestration is made doubly
+complete by the contrast!
+
+And for this strange enchantment to be well and thoroughly felt, both
+his languages must be native; not acquired, however perfectly. Every
+single word must have its roots deep down in a personal past so remote
+for him as to be almost unremembered; the very sound and printed aspect
+of each must be rich in childish memories of home; in all the countless,
+nameless, priceless associations that make it sweet and fresh and
+strong, and racy of the soil.
+
+Oh! Porthos, Athos, and D'Artagnan--how I loved you, and your immortal
+squires, Planchet, Grimaud, Mousqueton! How well and wittily you spoke
+the language I adored--better even than good Monsieur Lallemand, the
+French master at Bluefriars, who could wield the most irregular
+subjunctives as if they had been mere feathers--trifles light as air.
+
+Then came the Count of Monte-Cristo, who taught me (only too well) his
+terrible lesson of hatred and revenge; and _Les Mystères de Paris, Le
+Juif Errant_, and others.
+
+But no words that I can think of in either mother-tongue can express
+what I felt when first, through these tear-dimmed eyes of mine, and deep
+into my harrowed soul, came silently flowing the never-to-be-forgotten
+history of poor Esmeralda,[A] my first love! whose cruel fate filled
+with pity, sorrow, and indignation the last term of my life at school.
+It was the most important, the most solemn, the most epoch-making event
+of my school life. I read it, reread it, and read it again. I have not
+been able to read it since; it is rather long! but how well I remember
+it, and how short it seemed then! and oh! how short those
+well-spent hours!
+
+[Footnote A: Notre Dame de Paris, par Victor Hugo.]
+
+That mystic word [Greek: Anagkae]! I wrote it on the flyleaf of all my
+books. I carved it on my desk. I intoned it in the echoing cloisters! I
+vowed I would make a pilgrimage to Notre Dame some day, that I might
+hunt for it in every hole and corner there, and read it with my own
+eyes, and feel it with my own forefinger.
+
+And then that terrible prophetic song the old hag sings in the dark
+slum--how it haunted me, too! I could not shake it out of my troubled
+consciousness for months:
+
+     _Grouille, grève, grève, grouille,
+     File, File, ma quenouille:_
+
+     _File sa corde au bourreau
+     Qui siffle dans le préau.
+
+     [Greek:"'Anagkae!'Anagkae!'Anagkae_!"]
+
+Yes; it was worth while having been a little French boy just for a few
+years.
+
+I especially found it so during the holidays, which I regularly spent at
+Bluefriars; for there was a French circulating library in Holborn, close
+by--a paradise. It was kept by a delightful old French lady who had seen
+better days, and was very kind to me, and did not lend me all the books
+I asked for!
+
+Thus irresistibly beguiled by these light wizards of our degenerate age,
+I dreamed away most of my school life, utterly deaf to the voices of the
+older enchanters--Homer, Horace, Virgil--whom I was sent to school on
+purpose to make friends with; a deafness I lived to deplore, like other
+dunces, when it was too late.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And I was not only given to dream by day--I dreamed by night; my sleep
+was full of dreams--terrible nightmares, exquisite visions, strange
+scenes full of inexplicable reminiscence; all vague and incoherent, like
+all men's dreams that have hitherto been; _for I had not yet learned how
+to dream_.
+
+A vast world, a dread and beautiful chaos, an ever-changing kaleidoscope
+of life, too shadowy and dim to leave any lasting impression on the
+busy, waking mind; with here and there more vivid images of terror or
+delight, that one remembered for a few hours with a strange wonder and
+questioning, as Coleridge remembered his Abyssinian maid who played
+upon the dulcimer (a charming and most original combination).
+
+The whole cosmos is in a man's brains--as much of it, at least, as a
+man's brains will hold; perhaps it is nowhere else. And when sleep
+relaxes the will, and there are no earthly surroundings to distract
+attention--no duty, pain, or pleasure to compel it--riderless Fancy
+takes the bit in its teeth, and the whole cosmos goes mad and has its
+wild will of us.
+
+[Illustration: "NOTRE DAME DE PARIS."]
+
+Ineffable false joys, unspeakable false terror and distress, strange
+phantoms only seen as in a glass darkly, chase each other without rhyme
+or reason, and play hide-and-seek across the twilit field and through
+the dark recesses of our clouded and imperfect consciousness.
+
+And the false terrors and distress, however unspeakable, are no worse
+than such real terrors and distress as are only too often the waking lot
+of man, or even so bad; but the ineffable false joys transcend all
+possible human felicity while they last, and a little while it is! We
+wake, and wonder, and recall the slight foundation on which such
+ultra-human bliss has seemed to rest. What matters the foundation if but
+the bliss be there, and the brain has nerves to feel it?
+
+Poor human nature, so richly endowed with nerves of anguish, so
+splendidly organized for pain and sorrow, is but slenderly equipped
+for joy.
+
+What hells have we not invented for the afterlife! Indeed, what hells we
+have often made of this, both for ourselves and others, and at really
+such a very small cost of ingenuity, after all!
+
+Perhaps the biggest and most benighted fools have been the best
+hell-makers.
+
+Whereas the best of our heavens is but a poor perfunctory conception,
+for all that the highest and cleverest among us have done their very
+utmost to decorate and embellish it, and make life there seem worth
+living. So impossible it is to imagine or invent beyond the sphere of
+our experience.
+
+Now, these dreams of mine (common to many) of the false but ineffable
+joys, are they not a proof that there exist in the human brain hidden
+capacities, dormant potentialities of bliss, unsuspected hitherto, to
+be developed some day, perhaps, and placed within the reach of all,
+wakers and sleepers alike?
+
+A sense of ineffable joy, attainable at will, and equal in intensity and
+duration to (let us say) an attack of sciatica, would go far to equalize
+the sorrowful, one-sided conditions under which we live.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But there is one thing which, as a school-boy, I never dreamed--namely,
+that I, and one other holding a torch, should one day, by common
+consent, find our happiness in exploring these mysterious caverns of the
+brain; and should lay the foundations of order where only misrule had
+been before: and out of all those unreal, waste, and transitory realms
+of illusion, evolve a real, stable, and habitable world, which all who
+run may reach.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At last I left school for good, and paid a visit to my Uncle Ibbetson in
+Hopshire, where he was building himself a lordly new pleasure-house on
+his own land, as the old one he had inherited a year or two ago was no
+longer good enough for him.
+
+It was an uninteresting coast on the German Ocean, without a rock, or a
+cliff, or a pier, or a tree; even without cold gray stones for the sea
+to break on--nothing but sand!--a bourgeois kind of sea, charmless in
+its best moods, and not very terrible in its wrath, except to a few
+stray fishermen whom it employed, and did not seem to reward very
+munificently.
+
+Inland it was much the same. One always thought of the country as gray,
+until one looked and found that it was green; and then, if one were old
+and wise, one thought no more about it, and turned one's gaze inward.
+Moreover, it seemed to rain incessantly.
+
+But it was the country and the sea, after Bluefriars and the
+cloisters--after Newgate, St. Bartholomew, and Smithfield.
+
+And one could fish and bathe in the sea after all, and ride in the
+country, and even follow the hounds, a little later; which would have
+been a joy beyond compare if one had not been blessed with an uncle who
+thought one rode like a French tailor, and told one so, and mimicked
+one, in the presence of charming young ladies who rode in perfection.
+
+In fact, it was heaven itself by comparison, and would have remained so
+longer but for Colonel Ibbetson's efforts to make a gentleman of me--an
+English gentleman.
+
+What is a gentleman? It is a grand old name; but what does it mean?
+
+At one time, to say of a man that he is a gentleman, is to confer on him
+the highest title of distinction we can think of; even if we are
+speaking of a prince.
+
+At another, to say of a man that he is _not_ a gentleman is almost to
+stigmatize him as a social outcast, unfit for the company of his
+kind--even if it is only one haberdasher speaking of another.
+
+_Who_ is a gentleman, and yet who _is not_?
+
+The Prince of Darkness was one, and so was Mr. John Halifax, if we are
+to believe those who knew them best; and so was one "Pelham," according
+to the late Sir Edward Bulwer, Earl of Lytton, etc.; and it certainly
+seemed as if _he_ ought to know.
+
+And I was to be another, according to Roger Ibbetson, Esquire, of
+Ibbetson Hall, late Colonel of the--, and it certainly seemed as if
+he ought to know too! The word was as constantly on his lips (when
+talking to _me_) as though, instead of having borne her Majesty's
+commission, he were a hairdresser's assistant who had just come into an
+independent fortune.
+
+This course of tuition began pleasantly enough, before I left London, by
+his sending me to his tailors, who made me several beautiful suits;
+especially an evening suit, which has lasted me for life, alas; and
+these, after the uniform of the gray-coat school, were like an
+initiation to the splendors of freedom and manhood.
+
+Colonel Ibbetson--or Uncle Ibbetson, as I used to call him--was my
+mother's first cousin; my grandmother, Mrs. Biddulph, was the sister of
+his father, the late Archdeacon Ibbetson, a very pious, learned, and
+exemplary divine, of good family.
+
+But his mother (the Archdeacon's second wife) had been the only child
+and heiress of an immensely rich pawnbroker, by name Mendoza; a
+Portuguese Jew, with a dash of colored blood in his veins besides, it
+was said; and, indeed, this remote African strain still showed itself in
+Uncle Ibbetson's thick lips, wide open nostrils, and big black eyes with
+yellow whites--and especially in his long, splay, lark-heeled feet,
+which gave both himself and the best bootmaker in London a great deal
+of trouble.
+
+Otherwise, and in spite of his ugly face, he was not without a certain
+soldier-like air of distinction, being very tall and powerfully built.
+He wore stays, and an excellent wig, for he was prematurely bald; and he
+carried his hat on one side, which (in my untutored eyes) made him look
+very much like a "_swell_," but not quite like a _gentleman_.
+
+To wear your hat jauntily cocked over one eye, and yet "look like a
+gentleman!"
+
+It can be done, I am told; and has been, and is even still! It is not,
+perhaps, a very lofty achievement--but such as it is, it requires a
+somewhat rare combination of social and physical gifts in the wearer;
+and the possession of either Semitic or African blood does not seem to
+be one of these.
+
+[Illustration: "PORTRAIT CHARMANT, PORTRAIT DE MON AMIE ..."]
+
+Colonel Ibbetson could do a little of everything--sketch (especially a
+steam-boat on a smooth sea, with beautiful thick smoke reflected in the
+water), play the guitar, sing chansonnettes and canzonets, write society
+verses, quote De Musset--
+
+     _"Avez-vous vu dans Barcelone
+     Une Andalouse au sein bruni?"_
+
+He would speak French whenever he could, even to an English ostler, and
+then recollect himself suddenly, and apologize for his thoughtlessness;
+and even when he spoke English, he would embroider it with little
+two-penny French tags and idioms: "Pour tout potage"; "Nous avons changé
+tout cela"; "Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galère?" etc.; or
+Italian, "Chi lo sa?" "Pazienza!" "Ahimè!" or even Latin, "Eheu
+fugaces," and "Vidi tantum!" for he had been an Eton boy. It must have
+been very cheap Latin, for I could always understand it myself! He drew
+the line at German and Greek; fortunately, for so do I. He was a
+bachelor, and his domestic arrangements had been irregular, and I will
+not dwell upon them; but his house, as far as it went, seemed to promise
+better things.
+
+His architect, Mr. Lintot, an extraordinary little man, full of genius
+and quite self-made, became my friend and taught me to smoke, and drink
+gin and water.
+
+He did his work well; but of an evening he used to drink more than was
+good for him, and rave about Shelley, his only poet. He would recite
+"The Skylark" (his only poem) with uncertain _h_'s, and a rather
+cockney accent--
+
+     "'_Ail to thee blythe sperrit!
+     Bird thou never wert,
+     That from 'eaven, or near it
+     Po'rest thy full 'eart
+     In profuse strains of hunpremeditated hart_."
+
+As the evening wore on his recitations became "low comic," and quite
+admirable for accent and humour. He could imitate all the actors in
+London (none of which I had seen) so well as to transport me with
+delight and wonder; and all this with nobody but me for an audience, as
+we sat smoking and drinking together in his room at the "Ibbetson Arms."
+
+I felt grateful to adoration.
+
+Later still, he would become sentimental again; and dilate to me on the
+joys of his wedded life, on the extraordinary of intellect and beauty of
+Mrs. Lintot. First he would describe to me the beauties of her mind, and
+compare her to "L.E.L." and Felicia Hemans. Then he would fall back on
+her physical perfections; there was nobody worthy to be compared to her
+in these--but I draw the veil.
+
+He was very egotistical. Whatever he did, whatever he liked, whatever
+belonged to him, was better than anything else in world; and he was
+cleverer than any one else, except Mrs. Lintot, to whom he yielded the
+palm; and then he would cheer up and become funny again.
+
+In fact his self-satisfaction was quite extraordinary; and what is more
+extraordinary still, it was not a bit offensive--at least, to me;
+perhaps because he was such a tiny little man; or because much of this
+vanity of his seemed to have no very solid foundation, for it was not of
+the gifts I most admired in him that he was vainest; or because it came
+out most when he was most tipsy, and genial tipsiness redeems so much;
+or else because he was most vain about things I should never have been
+vain about myself; and the most unpardonable vanity in others is that
+which is secretly our own, whether we are conscious of it or not.
+
+[Illustration: "I FELT GRATEFUL TO ADORATION."]
+
+And then he was the first funny man I had ever met. What a gift it is!
+He was always funny when he tried to be, whether one laughed with him or
+at him, and I loved him for it. Nothing on earth is more pathetically
+pitiable than the funny man when he still tries and succeeds no longer.
+
+The moment Lintot's vein was exhausted, he had the sense to leave off
+and begin to cry, which was still funny; and then I would jump out of
+his clothes and into his bed and be asleep in a second, with the tears
+still trickling down his little nose--and even that was funny!
+
+But next morning he was stern and alert and indefatiguable, as though
+gin and poetry and conjugal love had never been, and fun were a
+capital crime.
+
+Uncle Ibbetson thought highly of him as an architect, but not otherwise;
+he simply made use of him.
+
+"He's a terrible little snob, of course, and hasn't got an _h_ in his
+head" (as if _that_ were a capital crime); "but he's very clever--look
+at that campanile--and then he's cheap, my boy, cheap."
+
+There were several fine houses in fine parks not very far from Ibbetson
+Hall; but although Uncle Ibbetson appeared in name and wealth and social
+position to be on a par with their owners, he was not on terms of
+intimacy with any of them, or even of acquaintance, as far as I know,
+and spoke of them with contempt, as barbarians--people with whom he had
+nothing in common. Perhaps they, too, had found out this
+incompatibility, especially the ladies; for, school-boy as I was, I was
+not long in discovering that his manner towards those of the other sex
+was not always such as to please either of them or their husbands or
+fathers or brothers. The way he looked at them was enough. Indeed, most
+of his lady-friends and acquaintances through life had belonged to the
+_corps de ballet_, the _demi-monde_, etc.--not, I should imagine, the
+best school of manners in the world.
+
+On the other hand, he was very friendly with some families in the town;
+the doctor's, the rector's, his own agent's (a broken-down brother
+officer and bosom friend, who had ceased to love him since he received
+his pay); and he used to take Mr. Lintot and me to parties there; and he
+was the life of those parties.
+
+He sang little French songs, with no voice, but quite a good French
+accent, and told little anecdotes with no particular point, but in
+French and Italian (so that the point was never missed); and we all
+laughed and admired without quite knowing why, except that he was the
+lord of the manor.
+
+On these festive occasions poor Lintot's confidence and power of amusing
+seemed to desert him altogether; he sat glum in a corner.
+
+Though a radical and a sceptic, and a peace-at-any-price man, he was
+much impressed by the social status of the army and the church.
+
+Of the doctor, a very clever and accomplished person, and the best
+educated man for miles around, he thought little; but the rector, the
+colonel, the poor captain, even, now a mere land-steward, seemed to fill
+him with respectful awe. And for his pains he was cruelly snubbed by
+Mrs. Captain and Mrs. Rector and their plain daughters, who little
+guessed what talents he concealed, and thought him quite a common little
+man, hardly fit to turn over the leaves of their music.
+
+It soon became pretty evident that Ibbetson was very much smitten with
+a Mrs. Deane, the widow of a brewer, a very handsome woman indeed, in
+her own estimation and mine, and everybody else's, except Mr. Lintot's,
+who said, "Pooh, you should see my wife!"
+
+Her mother, Mrs. Glyn, excelled us all in her admiration of Colonel
+Ibbetson.
+
+For instance, Mrs. Deane would play some common little waltz of the
+cheap kind that is never either remembered or forgotten, and Mrs. Glyn
+would exclaim, "_Is_ not that _lovely_?"
+
+And Ibbetson would say: "Charming! charming! Whose is it? Rossini's?
+Mozart's?"
+
+"Why, no, my dear colonel. Don't you remember? _It's your own_!"
+
+"Ah, so it is! I had quite forgotten." And general laughter and applause
+would burst forth at such a natural mistake on the part of our
+great man.
+
+Well, I could neither play nor sing, and found it far easier by this
+time to speak English than French, especially to English people who were
+ignorant of any language but their own. Yet sometimes Colonel Ibbetson
+would seem quite proud of me.
+
+"Deux mètres, bien sonnés!" he would say, alluding to my stature, "et le
+profil d'Antinoüs!" which he would pronounce without the two little dots
+on the _u_.
+
+And afterwards, if he had felt his evening a pleasant one, if he had
+sung all he knew, if Mrs. Deane had been more than usually loving and
+self-surrendering, and I had distinguished myself by skilfully turning
+over the leaves when her mother had played the piano, he would tell me,
+as we walked home together, that I "did credit to his name, and that I
+would make an excellent figure in the world as soon as I had _décrassé_
+myself; that I must get another dress-suit from his tailor, just an
+eighth of an inch longer in the tails; that I should have a commission
+in his old regiment (the Eleventeenth Royal Bounders), a deuced crack
+cavalry regiment; and see the world and break a few hearts (it is not
+for nothing that our friends have pretty wives and sisters); and finally
+marry some beautiful young heiress of title, and make a home for him
+when he was a poor solitary old fellow. Very little would do for him: a
+crust of bread, a glass of wine and water, and a clean napkin, a couple
+of rooms, and an old piano and a few good books. For, of course,
+Ibbetson Hall would be mine and every penny he possessed in the world."
+
+[Illustration:]
+
+All this in confidential French--lest the very clouds should hear
+us--and with the familiar thee and thou of blood-relationship, which I
+did not care to return.
+
+It did not seem to bode very serious intentions towards Mrs. Deane, and
+would scarcely have pleased her mother.
+
+Or else, if something had crossed him, and Mrs. Deane had flirted
+outrageously with somebody else, and he had not been asked to sing (or
+somebody else had), he would assure me in good round English that I was
+the most infernal lout that ever disgraced a drawing-room, or ate a man
+out of house and home, and that he was sick and ashamed of me. "Why
+can't you sing, you d--d French milksop? The d--d roulade-monger of a
+father of yours could sing fast enough, if he could do nothing else,
+confound him! Why can't you talk French, you infernal British booby? Why
+can't you hand round the tea and muffins, confound you! Why, twice Mrs.
+Glyn dropped her pocket-handkerchief and had to pick it up herself!
+What, 'at the other end of the room,' were you? Well, you should have
+skipped _across_ the room, and picked it up, and handed it to her with a
+pretty speech, like a gentleman! When I was your age I was _always_ on
+the lookout for ladies' pocket-handkerchiefs to drop--or their fans! I
+never missed _one_!"
+
+Then he would take me out to shoot with him (for it was quite essential
+that an English gentleman should be a sportsman)--a terrible ordeal to
+both of us.
+
+A snipe that I did not want to kill in the least would sometimes rise
+and fly right and left like a flash of lightning, and I would miss
+it--always; and he would d--n me for a son of a confounded French
+Micawber, and miss the next himself, and get into a rage and thrash his
+dog, a pointer that I was very fond of. Once he thrashed her so cruelly
+that I saw scarlet, and nearly yielded to the impulse of emptying both
+my barrels in his broad back. If I had done so it would have passed for
+a mere mishap, after all, and saved many future complications.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One day he pointed out to me a small bird pecking in a field--an
+extremely pretty bird--I think it was a skylark--and whispered to me in
+his most sarcastic manner--
+
+"Look here, you Peter without any salt, do you think, if you were to
+kneel down and rest your gun comfortably on this gate without making a
+noise, and take a careful aim, you could manage to shoot that bird
+_sitting_? I've heard of some Frenchmen who would be equal to _that_!"
+
+I said I would try, and, resting my gun as he told me, I carefully aimed
+a couple of yards above the bird's head, and mentally ejaculating,
+
+     "'_All to thee blythe sperrit_!"
+
+I fired both barrels (for fear of any after-mishap to Ibbetson), and the
+bird naturally flew away.
+
+After this he never took me out shooting with him again; and, indeed, I
+had discovered to my discomfiture that I, the friend and admirer and
+would-be emulator of Natty Bumppo the Deerslayer, I, the familiar of the
+last of the Mohicans and his scalp-lifting father, could not bear the
+sight of blood--least of all, of blood shed by myself, and for my own
+amusement.
+
+The only beast that ever fell to my gun during those shootings with
+Uncle Ibbetson was a young rabbit, and that more by accident than
+design, although I did not tell Uncle Ibbetson so.
+
+As I picked it off the ground, and felt its poor little warm narrow
+chest, and the last beats of its heart under its weak ribs, and saw the
+blood on its fur, I was smitten with pity, shame, and remorse; and
+settled with myself that I would find some other road to English
+gentlemanhood than the slaying of innocent wild things whose happy life
+seems so well worth living.
+
+[Illustration: "'AIL TO THEE BLYTHE SPERRIT!"]
+
+I must eat them, I suppose, but I would never shoot them any more; my
+hands, at least, should be clean of blood henceforward.
+
+Alas, the irony of fate!
+
+The upshot of all this was that he confided to Mrs. Deane the task of
+licking his cub of a nephew into shape. She took me in hand with right
+good-will, began by teaching me how to dance, that I might dance with
+her at the coming hunt ball; and I did so nearly all night, to my
+infinite joy and triumph, and to the disgust of Colonel Ibbetson, who
+could dance much better than I--to the disgust, indeed, of many smart
+men in red coats and black, for she was considered the belle of
+the evening.
+
+[Illustration: THE DANCING LESSON.]
+
+Of course I fell, or fancied I fell, in love with her. To her mother's
+extreme distress, she gave me every encouragement, partly for fun,
+partly to annoy Colonel Ibbetson, whom she had apparently grown to hate.
+And, indeed, from the way he spoke of her to me (this trainer of English
+gentlemen), he well deserved that she should hate him. He never had the
+slightest intention of marrying her--that is certain; and yet he had
+made her the talk of the place.
+
+And here I may state that Ibbetson was one of those singular men who go
+through life afflicted with the mania that they are fatally
+irresistible to women.
+
+He was never weary of pursuing them--not through any special love of
+gallantry for its own sake, I believe, but from the mere wish to appear
+as a Don Giovanni in the eyes of others. Nothing made him happier than
+to be seen whispering mysteriously in corners with the prettiest woman
+in the room. He did not seem to perceive that for one woman silly or
+vain or vulgar enough to be flattered by his idiotic persecution, a
+dozen would loathe the very sight of him, and show it plainly enough.
+
+This vanity had increased with years and assumed a very dangerous form.
+He became indiscreet, and, more disastrous still, he told lies! The very
+dead--the honored and irreproachable dead--were not even safe in their
+graves. It was his revenge for unforgotten slights.
+
+He who kisses and tells, he who tells even though he has not
+kissed--what can be said for him, what should be done to him?
+
+Ibbetson one day expiated this miserable craze with his life, and the
+man who took it--more by accident than design, it is true--has not yet
+found it in his heart to feel either compunction or regret.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So there was a great row between Ibbetson and myself. He d----d and
+confounded and abused me in every way, and my father before me, and
+finally struck me; and I had sufficient self-command not to strike him
+back, but left him then and there with as much dignity as I
+could muster.
+
+Thus unsuccessfully ended my brief experience of English country life--a
+little hunting and shooting and fishing, a little dancing and flirting;
+just enough of each to show me I was unfit for all.
+
+A bitter-sweet remembrance, full of humiliation, but not altogether
+without charm. There was the beauty of sea and open sky and changing
+country weather; and the beauty of Mrs. Deane, who made a fool of me to
+revenge herself on Colonel Ibbetson for trying to make a fool of her,
+whereby he became the laughing-stock of the neighborhood for at least
+nine days.
+
+And I revenged myself on both--heroically, as I thought; though where
+the heroism comes in, and where the revenge, does not appear
+quite patent.
+
+For I ran away to London, and enlisted in her Majesty's Household
+Cavalry, where I remained a twelvemonth, and was happy enough, and
+learned a great deal more good than harm.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Then I was bought out and articled to Mr. Lintot, architect and
+surveyor: a conclave of my relatives agreeing to allow me ninety pounds
+a year for three years; then all hands were to be washed of me
+altogether.[A]
+
+[Footnote A: _Note_.--I have thought it better to leave out, in its
+entirety, my cousin's account of his short career as a private soldier.
+It consists principally of personal descriptions that are not altogether
+unprejudiced; he seems never to have quite liked those who were placed
+in authority above him, either at school or in the army. MADGE PLUNKET.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So I took a small lodging in Pentonville, to be near Mr. Lintot, and
+worked hard at my new profession for three years, during which nothing
+of importance occurred in my outer life. After this Lintot employed me
+as a salaried clerk, and I do not think he had any reason to complain of
+me, nor did he make any complaint. I was worth my hire, I think, and
+something over; which I never got and never asked for.
+
+Nor did I complain of him; for with all his little foibles of vanity,
+irascibility, and egotism, and a certain close-fistedness, he was a good
+fellow and a very clever one.
+
+His paragon of a wife was by no means the beautiful person he had made
+her out to be, nor did anybody but he seem to think her so.
+
+She was a little older than himself; very large and massive, with stern
+but not irregular features, and a very high forehead; she had a slight
+tendency to baldness, and colorless hair that she wore in an austere
+curl on each side of her face, and a menacing little topknot on her
+occiput. She had been a Unitarian and a governess, was fond of good long
+words, like Dr. Johnson, and very censorious.
+
+But one of my husband's intimate friends, General----, who was cornet in
+the Life Guards in my poor cousin's time, writes me that "he remembers
+him well, as far and away the tallest and handsomest lad in the whole
+regiment, of immense physical strength, unimpeachable good conduct, and
+a thorough gentleman from top to toe."
+
+Her husband's occasional derelictions in the matter of grammar and
+accent must have been very trying to her!
+
+[Illustration: PENTONVILLE.]
+
+She knew her own mind about everything under the sun, and expected that
+other people should know it, too, and be of the same mind as herself.
+And yet she was not proud; indeed, she was a very dragon of humility,
+and had raised injured meekness to the rank of a militant virtue. And
+well she knew how to be master and mistress in her own house!
+
+But with all this she was an excellent wife to Mr. Lintot and a devoted
+mother to his children, who were very plain and subdued (and adored
+their father); so that Lintot, who thought her Venus and Diana and
+Minerva in one, was the happiest man in all Pentonville.
+
+And, on the whole, she was kind and considerate to me, and I always did
+my best to please her.
+
+Moreover (a gift for which I could never be too grateful), she presented
+me with an old square piano, which had belonged to her mother, and had
+done duty in her school-room, till Lintot gave her a new one (for she
+was a highly cultivated musician of the severest classical type). It
+became the principal ornament of my small sitting-room, which it nearly
+filled, and on it I tried to learn my notes, and would pick out with one
+finger the old beloved melodies my father used to sing, and my mother
+play on the harp.
+
+To sing myself was, it seems, out of the question; my voice (which I
+trust was not too disagreeable when I was content merely to speak)
+became as that of a bull-frog under a blanket whenever I strove to
+express myself in song; my larynx refused to produce the notes I held so
+accurately in my mind, and the result was disaster.
+
+On the other hand, in my mind I could sing most beautifully. Once on a
+rainy day, inside an Islington omnibus, I mentally sang "Adelaida" with
+the voice of Mr. Sims Reeves--an unpardonable liberty to take; and
+although it is not for me to say so, I sang it even better than he, for
+I made myself shed tears--so much so that a kind old gentleman sitting
+opposite seemed to feel for me very much.
+
+I also had the faculty of remembering any tune I once heard, and would
+whistle it correctly ever after--even one of Uncle Ibbetson's waltzes!
+
+As an instance of this, worth recalling, one night I found myself in
+Guildford Street, walking in the same direction as another belated
+individual (only on the other side of the road), who, just as the moon
+came out of a cloud, was moved to whistle.
+
+He whistled exquisitely, and, what was more, he whistled quite the most
+beautiful tune I had ever heard. I felt all its changes and modulations,
+its majors and minors, just as if a whole band had been there to play
+the accompaniment, so cunning and expressive a whistler was he.
+
+And so entranced was I that I made up my mind to cross over and ask him
+what it was--"Your melody or your life!" But he suddenly stopped at No.
+48, and let himself in with his key before I could prefer my
+humble request.
+
+Well, I went whistling that tune all next day, and for many days after,
+without ever finding out what it was; till one evening, happening to be
+at the Lintots. I asked Mrs. Lintot (who happened to be at the piano) if
+she knew it, and began to whistle it once more. To my delight and
+surprise she straightway accompanied it all through (a wonderful
+condescension in so severe a purist), and I did not make a single
+wrong note.
+
+"Yes," said Mrs. Lintot, "it's a pretty, catchy little tune--of a kind
+to achieve immediate popularity."
+
+Now, I apologize humbly to the reader for this digression; but if he be
+musical he will forgive me, for that tune was the "Serenade" of
+Schubert, and I had never even heard Schubert's name!
+
+And having thus duly apologized, I will venture to transgress and
+digress anew, and mention here a kind of melodic malady, a singular
+obsession to which I am subject, and which I will call unconscious
+musical cerebration.
+
+I am never without some tune running in my head--never for a moment; not
+that I am always aware of it; existence would be insupportable if I
+were. What part of my brain sings it, or rather in what part of my brain
+it sings itself, I cannot imagine--probably in some useless corner full
+of cobwebs and lumber that is fit for nothing else.
+
+But it never leaves off; now it is one tune, now another; now a song
+_without_ words, now _with_; sometimes it is near the surface, so to
+speak, and I am vaguely conscious of it as I read or work, or talk or
+think; sometimes to make sure it is there I have to dive for it deep
+into myself, and I never fail to find it after a while, and bring it up
+to the top. It is the "Carnival of Venice," let us say; then I let it
+sink again, and it changes without my knowing; so that when I take
+another dive the "Carnival of Venice" has become "Il Mio Tesoro," or the
+"Marseillaise," or "Pretty Little Polly Perkins of Paddington Green."
+And Heaven knows what tunes, unheard and unperceived, this internal
+barrel-organ has been grinding meanwhile.
+
+Sometimes it intrudes itself so persistently as to become a nuisance,
+and the only way to get rid of it is to whistle or sing myself. For
+instance, I may be mentally reciting for my solace and delectation some
+beloved lyric like "The Waterfowl," or "Tears, Idle Tears," or "Break,
+Break, Break"; and all the while, between the lines, this fiend of a
+subcerebral vocalist, like a wandering minstrel in a distant square,
+insists on singing, "Cheer, Boys, Cheer," or, "Tommy, make room for
+your uncle" (tunes I cannot abide), with words, accompaniment, and all,
+complete, and not quite so refined an accent as I could wish; so that I
+have to leave off my recitation and whistle "J'ai du Bon Tabac" in quite
+a different key to exorcise it.
+
+But this, at least, I will say for this never still small voice of mine:
+its intonation is always perfect; it keeps ideal time, and its quality,
+though rather thin and somewhat nasal and quite peculiar, is not
+unsympathetic. Sometimes, indeed (as in that Islington omnibus), I can
+compel it to imitate, _à s'y méprendre_, the tones of some singer I have
+recently heard, and thus make for myself a ghostly music which is not to
+be despised.
+
+Occasionally, too, and quite unbidden, it would warble little impromptu
+inward melodies of my own composition, which often seemed to me
+extremely pretty, old-fashioned, and quaint; but one is not a fair judge
+of one's own productions, especially during the heat of inspiration; and
+I had not the means of recording them, as I had never learned the
+musical notes. What the world has lost!
+
+Now whose this small voice was I did not find out till many years later,
+_for it was not mine_!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In spite of such rare accomplishments and resources within myself, I was
+not a happy or contented young man; nor had my discontent in it anything
+of the divine.
+
+I disliked my profession, for which I felt no particular aptitude, and
+would fain have followed another--poetry, science, literature, music,
+painting, sculpture; for all of which I most unblushingly thought myself
+better fitted by the gift of nature.
+
+I disliked Pentonville, which, although clean, virtuous, and
+respectable, left much to be desired on the score of shape, color,
+romantic tradition, and local charm; and I would sooner have lived
+anywhere else: in the Champs-Élysées, let us say--yes, indeed, even on
+the fifth branch of the third tree on the left-hand side as you leave
+the Arc de Triomphe, like one of those classical heroes in Henri
+Murger's _Vie de Bohème_.
+
+I disliked my brother apprentices, and did not get on well with them,
+especially a certain very clever but vicious and deformed youth called
+Judkins, who seemed to have conceived an aversion for me from the first;
+he is now an associate of the Royal Academy. They thought I gave myself
+airs because I did not share in their dissipations; such dissipations as
+I could have afforded would have been cheap and nasty indeed.
+
+Yet such pothouse dissipation seemed to satisfy them, since they took
+not only a pleasure in it, but a pride.
+
+They even took a pride in a sick headache, and liked it, if it were the
+result of a debauch on the previous night; and were as pompously
+mock-modest about a black eye, got in a squabble at the Argyll Rooms, as
+if it had been the Victoria Cross. To pass the night in a police cell
+was such glory that it was worth while pretending they had done so when
+it was untrue.
+
+They looked upon me as a muff, a milksop, and a prig, and felt the
+greatest contempt for me; and if they did not openly show it, it was
+only because they were not quite so fond of black eyes as they made out.
+
+So I left them to their inexpensive joys, and betook myself to pursuits
+of my own, among others to the cultivation of my body, after methods I
+had learned in the Life Guards. I belonged to a gymnastic and fencing
+and boxing club, of which I was a most assiduous frequenter; a more
+persevering dumb-beller and Indian-clubber never was, and I became in
+time an all-round athlete, as wiry and lean as a greyhound, just under
+fifteen stone, and four inches over six feet in height, which was
+considered very tall thirty years ago; especially in Pentonville, where
+the distinction often brought me more contumely than respect.
+
+Altogether a most formidable person; but that I was of a timid nature,
+afraid to hurt, and the peacefulest creature in the world.
+
+My old love for slums revived, and I found out and haunted the worst in
+London. They were very good slums, but they were not the slums of
+Paris--they manage these things better in France.
+
+Even Cow Cross (where the Metropolitan Railway now runs between King's
+Cross and Farringdon Street)--Cow Cross, that whilom labyrinth of
+slaughter-houses, gin-shops, and thieves' dens, with the famous Fleet
+Ditch running underneath it all the while, lacked the fascination and
+mystery of mediaeval romance. There were no memories of such charming
+people as Le roi des Truands and Gringoire and Esmeralda; with a sigh
+one had to fall back on visions of Fagin and Bill Sykes and Nancy.
+
+_Quelle dégringolade_!
+
+And as to the actual denizens! One gazed with a dull, wondering pity at
+the poor, pale, rickety children; the slatternly, coarse women who never
+smiled (except when drunk); the dull, morose, miserable men. How they
+lacked the grace of French deformity, the ease and lightness of French
+depravity, the sympathetic distinction of French grotesqueness. How
+unterrible they were, who preferred the fist to the noiseless and
+insidious knife! who fought with their hands instead of their feet,
+quite loyally; and reserved the kicks of their hobnailed boots for their
+recalcitrant wives!
+
+And then there was no Morgue; one missed one's Morgue badly.
+
+And Smithfield! It would split me truly to the heart (as M. le Major
+used to say) to watch the poor beasts that came on certain days to make
+a short station in that hideous cattle-market, on their way to the
+slaughter-house.
+
+What bludgeons have I seen descend on beautiful, bewildered, dazed, meek
+eyes, so thickly fringed against the country sun; on soft, moist, tender
+nostrils that clouded the poisonous reek with a fragrance of the far-off
+fields! What torture of silly sheep and genially cynical pigs!
+
+The very dogs seemed demoralized, and brutal as their masters. And there
+one day I had an adventure, a dirty bout at fisticuffs, most humiliating
+in the end for me and which showed that chivalry is often its own
+reward, like virtue, even when the chivalrous are young and big and
+strong, and have learned to box.
+
+A brutal young drover wantonly kicked a sheep, and, as I thought, broke
+her hind-leg, and in my indignation I took him by the ear and flung him
+round onto a heap of mud and filth. He rose and squared at me in a most
+plucky fashion; he hardly came up to my chin, and I refused to fight
+him. A crowd collected round us, and as I tried to explain to the
+by-standers the cause of our quarrel, he managed to hit me in the face
+with a very muddy fist.
+
+"Bravo, little 'un!" shouted the crowd, and he squared up again. I felt
+wretchedly ashamed and warded off all his blows, telling him that I
+could not hit him or I should kill him.
+
+"Yah!" shouted the crowd again; "go it, little un! Let 'im 'ave it! The
+long un's showing the white feather," etc., and finally I gave him a
+slight backhander that made his nose bleed and seemed to demoralize him
+completely. "Yah!" shouted the crowd; "'it one yer own size!"
+
+I looked round in despair and rage, and picking out the biggest man I
+could see, said, "Are _you_ big enough?" The crowd roared with laughter.
+
+"Well, guv'ner, I dessay I might do at a pinch," he replied; and I tried
+to slap his face, but missed it, and received such a tremendous box on
+the ear that I was giddy for a second or two, and when I recovered I
+found him still grinning at me. I tried to hit him again and again, but
+always missed; and at last, without doing me any particular damage, he
+laid me flat three times running onto the very heap where I had flung
+the drover, the crowd applauding madly. Dazed, hatless, and panting, and
+covered with filth, I stared at him in hopeless impotence. He put out
+his hand, and said, "You're all right, ain't yer, guv'ner? I 'ope I
+'aven't 'urt yer! My name's Tom Sayers. If you'd a 'it me, I should 'a'
+gone down like a ninepin, and I ain't so sure as I should ever 'ave got
+up again."
+
+He was to become the most famous fighting-man in England!
+
+I wrung his hand and thanked him, and offered him a sovereign, which he
+refused; and then he led me into a room in a public-house close by,
+where he washed and brushed me down, and insisted on treating me to a
+glass of brandy-and-water.
+
+I have had a fondness for fighting-men ever since, and a respect for the
+noble science I had never felt before. He was many inches shorter than
+I, and did not look at all the Hercules he was.
+
+He told me I was the strongest built man for a youngster that he had
+ever seen, barring that I was "rather leggy." I do not know if he was
+sincere or not, but no possible compliment could have pleased me more.
+Such is the vanity of youth.
+
+And here, although it savors somewhat of vaingloriousness, I cannot
+resist the temptation of relating another adventure of the same kind,
+but in which I showed to greater advantage.
+
+It was on a boxing-day (oddly enough), and I was returning with Lintot
+and one of his boys from a walk in the Highgate Fields. As we plodded our
+dirty way homeward through the Caledonian Road we were stopped by a
+crowd outside a public-house. A gigantic drayman (they always seem
+bigger than they really are) was squaring up to a poor drunken lout of a
+navvy not half his size, who had been put up to fight him, and who was
+quite incapable of even an attempt it self-defence; he could scarcely
+lift his arms, I thought at first it was only horse-play; and as little
+Joe Lintot wanted to see, I put him up on my shoulder, just as the
+drayman, who had been drinking, but was not drunk, and had a most
+fiendishly brutal face, struck the poor tipsy wretch with all his might
+between the eyes, and felled him (it was like pole-axing a bullock), to
+the delight of the crowd.
+
+Little Joe, a very gentle and sensitive boy, began to cry; and his
+father, who had the pluck of a bull-terrier, wanted to interfere, in
+spite of his diminutive stature. I was also beside myself with
+indignation, and pulling off my coat and hat, which I gave to Lintot,
+made my way to the drayman, who was offering to fight any three men in
+the crowd, an offer that met with no response.
+
+"Now, then, you cowardly skunk!" I said, tucking up my shirt-sleeves;
+"stand up, and I will knock every tooth down your ugly throat."
+
+His face went the colors of a mottled Stilton cheese, and he asked what
+I meddled with him for. A ring formed itself, and I felt the sympathy of
+the crowd _with_ me this time--a very agreeable sensation!
+
+"Now, then, up with your arms! I'm going to kill you!"
+
+"I ain't going to fight you, mister; I ain't going to fight _nobody_.
+Just you let me alone!"
+
+[Illustration:]
+
+"Oh yes, you are, or you're going on your marrow-bones to be pardon for
+being a brutal, cowardly skunk"; and I gave him a slap on the face that
+rang like a pistol-shot--a most finished, satisfactory, and successful
+slap this time. My finger-tips tingle at the bare remembrance.
+
+He tried to escape, but was held opposite to me. He began to snivel and
+whimper, and said he had never meddled with me, and asked what should I
+meddle with him for?
+
+"Then down on your knees--quick--this instant!" and I made as if I were
+going to begin serious business at once, and no mistake.
+
+So down he plumped on his knees, and there he actually fainted from
+sheer excess of emotion.
+
+As I was helped on with my coat, I tasted, for once in my life the
+sweets of popularity, and knew what it was to be the idol of a mob.
+
+Little Joey Lintot and his brothers and sisters, who had never held me
+in any particular regard before that I knew of, worshipped me from that
+day forward.
+
+And I should be insincere if I did not confess that on that one occasion
+I was rather pleased with myself, although the very moment I stood
+opposite the huge, hulking, beer-sodden brute (who had looked so
+formidable from afar) I felt, with a not unpleasant sense of relief,
+that he did not stand a chance. He was only big, and even at that I
+beat him.
+
+The real honors of the day belonged to Lintot, who, I am convinced, was
+ready to act the David to that Goliath. He had the real stomach for
+fighting, which I lacked, as very tall men are often said to do.
+
+And that, perhaps, is why I have made so much of my not very wonderful
+prowess on that occasion; not, indeed, that I am physically a coward--at
+least, I do not think so. If I thought I were I should avow it with no
+more shame than I should avow that I had a bad digestion, or a weak
+heart, which makes cowards of us all.
+
+It is that I hate a row, and violence, and bloodshed, even from a
+nose--any nose, either my own or my neighbor's.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There are slums at the east end of London that many fashionable people
+know something of by this time; I got to know them by heart. In addition
+to the charm of the mere slum, there was the eternal fascination of the
+seafaring element; of Jack ashore--a lovable creature who touches
+nothing but what he adorns it in his own peculiar fashion.
+
+I constantly haunted the docks, where the smell of tar and the sight of
+ropes and masts filled me with unutterable longings for the sea--for
+distant lands--for anywhere but where it was my fate to be.
+
+I talked to ship captains and mates and sailors, and heard many
+marvellous tales, as the reader may well believe, and framed for myself
+visions of cloudless skies, and sapphire seas, and coral reefs, and
+groves of spice, and dusky youths in painted plumage roving, and
+friendly isles where a lovely half-clad, barefooted Neuha would wave her
+torch, and lead me, her Torquil, by the hand through caverns of bliss!
+
+Especially did I haunt a wharf by London Bridge, from whence two
+steamers--the _Seine_ and the _Dolphin_, I believe--started on alternate
+days for Boulogne-sur-Mer.
+
+I used to watch the happy passengers bound for France, some of them, in
+their holiday spirits, already fraternizing together on the sunny deck,
+and fussing with camp-stools and magazines and novels and bottles
+of bitter beer, or retiring before the funnel to smoke the pipe of
+peace.
+
+[Illustration: THE BOULOGNE STEAMER.]
+
+The sound of the boiler getting up steam--what delicious music it was!
+Would it ever get up steam for me? The very smell of the cabin, the very
+feel of the brass gangway and the brass-bound, oil-clothed steps were
+delightful; and down-stairs, on the snowy cloth, were the cold beef and
+ham, the beautiful fresh mustard, the bottles of pale ale and stout. Oh,
+happy travellers, who could afford all this, and France into
+the bargain!
+
+Soon would a large white awning make the after-deck a paradise, from
+which, by-and-by, to watch the quickly gliding panorama of the Thames.
+The bell would sound for non-passengers like me to go ashore--"Que
+diable allait-il faire dans cette galère!" as Uncle Ibbetson would have
+said. The steamer, disengaging itself from the wharf with a pleasant
+yoho-ing of manly throats and a slow, intermittent plashing of the
+paddle-wheels, would carefully pick its sunny, eastward way among the
+small craft of the river, while a few handkerchiefs were waved in a
+friendly, make-believe farewell--_auf wiedersehen_!
+
+Oh, to stand by that unseasonably sou'-westered man at the wheel, and
+watch St. Paul's and London Bridge and the Tower of London fade out of
+sight--never, never to see them again. No _auf wiedersehen_ for me!
+
+Sometimes I would turn my footsteps westward and fill my hungry, jealous
+eyes with a sight of the gay summer procession in Hyde Park, or listen
+to the band in Kensington Gardens, and see beautiful, welldressed
+women, and hear their sweet, refined voices and happy laughter; and a
+longing would come into my heart more passionate than my longing for the
+sea and France and distant lands, and quite as unutterable. I would even
+forget Neuha and her torch.
+
+After this it was a dreary downfall to go and dine for tenpence all by
+myself, and finish up with a book at my solitary lodgings in
+Pentonville. The book would not let itself be read; it sulked and had to
+be laid down, for "beautiful woman! beautiful girl!" spelled themselves
+between me and the printed page. Translate me those words into French, O
+ye who can even render Shakespeare into French Alexandrines--"Belle
+femme? Belle fille?" Ha! ha!
+
+If you want to get as near it as you can, you will have to write, "Belle
+Anglaise," or "Belle Américaine;" only then will you be understood, even
+in France!
+
+Ah! elle était bien belle, Madame Seraskier!
+
+At other times, more happily inspired, I would slake my thirst for
+nature by long walks into the country. Hampstead was my Passy--the
+Leg-of-Mutton Pond my Mare d'Auteuil; Richmond was my St. Cloud, with
+Kew Gardens for a Bois de Boulogne; and Hampton Court made a very fair
+Versailles--how incomparably fairer, even a pupil of Lintot's
+should know.
+
+And after such healthy fatigue and fragrant impressions the tenpenny
+dinner had a better taste, the little front parlor in Pentonville was
+more like a home, the book more like a friend.
+
+For I read all I could get in English or French.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Novels, travels, history, poetry, science--everything came as grist to
+that most melancholy mill, my mind.
+
+I tried to write; I tried to draw; I tried to make myself an inner life
+apart from the sordid, commonplace ugliness of my outer one--a private
+oasis of my own; and to raise myself a little, if only mentally, above
+the circumstances in which it had pleased the Fates to place me.[A]
+
+[Footnote A: _Note_--It Is with great reluctance that I now come to my
+cousin's account of deplorable opinions he held, at that period of his
+life, on the most important subject that can ever engross the mind of
+man. I have left out _much_, but I feel that in suppressing it
+altogether, I should rob his sad story of all its moral significance;
+for it cannot be doubted that most of his unhappiness is attributable to
+the defective religious training of his childhood, and that his parents
+(otherwise the best and kindest people I have ever known) incurred a
+terrible responsibility when they determined to leave him "unbiased," as
+he calls it, at that tender and susceptible age when the mind is
+     "Wax to receive, marble to retain."
+                                 Madge Plunket.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It goes without saying that, like many thoughtful youths of a melancholy
+temperament, impecunious and discontented with their lot, and much given
+to the smoking of strong tobacco (on an empty stomach), I continuously
+brooded on the problems of existence--free-will and determinism, the
+whence and why and whither of man, the origin of evil, the immortality
+of the soul, the futility of life, etc., and made myself very miserable
+over such questions.
+
+Often the inquisitive passer-by, had he peeped through the blinds of
+No.--Wharton Street, Pentonville, late at night, would have been
+rewarded by the touching spectacle of a huge, rawboned ex-private in her
+Majesty's Life Guards, with his head bowed over the black and yellow
+key-board of a venerable square piano-forte (on which he could not
+play), dropping the bitter tear of loneliness and _Weltschmertz_ combined.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+It never once occurred to me to seek relief in the bosom of any Church.
+
+Some types are born and not made. I was a born "infidel;" if ever there
+was a congenital agnostic, one agnostically constituted from his very
+birth, it was I. Not that I had ever heard such an expression as
+agnosticism; it is an invention of late years....
+
+     "_J'avais fait de la prose toute ma vie sans le savoir!_"
+
+But almost the first conscious dislike I can remember was for the black
+figure of the priest, and there were several of these figures in Passy.
+
+Monsieur le Major called them _maîtres corbeaux_, and seemed to hold
+them in light esteem. Dr. Seraskier hated them; his gentle Catholic wife
+had grown to distrust them. My loving, heretic mother loved them not; my
+father, a Catholic born and bred, had an equal aversion. They had
+persecuted his gods--the thinkers, philosophers, and scientific
+discoverers--Galileo, Bruno, Copernicus; and brought to his mind the
+cruelties of the Holy Inquisition, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew; and
+I always pictured them as burning little heretics alive if they had
+their will--Eton jackets, white chimney-pot hats, and all!
+
+I have no doubt they were in reality the best and kindest of men.
+
+The parson (and parsons were not lacking in Pentonville) was not so
+insidiously repellent as the blue-cheeked, blue-chinned Passy priest;
+but he was by no means to me a picturesque or sympathetic apparition,
+with his weddedness, his whiskers, his black trousers, his frock-coat,
+his tall hat, his little white tie, his consciousness of being a
+"gentleman" by profession. Most unattractive, also, were the cheap,
+brand-new churches wherein he spoke the word to his dreary-looking,
+Sunday-clad flock, with scarcely one of whom his wife would have sat
+down to dinner--especially if she had been chosen from among them.
+
+[Illustration: SUNDAY IN PENTONVILLE.]
+
+To watch that flock pouring in of a Sunday morning, or afternoon, or
+evening, at the summons of those bells, and pouring out again after the
+long service, and banal, perfunctory sermon, was depressing. Weekdays,
+in Pentonville, were depressing enough; but Sundays were depressing
+beyond words, though nobody seemed to think so but myself. Early
+training had acclimatized them.
+
+I have outlived those physical antipathies of my salad days; even the
+sight of an Anglican bishop is no longer displeasing to me, on the
+contrary; and I could absolutely rejoice in the beauty of a cardinal.
+
+Indeed, I am now friends with both a parson and a priest, and do not
+know which of the two I love and respect the most. They ought to hate
+me, but they do not; they pity me too much, I suppose. I am too negative
+to rouse in either the deep theological hate; and all the little hate
+that the practice of love and charity has left in their kind hearts is
+reserved for each other--an unquenchable hate in which they seem to
+glory, and which rages all the more that it has to be concealed. It
+saddens me to think that I am a bone of contention between them.
+
+And yet, for all my unbelief, the Bible was my favorite book, and the
+Psalms my adoration; and most truly can I affirm that my mental attitude
+has ever been one of reverence and humility.
+
+But every argument that has ever been advanced against Christianity (and
+I think I know them all by this time) had risen spontaneously and
+unprompted within me, and they have all seemed to me unanswerable, and
+indeed, as yet, unanswered. Nor had any creed of which I ever heard
+appeared to me either credible or attractive or even sensible, but for
+the central figure of the Deity--a Deity that in no case could ever
+be mine.
+
+The awe-inspiring and unalterable conception that had wrought itself
+into my consciousness, whether I would or no, was that of a Being
+infinitely more abstract, remote, and inaccessible than any the genius
+of mankind has ever evolved after its own image and out of the needs of
+its own heart--inscrutable, unthinkable, unspeakable; above all human
+passions, beyond the reach of any human appeal; One upon whose
+attributes it was futile to speculate--One whose name was _It_,
+not _He_.
+
+The thought of total annihilation was uncongenial, but had no terror.
+
+Even as a child I had shrewdly suspected that hell was no more than a
+vulgar threat for naughty little boys and girls, and heaven than a
+vulgar bribe, from the casual way in which either was meted out to me as
+my probable portion, by servants and such people, according to the way I
+behaved. Such things were never mentioned to me by either my father or
+mother, or M. le Major, or the Seraskiers--the only people in whom
+I trusted.
+
+But for the bias against the priest, I was left unbiassed at that tender
+and susceptible age. I had learned my catechism and read my Bible, and
+used to say the Lord's Prayer as I went to bed, and "God bless papa and
+mamma" and the rest, in the usual perfunctory manner.
+
+Never a word against religion was said in my hearing by those few on
+whom I had pinned my childish faith; on the other hand, no such
+importance was attached to it, apparently, as was attached to the
+virtues of truthfulness, courage, generosity, self-denial, politeness,
+and especially consideration for others, high or low, human and
+animal alike.
+
+I imagine that my parents must have compromised the matter between them,
+and settled that I should work out all the graver problems of existence
+for myself, when I came to a thinking age, out of my own conscience,
+and such knowledge of life as I should acquire, and such help as they
+would no doubt have given me, according to their lights, had
+they survived.
+
+I did so, and made myself a code of morals to live by, in which religion
+had but a small part.
+
+For me there was but one sin, and that was cruelty, because I hated it;
+though Nature, for inscrutable purposes of her own, almost teaches it as
+a virtue. All sins that did not include cruelty were merely sins against
+health, or taste, or common-sense, or public expediency.
+
+Free-will was impossible. We could only _seem_ to will freely, and that
+only within the limits of a small triangle, whose sides were heredity,
+education, and circumstance--a little geometrical arrangement of my own,
+of which I felt not a little proud, although it does not quite go on
+all-fours--perhaps because it is only a triangle.
+
+That is, we could will fast enough--_too_ fast; but could not will _how_
+to will--fortunately, for we were not fit as yet, and for a long time to
+come, to be trusted, constituted as we are!
+
+Even the characters of a novel must act according to the nature,
+training, and motives their creator the novelist has supplied them with,
+or we put the novel down and read something else; for human nature must
+be consistent with itself in fiction as well as in fact. Even in its
+madness there must be a method, so how could the will be free?
+
+To pray for any personal boon or remission of evil--to bend the knee, or
+lift one's voice in praise or thanksgiving for any earthly good that had
+befallen one, either through inheritance, or chance, or one's own
+successful endeavor--was in my eyes simply futile; but, putting its
+futility aside, it was an act of servile presumption, of wheedling
+impertinence, not without suspicion of a lively sense of favors to come.
+
+It seemed to me as though the Jews--a superstitious and business-like
+people, who know what they want and do not care how they get it--must
+have taught us to pray like that.
+
+It was not the sweet, simple child innocently beseeching that to-morrow
+might be fine for its holiday, or that Santa Claus would be generous; it
+was the cunning trader, fawning, flattering, propitiating, bribing with
+fulsome, sycophantic praise (an insult in itself), as well as
+burnt-offerings, working for his own success here and hereafter, and his
+enemy's confounding.
+
+It was the grovelling of the dog, without the dog's single-hearted love,
+stronger than even its fear or its sense of self-interest.
+
+What an attitude for one whom God had made after His own image--even
+towards his Maker!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The only permissible prayer was a prayer for courage or resignation; for
+that was a prayer turned inward, an appeal to what is best in
+ourselves--our honor, our stoicism, our self-respect.
+
+And for a small detail, grace before and after meals seemed to me
+especially self-complacent and iniquitous, when there were so many with
+scarcely ever a meal to say grace for. The only decent and proper grace
+was to give half of one's meal away--not, indeed, that I was in the
+habit of doing so! But at least I had the grace to reproach myself for
+my want of charity, and that was my only grace.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Fortunately, since we had no free-will of our own, the tendency that
+impelled us was upward, like the sparks, and bore us with it
+willy-nilly--the good and the bad, and the worst and the best.
+
+By seeing this clearly, and laying it well to heart, the motive was
+supplied to us for doing all we could in furtherance of that upward
+tendency--_pour aider le bon Dieu_--that we might rise the faster and
+reach Him the sooner, if He were! And when once the human will has been
+set going, like a rocket or a clock or a steam-engine, and in the right
+direction, what can it not achieve?
+
+We should in time control circumstance instead of being controlled
+thereby; education would day by day become more adapted to one
+consistent end; and, finally, conscience-stricken, we should guide
+heredity with our own hands instead of leaving it to blind chance;
+unless, indeed, a well-instructed paternal government wisely took the
+reins, and only sanctioned the union of people who were thoroughly in
+love with each other, after due and careful elimination of the unfit.
+
+Thus, cruelty should at least be put into harness, and none of its
+valuable energy wasted on wanton experiments, as it is by Nature.
+
+And thus, as the boy is father to the man, should the human race one
+day be father to--what?
+
+That is just where my speculations would arrest themselves; that was the
+X of a sum in rule of three, not to be worked out by Peter Ibbetson,
+Architect and Surveyor, Wharton Street, Pentonville.
+
+As the orang-outang is to Shakespeare, so is Shakespeare to ... X?
+
+As the female chimpanzee is to the Venus of Milo, so is the Venus of
+Milo to ... X?
+
+Finally, multiply these two X's by each other, and try to conceive the
+result!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Such was, crudely, the simple creed I held at this time; and, such as it
+was, I had worked it all out for myself, with no help from outside--a
+poor thing, but mine own; or, as I expressed it in the words of De
+Musset, "Mon verre n'est pas grand--mais je bois dans mon verre."
+
+For though such ideas were in the air, like wholesome clouds, they had
+not yet condensed themselves into printed words for the million. People
+did not dare to write about these things, as they do at present, in
+popular novels and cheap magazines, that all who run may read, and learn
+to think a little for themselves, and honestly say what they think,
+without having to dread a howl of execration, clerical and lay.
+
+And it was not only that I thought like this and could not think
+otherwise; it was that I felt like this and could not feel otherwise;
+and I should have appeared to myself as wicked, weak, and base had I
+ever even _desired_ to think or feel otherwise, however personally
+despairing of this life--a traitor to what I jealously guarded as my
+best instincts.
+
+And yet to me the faith of others, if but unaggressive, humble, and
+sincere, had often seemed touching and pathetic, and sometimes even
+beautiful, as childish things seem sometimes beautiful, even in those
+who are no longer children, and should have put them away. It had caused
+many heroic lives, and rendered many obscure lives blameless and happy;
+and then its fervor and passion seemed to burn with a lasting flame.
+
+At brief moments now and then, and especially in the young, unfaith can
+be as fervent and as passionate as faith, and just as narrow and
+unreasonable, as _I_ found; but alas! its flame was intermittent, and
+its light was not a kindly light.
+
+It had no food for babes; it could not comfort the sick or sorry, nor
+resolve into submissive harmony the inner discords of the soul; nor
+compensate us for our own failures and shortcomings, nor make up to us
+in any way for the success and prosperity of others who did not choose
+to think as we did.
+
+It was without balm for wounded pride, or stay for weak despondency, or
+consolation for bereavement; its steep and rugged thoroughfares led to
+no promised land of beatitude, and there were no soft resting-places
+by the way.
+
+Its only weapon was steadfastness; its only shield, endurance; its
+earthly hope, the common weal; its earthly prize, the opening of all
+roads to knowledge, and the release from a craven inheritance of fear;
+its final guerdon--sleep? Who knows?
+
+Sleep was not bad.
+
+So that simple, sincere, humble, devout, earnest, fervent, passionate,
+and over-conscientious young unbelievers like myself had to be very
+strong and brave and self-reliant (which I was not), and very much in
+love with what they conceived to be the naked Truth (a figure of
+doubtful personal attractions at first sight), to tread the ways of life
+with that unvarying cheerfulness, confidence, and serenity which the
+believer claims as his own special and particular appanage.
+
+So much for my profession of unfaith, shared (had I but known it) by
+many much older and wiser and better educated than I, and only reached
+by them after great sacrifice of long-cherished illusions, and terrible
+pangs of soul-questioning--a struggle and a wrench that I was spared
+through my kind parents' thoughtfulness when I was a little boy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It thus behooved me to make the most of this life; since, for all I
+knew, or believed, or even hoped to the contrary, to-morrow we must die.
+
+Not, indeed, that I might eat and drink and be merry; heredity and
+education had not inclined me that way, I suppose, and circumstances did
+not allow it; but that I might try and live up to the best ideal I could
+frame out of my own conscience and the past teaching of mankind. And
+man, whose conception of the Infinite and divine has been so inadequate,
+has furnished us with such human examples (ancient and modern, Hebrew,
+Pagan, Buddhist, Christian, Agnostic, and what not) as the best of us
+can only hope to follow at a distance.
+
+I would sometimes go to my morning's work, my heart elate with lofty
+hope and high resolve.
+
+How easy and simple it seemed to lead a life without fear, or reproach,
+or self-seeking, or any sordid hope of personal reward, either here or
+hereafter!--a life of stoical endurance, invincible patience and
+meekness, indomitable cheerfulness and self-denial!
+
+After all, it was only for another forty or fifty years at the most, and
+what was that? And after that--_que sçais-je?_
+
+The thought was inspiring indeed!
+
+By luncheon-time (and luncheon consisted of an Abernethy biscuit and a
+glass of water, and several pipes of shag tobacco, cheap and rank) some
+subtle change would come over the spirit of my dream.
+
+Other people did not have high resolves. Some people had very bad
+tempers, and rubbed one very much the wrong way.
+
+What a hideous place was Pentonville to slave away one's life in! ...
+
+What a grind it was to be forever making designs for little new shops in
+Rosoman Street, and not making them well, it seemed! ...
+
+Why should a squinting, pock-marked, bowlegged, hunch-backed little
+Judkins (a sight to make a recruiting-sergeant shudder) forever taunt
+one with having enlisted as a private soldier? ...
+
+And then why should one be sneeringly told to "hit a fellow one's own
+size," merely because, provoked beyond endurance, one just grabbed him
+by the slack of his trousers and gently shook him out of them onto the
+floor, terrified but quite unhurt? ...
+
+And so on, and so on; constant little pin-pricks, sordid humiliations,
+ugliness, meannesses, and dirt, that called forth in resistance all that
+was lowest and least commendable in one's self.
+
+One has attuned one's nerves to the leading of a forlorn hope, and a
+gnat gets into one's eye, or a little cinder grit, and there it sticks;
+and there is no question of leading any forlorn hope, after all, and
+never will be; all _that_ was in the imagination only: it is always
+gnats and cinder grits, gnats and cinder grits.
+
+By the evening I had ignominiously broken down, and was plunged in the
+depths of an exasperated pessimism too deep even for tears, and would
+have believed myself the meanest and most miserable of mankind, but that
+everybody else, without exception, was even meaner and miserabler
+than myself.
+
+They could still eat and drink and be merry. I could not, and did not
+even want to.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And so on, day after day, week after week, for months and years....
+
+Thus I grew weary in time of my palling individuality, ever the same
+through all these uncontrollable variations of mood.
+
+Oh, that alternate ebb and flow of the spirits! It is a disease, and,
+what is most distressing, it is no real change; it is more sickeningly
+monotonous than absolute stagnation itself. And from that dreary seesaw
+I could never escape, except through the gates of dreamless sleep, the
+death in life; for even in our dreams we are still ourselves. There
+was no rest!
+
+I loathed the very sight of myself in the shop-windows as I went by; and
+yet I always looked for it there, in the forlorn hope of at least
+finding some alteration, even for the worse. I passionately longed to be
+somebody else; and yet I never met anybody else I could have borne to be
+for a moment.
+
+And then the loneliness of us!
+
+Each separate unit of our helpless race is inexorably bounded by the
+inner surface of his own mental periphery, a jointless armor in which
+there is no weak place, never a fault, never a single gap of egress for
+ourselves, of ingress for the nearest and dearest of our fellow-units.
+At only five points can we just touch each other, and all that is--and
+that only by the function of our poor senses--from the outside. In vain
+we rack them that we may get a little closer to the best beloved and
+most implicitly trusted; ever in vain, from the cradle to the grave.
+
+Why should so fantastic a thought have persecuted me so cruelly? I knew
+nobody with whom I should have felt such a transfusion of soul even
+tolerable for a second. I cannot tell! But it was like a gadfly which
+drove me to fatigue my body that I should have by day the stolid peace
+of mind that comes of healthy physical exhaustion; that I should sleep
+at night the dreamless sleep--the death in life!
+
+"Of such materials wretched men are made!" Especially wretched young
+men; and the wretcheder one is, the more one smokes; and the more one
+smokes, the wretcheder one gets--a vicious circle!
+
+Such was my case. I grew to long for the hour of my release (as I
+expressed it pathetically to myself), and caressed the idea of suicide.
+I even composed for myself a little rhymed epitaph in French which I
+thought very neat--
+
+     Je n'étais point. Je fus.
+         Je ne suis plus.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Oh, to perish in some noble cause--to die saving another's life, even
+another's worthless life, to which he clung!
+
+I remember formulating this wish, in all sincerity, one moonlit night as
+I walked up Frith Street, Soho. I came upon a little group of excited
+people gathered together at the foot of a house built over a shop. From
+a broken window-pane on the second floor an ominous cloud of smoke rose
+like a column into the windless sky. An ordinary ladder was placed
+against the house, which, they said, was densely inhabited; but no
+fire-engine or fire-escape had arrived as yet, and it appeared useless
+to try and rouse the inmates by kicking and beating at the door
+any longer.
+
+A brave man was wanted--a very brave man, who would climb the ladder,
+and make his way into the house through the broken window. Here was a
+forlorn hope to lead at last!
+
+Such a man was found. To my lasting shame and contrition, it was not I.
+
+He was short and thick and middle-aged, and had a very jolly red face
+and immense whiskers--quite a common sort of man, who seemed by no means
+tired of life.
+
+His heroism was wasted, as it happened; for the house was an empty one,
+as we all heard, to our immense relief, before he had managed to force a
+passage into the burning room. His whiskers were not even singed!
+
+Nevertheless, I slunk home, and gave up all thoughts of
+self-destruction--even in a noble cause; and there, in penance, I
+somewhat hastily committed to flame the plodding labor of many
+midnights--an elaborate copy in pen and ink, line for line, of Retel's
+immortal wood-engraving "Der Tod als Freund," which Mrs. Lintot had been
+kind enough to lend me--and under which I had written, in beautiful
+black Gothic letters and red capitals (and without the slightest sense
+of either humor or irreverence), the following poem, which had cost me
+infinite pains:
+
+               I.
+
+        _F, i, fi--n, i, ni!
+     Bon dieu Père, j'ai fini...
+     Vous qui m'avez lant puni,
+       Dans ma triste vie,
+     Pour tant d'horribles forfaits
+     Que je ne commis jamais
+     Laissez-moi jouir en paix
+       De mon agonie!_
+
+               II.
+
+     _Les faveurs que je Vous dois,
+     Je les compte sur mes doigts:_
+     _Tout infirme que je sois,
+        Ça se fait bien vite!
+     Prenez patience, et comptez
+     Tous mes maux--puis computez
+     Toutes Vos sévérités--
+       Vous me tiendrez quitte!_
+
+               III.
+
+     _Né pour souffrir, et souffrant--
+     Bas, honni, bête, ignorant,
+     Vieux, laid, chétif--et mourant
+        Dans mon trou sans plainte,
+     Je suis aussi sans désir
+     Autre que d'en bien finir--
+     Sans regret, sans repentir--
+        Sans espoir ni crainte!_
+
+               IV.
+
+     _Père inflexible et jaloux,
+     Votre Fils est mort pour nous!
+     Aussi, je reste envers Vous
+         Si bien sans rancune,
+     Que je voudrais, sans façon,
+     Faire, au seuil de ma prison,
+     Quelque petite oraison ...
+         Je n'en sais pas une!_
+
+               V.
+
+     _J'entends sonner l'Angélus
+     Qui rassemble Vos Elus:
+     Pour moi, du bercail exclus.
+         C'est la mort qui sonne!
+     Prier ne profite rien ...
+     Pardonner est le seul bien:_
+     _C'est le Vôtre, et c'est le mien:
+        Moi, je Vous pardonne!_
+
+               VI.
+
+     _Soyez d'un égard pareil!
+     S'il est quelque vrai sommeil
+     Sans ni rêve, ni réveil,
+        Ouvrez-m'en la porte--
+     Faites que l'immense Oubli
+     Couvre, sous un dernier pli,
+     Dans mon corps enséveli,
+        Ma conscience morte!_
+
+Oh me duffer! What a hopeless failure was I in all things, little and
+big.
+
+
+
+
+Part Three
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+I had no friends but the Lintots and their friends. "Les amis de nos
+amis sont nos amis!"
+
+My cousin Alfred had gone into the army, like his father before him. My
+cousin Charlie had gone into the Church, and we had drifted completely
+apart. My grandmother was dead. My Aunt Plunket, a great invalid, lived
+in Florence. Her daughter, Madge, was in India, happily married to a
+young soldier who is now a most distinguished general.
+
+The Lintots held their heads high as representatives of a liberal
+profession, and an old Pentonville family. People were generally
+exclusive in those days--an exclusiveness that was chiefly kept up by
+the ladies. There were charmed circles even in Pentonville.
+
+Among the most exclusive were the Lintots. Let us hope, in common
+justice, that those they excluded were at least able to exclude others.
+
+I have eaten their bread and salt, and it would ill become me to deny
+that their circle was charming as well as charmed. But I had no gift for
+making friends, although I was often attracted by people the very
+opposite of myself; especially by little, clever, quick, but not too
+familiar men; but even if they were disposed to make advances, a
+miserable shyness and stiffness of manner on my part, that I could not
+help, would raise a barrier of ice between us.
+
+They were most hospitable people, these good Lintots, and had many
+friends, and gave many parties, which my miserable shyness prevented me
+from enjoying to the full. They were both too stiff and too free.
+
+In the drawing-room, Mrs. Lintot and one or two other ladies, severely
+dressed, would play the severest music in a manner that did not mitigate
+its severity. They were merciless! It was nearly always Bach, or Hummel,
+or Scarlatti, each of whom, they would say, could write both like an
+artist and a gentleman--a very rare but indispensable combination,
+it seemed.
+
+Other ladies, young and middle-aged, and a few dumb-struck youths like
+myself, would be suffered to listen, but never to retaliate--never to
+play or sing back again.
+
+If one ventured to ask for a song without words by Mendelssohn--or a
+song with words, even by Schubert, even with German words--one was
+rebuked and made to blush for the crime of musical frivolity.
+
+Meanwhile, in Lintot's office (built by himself in the back garden),
+grave men and true, pending the supper hour, would smoke and sip
+spirits-and-water, and talk shop; formally at first, and with much
+politeness. But gradually, feeling their way, as it were, they would
+relax into social unbuttonment, and drop the "Mister" before each
+other's names (to be resumed next morning), and indulge in lively
+professional chaff, which would soon become personal and free and
+boisterous--a good-humored kind of warfare in which I did not shine, for
+lack of quickness and repartee. For instance, they would ask one whether
+one would rather be a bigger fool than one looked, or look a bigger fool
+than one was; and whichever way one answered the question, the retort
+would be that "that was impossible!" amid roars of laughter from all
+but one.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+So that I would take a middle course, and spend most of the evening on
+the stairs and in the hall, and study (with an absorbing interest much
+too well feigned to look natural) the photographs of famous cathedrals
+and public buildings till supper came; when, by assiduously attending on
+the ladies, I would cause my miserable existence to be remembered, and
+forgiven; and soon forgotten again, I fear.
+
+I hope I shall not be considered an overweening coxcomb for saying that,
+on the whole, I found more favor with the ladies than with the
+gentlemen; especially at supper-time.
+
+After supper there would be a change--for the better, some thought.
+Lintot, emboldened by good-cheer and good-fellowship, would become
+unduly, immensely, uproariously funny, in spite of his wife. He had a
+genuine gift of buffoonery. His friends would whisper to each other
+that Lintot was "on," and encourage him. Bach and Hummel and Scarlatti
+were put on the shelf, and the young people would have a good time.
+There were comic songs and negro melodies, with a chorus all round.
+Lintot would sing "Vilikins and his Dinah," in the manner of Mr. Robson,
+so well that even Mrs. Lintot's stern mask would relax into indulgent
+smiles. It was irresistible. And when the party broke up, we could all
+(thanks to our host) honestly thank our hostess "for a very pleasant
+evening," and cheerfully, yet almost regretfully, wish her good-night.
+
+It is good to laugh sometimes--wisely if one can; if not, _quocumque
+modo_! There are seasons when even "the crackling of thorns under a pot"
+has its uses. It seems to warm the pot--all the pots--and all the
+emptiness thereof, if they be empty.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Once, indeed, I actually made a friend, but he did not last me very
+long.
+
+It happened thus: Mrs. Lintot gave a grander party than usual. One of
+the invited was Mr. Moses Lyon, the great picture-dealer--a client of
+Lintot's; and he brought with him young Raphael Merridew, the already
+famous painter, the most attractive youth I had ever seen. Small and
+slight, but beautifully made, and dressed in the extreme of fashion,
+with a handsome face, bright and polite manners, and an irresistible
+voice, he became his laurels well; he would have been sufficiently
+dazzling without them. Never had those hospitable doors in Myddelton
+Square been opened to so brilliant a guest.
+
+I was introduced to him, and he discovered that the bridge of my nose
+was just suited for the face of the sun-god in his picture of "The
+Sun-god and the Dawn-maiden," and begged I would favor him with a
+sitting or two.
+
+Proud indeed was I to accede to such a request, and I gave him many
+sittings. I used to rise at dawn to sit, before my work at Lintot's
+began; and to sit again as soon as I could be spared.
+
+It seems I not only had the nose and brow of a sun-god (who is not
+supposed to be a very intellectual person), but also his arms and his
+torso; and sat for these, too. I have been vain of myself ever since.
+
+During these sittings, which he made delightful, I grew to love him as
+David loved Jonathan.
+
+We settled that we would go to the Derby together in a hansom. I engaged
+the smartest hansom in London days beforehand. On the great Wednesday
+morning I was punctual with it at his door in Charlotte Street. There
+was another hansom there already--a smarter hansom still than mine, for
+it was a private one--and he came down and told me he had altered his
+mind, and was going with Lyon, who had asked him the evening before.
+
+"One of the first picture-dealers in London, my dear fellow. Hang it
+all, you know, I couldn't refuse--awfully sorry!"
+
+So I drove to the Derby in solitary splendor, but the bright weather,
+the humors of the road, all the gay scenes were thrown away upon me,
+such was the bitterness of my heart.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+In the early afternoon I saw Merridew lunching on the top of a drag,
+among some men of smart and aristocratic appearance. He seemed to be the
+life of the party, and gave me a good-humored nod as I passed. I soon
+found Lyon sitting disconsolate in his hansom, scowling and solitary; he
+invited me to lunch with him, and disembosomed himself of a load of
+bitterness as intense as mine (which I kept to myself). The shrewd
+Hebrew tradesman was sunk in the warm-hearted, injured friend. Merridew
+had left Lyon for the Earl of Chiselhurst, just as he had left me
+for Lyon.
+
+That was a dull Derby for us both!
+
+A few days later I met Merridew, radiant as ever. All he said was:
+
+"Awful shame of me to drop old Lyon for Chiselhurst, eh? But an earl, my
+dear fellow! Hang it all, you know! Poor old Mo had to get back in his
+hansom all by himself, but he's bought the 'Sun-god' all the same."
+
+Merridew soon dropped me altogether, to my great sorrow, for I forgave
+him his Derby desertion as quickly as Lyon did, and would have forgiven
+him anything. He was one of those for whom allowances are always being
+made, and with a good grace.
+
+He died before he was thirty, poor boy! but his fame will never die. The
+"Sun-god" (even with the bridge of that nose which had been so wofully
+put out of joint) is enough by itself to place him among the immortals.
+Lyon sold it to Lord Chiselhurst for three thousand pounds--it had cost
+him five hundred. It is now in the National Gallery.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Poetical justice was satisfied!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Nor was I more fortunate in love than in friendship.
+
+All the exclusiveness in the world cannot exclude good and beautiful
+maidens, and these were not lacking, even in Pentonville.
+
+There is always one maiden much more beautiful and good than all the
+others--like Esmeralda among the ladies of the Hôtel de Gondelaurier.
+There was such a maiden in Pentonville, or rather Clerkenwell, close by.
+But her station was so humble (like Esmeralda's) that even the least
+exclusive would have drawn the line at _her!_ She was one of a large
+family, and they sold tripe and pig's feet, and food for cats and dogs,
+in a very small shop opposite the western wall of the Middlesex House of
+Detention. She was the eldest, and the busy, responsible one at this
+poor counter. She was one of Nature's ladies, one of Nature's
+goddesses--a queen! Of that I felt sure every time I passed her shop,
+and shyly met her kind, frank, uncoquettish gaze. A time was approaching
+when I should have to overcome my shyness, and tell her that she of all
+women was the woman for me, and that it was indispensable, absolutely
+indispensable, that we two should be made one--immediately! at
+once! forever!
+
+But before I could bring myself to this she married somebody else, and
+we had never exchanged a single word!
+
+If she is alive now she is an old woman--a good and beautiful old woman,
+I feel sure, wherever she is, and whatever her rank in life. If she
+should read this book, which is not very likely, may she accept this
+small tribute from an unknown admirer; for whom, so many years ago, she
+beautified and made poetical the hideous street that still bounds the
+Middlesex House of Detention on its western side; and may she try to
+think not the less of it because since then its writer has been on the
+wrong side of that long, blank wall, of that dreary portal where the
+agonized stone face looks down on the desolate slum:
+
+     "_Per me si va tra la perduta gente_ ...!"
+
+After this disappointment I got myself a big dog (like Byron, Bismarck,
+and Wagner), but not in the spirit of emulation. Indeed, I had never
+heard of either Bismarck or Wagner in those days, or their dogs, and I
+had lost my passion for Byron and any wish to emulate him in any way; it
+was simply for the want of something to be fond of, and that would be
+sure to love me back again.
+
+He was not a big dog when I bought him, but just a little ball of
+orange-tawny fluff that I could carry with one arm. He cost me all the
+money I had saved up for a holiday trip to Passy. I had seen his father,
+a champion St. Bernard, at a dog-show, and felt that life would be well
+worth living with such a companion; but _his_ price was five hundred
+guineas. When I saw the irresistible son, just six weeks old, and heard
+that he was only one-fiftieth of his sire's value, I felt Passy must
+wait, and became his possessor.
+
+[Illustration: PORTHOS AND HIS ATTENDANT SQUIRE.]
+
+I gave him of the best that money could buy--real milk at fivepence a
+quart, three quarts a day, I combed his fluff every morning, and washed
+him three times a week, and killed all his fleas one by one--a labour of
+love. I weighed him every Saturday, and found he increased at the rate
+of six to nine weekly; and his power of affection increased as the
+square of his weight. I christened him Porthos, because he was so big
+and fat and jolly; but in his noble puppy face and his beautiful
+pathetic eyes I already foresaw for his middle age that distinguished
+and melancholy grandeur which characterized the sublime Athos, Comte
+de la Fère.
+
+He was a joy. It was good to go to sleep at night and know he would be
+there in the morning. Whenever we took our walks abroad, everybody
+turned round to look at him and admire, and to ask if he was
+good-tempered, and what his particular breed was, and what I fed him on.
+He became a monster in size--a beautiful, playful, gracefully
+galumphing, and most affectionate monster, and I, his happy
+Frankenstein, congratulated myself on the possession of a treasure that
+would last twelve years at least, or even fourteen, with the care I
+meant to take of him. But he died of distemper when he was eleven
+months old.
+
+I do not know if little dogs cause as large griefs when they die as big
+ones; but I settled there should be no more dogs--big or little--for me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After this I took to writing verses and sending them to magazines, where
+they never appeared. They were generally about my being reminded, by a
+tune, of things that had happened a long time ago: my poetic, like my
+artistic vein, was limited.
+
+Here are the last I made, thirty years back. My only excuse for giving
+them is that they are so _singularly prophetic_.
+
+The reminding tune (an old French chime which my father used to sing)
+is very simple and touching; and the old French words run thus:
+
+     _"Orléans, Beaugency!
+     Notre Dame de Cléry!
+       Vendôme! Vendôme!
+     Quel chagrin, quel ennui
+     De compter toute la nuit
+       Les heures--Les heures!"_
+
+That is all. They are supposed to be sung by a mediaeval prisoner who
+cannot sleep; and who, to beguile the tediousness of his insomnia, sets
+any words that come into his head to the tune of the chime which marks
+the hours from a neighboring belfry. I tried to fancy that his name was
+Pasquier de la Marière, and that he was my ancestor.
+
+     THE CHIME.
+
+       _There is an old French air,
+     A little song of loneliness and grief--
+     Simple as nature, sweet beyond compare--
+       And sad--past all belief!
+
+       Nameless is he that wrote
+     The melody--but this I opine:
+     Whoever made the words was some remote
+       French ancestor of mine.
+
+       I know the dungeion deep
+     Where long he lay--and why he lay therein;
+     And all his anguish, that he could not sleep
+       For conscience of a sin._
+
+       I see his cold, hard bed;
+     I hear the chimes that jingled in his ears
+     As he pressed nightly, with that wakeful head,
+       A pillow wet with tears.
+
+       Oh, restless little chime!
+     It never changed--but rang its roundelay
+     For each dark hour of that unhappy time
+       That sighed itself away.
+
+       And ever, more and more,
+     Its burden grew of his lost self a part--
+     And mingled with his memories, and wore
+       Its way into his heart.
+
+       And there it wove the name
+     Of many a town he loved, for one dear sake,
+     Into its web of music; thus he came
+       His little song to make.
+
+       Of all that ever heard
+     And loved it for its sweetness, none but I
+     Divined the clew that, as a hidden word,
+       The notes doth underlie.
+
+       That wail from lips long dead
+     Has found its echo in this breast alone!
+     Only to me, by blood-remembrance led,
+       Is that wild story known!
+
+       And though 'tis mine, by right
+     Of treasure-trove, to rifle and lay bare--
+     A heritage of sorrow and delight
+       The world would gladly share--
+
+       Yet must I not unfold
+     For evermore, nor whisper late or soon,
+     The secret that a few slight bars thus hold
+       Imprisoned in a tune.
+
+       For when that little song
+     Goes ringing in my head, I know that he,
+     My luckless lone forefather, dust so long,
+       Relives his life in me!
+
+I sent them to ----'s Magazine, with the six French lines on at the
+which they were founded at the top. ----'s _Magazine_ published only the
+six French lines--the only lines in my handwriting that ever got into
+print. And they date from the fifteenth century!
+
+Thus was my little song lost to the world, and for a time to me. But
+long, long afterwards, I found it again, where Mr. Longfellow once found
+a song of _his_: "in the heart of a friend"--surely the sweetest bourne
+that can ever be for any song!
+
+Little did I foresee that a day was not far off when real blood
+remembrance would carry me--but that is to come.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Poetry, friendship and love having failed, I sought for consolation in
+art, and frequented the National Gallery, Marlborough House (where the
+Vernon collection was), the British Museum, the Royal Academy, and other
+exhibitions.
+
+I prostrated myself before Titian, Rembrandt, Velasquez, Veronese, Da
+Vinci, Botticelli, Signorelli--the older the better; and tried my best
+to honestly feel the greatness I knew and know to be there; but for
+want of proper training I was unable to reach those heights, and, like
+most outsiders, admired them for the wrong things, for the very beauties
+they lack--such transcendent, ineffable beauties of feature, form, and
+expression as an outsider always looks for in an old master, and often
+persuades himself he finds there--and oftener still, _pretends_ he does!
+
+I was far more sincerely moved (although I did not dare to say so) by
+some works of our own time--for instance, by the "Vale of Rest," the
+"Autumn Leaves," "The Huguenot" of young Mr. Millais--just as I found
+such poems as _Maud_ and _In Memoriam_, by Mr. Alfred Tennyson,
+infinitely more precious and dear to me than Milton's _Paradise Lost_
+and Spenser's _Faerie Queene_.
+
+Indeed, I was hopelessly modern in those days--quite an every-day young
+man; the names I held in the warmest and deepest regard were those of
+then living men and women. Darwin, Browning, and George Eliot did not,
+it is true, exist for me as yet; but Tennyson, Thackeray, Dickens,
+Millais, John Leech, George Sand, Balzac, the old Dumas, Victor Hugo,
+and Alfred de Musset!
+
+I have never beheld them in the flesh; but, like all the world, I know
+their outer aspect well, and could stand a pretty stiff examination in
+most they have ever written, drawn, or painted.
+
+Other stars of magnitude have risen since, but of the old galaxy four at
+least still shine out of the past with their ancient lustre undimmed in
+my eyes--Thackeray; dear John Leech, who still has power to make me
+laugh as I like to laugh; and for the two others it is plain that the
+Queen, the world, and I are of a like mind as to their deserts, for one
+of them is now an ornament to the British peerage, the other a baronet
+and a millionaire; only I would have made dukes of them straight off,
+with precedence over the Archbishop of Canterbury, if they would care to
+have it so.
+
+It is with a full but humble heart that I thus venture to record my long
+indebtedness, and pay this poor tribute, still fresh from the days of my
+unquestioning hero-worship. It will serve, at least, to show my reader
+(should I ever have one sufficiently interested to care) in what mental
+latitudes and longitudes I dwelt, who was destined to such singular
+experience--a kind of reference, so to speak--that he may be able to
+place me at a glance, according to the estimation in which he holds
+these famous and perhaps deathless names.
+
+It will be admitted, at least, that my tastes were normal, and shared by
+a large majority--the tastes of an every-day young man at that
+particular period of the nineteenth century--one much given to athletics
+and cold tubs, and light reading and cheap tobacco, and endowed with the
+usual discontent; the last person for whom or from whom or by whom to
+expect anything out of the common.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But the splendor of the Elgin Marbles! I understood that at
+once--perhaps because there is not so much to understand. Mere
+physically beautiful people appeal to us all, whether they be in flesh
+or marble.
+
+By some strange intuition, or natural instinct, I _knew_ that people
+ought to be built like that, before I had ever seen a single statue in
+that wondrous room. I had divined them--so completely did they realize
+an aesthetic ideal I had always felt.
+
+I had often, as I walked the London streets, peopled an imaginary world
+of my own with a few hundreds of such beings, made flesh and blood, and
+pictured them as a kind of beneficent aristocracy seven feet high, with
+minds and manners to match their physique, and set above the rest of the
+world for its good; for I found it necessary (so that my dream should
+have a point) to provide them with a foil in the shape of millions of
+such people as we meet every day. I was egotistic and self-seeking
+enough, it is true, to enroll myself among the former, and had chosen
+for my particular use and wear just such a frame as that of the Theseus,
+with, of course, the nose and hands and feet (of which time has bereft
+him) restored, and all mutilations made good.
+
+And for my mistress and companion I had duly selected no less a person
+than the Venus of Milo (no longer armless), of which Lintot possessed a
+plaster-cast, and whose beauties I had foreseen before I ever beheld
+them with the bodily eye.
+
+"Monsieur n'est pas dégoûté!" as Ibbetson would have remarked.
+
+But most of all did I pant for the music which is divine.
+
+Alas, that concerts and operas and oratorios should not be as free to
+the impecunious as the National Gallery and the British Museum--a
+privilege which is not abused!
+
+Impecunious as I was, I sometimes had pence enough to satisfy this
+craving, and discovered in time such realms of joy as I had never
+dreamed of; such monarchs as Mozart, Handel, and Beethoven, and others,
+of whom my father knew apparently so little; and yet they were more
+potent enchanters than Grétry, Hérold, and Boieldieu, whose music he
+sang so well.
+
+I discovered, moreover, that they could do more than charm--they could
+drive my weary self out of my weary soul, and for a space fill that
+weary soul with courage, resignation, and hope. No Titian, no
+Shakespeare, no Phidias could ever accomplish that--not even Mr. William
+Makepeace Thackeray or Mr. Alfred Tennyson.
+
+My sweetest recollections of this period of my life (indeed, the only
+sweet recollections) are of the music I heard, and the places where I
+heard it; it was an enchantment! With what vividness I can recall it
+all! The eager anticipation for days; the careful selection, beforehand,
+from such an _embarras de richesses_ as was duly advertised; then the
+long waiting in the street, at the doors reserved for those whose
+portion is to be the gallery. The hard-won seat aloft is reached at
+last, after a selfish but good-humored struggle up the long stone
+staircase (one is sorry for the weak, but a famished ear has no
+conscience). The gay and splendid house is crammed; the huge chandelier
+is a golden blaze; the delight of expectation is in the air, and also
+the scent of gas, and peppermint, and orange-peel, and music-loving
+humanity, whom I have discovered to be of sweeter fragrance than the
+common herd.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+The orchestra fills, one by one; instruments tune up--a familiar
+cacophony, sweet with seductive promise. The conductor takes his
+seat--applause--a hush--three taps--the baton waves once, twice,
+thrice--the eternal fountain of magic is let loose, and at the
+very first jet
+
+     "_The cares that infest the day
+     Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,
+     And as silently steal away_."
+
+Then lo! the curtain rises, and straightway we are in Seville--Seville,
+after Pentonville! Count Alma-viva, lordly, gallant, and gay beneath his
+disguise, twangs his guitar, and what sounds issue from it! For every
+instrument that was ever invented is in that guitar--the whole
+orchestra!
+
+"_Ecco ridente il cielo_....," so sings he (with the most beautiful male
+voice of his time) under Rosina's balcony; and soon Rosina's voice (the
+most beautiful female voice of hers) is heard behind her curtains--so
+girlish, so innocent, so young and light-hearted, that the eyes fill
+with involuntary tears.
+
+Thus encouraged, he warbles that his name is Lindoro, that he would fain
+espouse her; that he is not rich in the goods of this world, but gifted
+with an inordinate, inexhaustible capacity for love (just like Peter
+Ibbetson); and vows that he will always warble to her, in this wise,
+from dawn till when daylight sinks behind the mountain. But what matter
+the words?
+
+"Go on, my love, go on, _like this_!" warbles back Rosina--and no
+wonder--till the dull, despondent, commonplace heart of Peter Ibbetson
+has room for nothing else but sunny hope and love and joy! And yet it is
+all mere sound--impossible, unnatural, unreal nonsense!
+
+Or else, in a square building, decent and well-lighted enough, but not
+otherwise remarkable--the very chapel of music--four business-like
+gentlemen, in modern attire and spectacles, take their places on an
+unpretentious platform amid refined applause; and soon the still air
+vibrates to the trembling of sixteen strings--only that and
+nothing more!
+
+But in that is all Beethoven, or Schubert, or Schumann has got to say to
+us for the moment, and what a say it is! And with what consummate
+precision and perfection it is said--with what a mathematical certainty,
+and yet with what suavity, dignity, grace, and distinction!
+
+They are the four greatest players in the world, perhaps; but they
+forget themselves, and we forget them (as it is their wish we should),
+in the master whose work they interpret so reverently, that we may yearn
+with his mighty desire and thrill with his rapture and triumph, or ache
+with his heavenly pain and submit with his divine resignation.
+
+Not all the words in all the tongues that ever were--dovetail them,
+rhyme them, alliterate them, torture them as you will--can ever pierce
+to the uttermost depths of the soul of man, and let in a glimpse of the
+Infinite, as do the inarticulate tremblings of those sixteen strings.
+
+Ah, songs without words are the best!
+
+Then a gypsy-like little individual, wiry and unkempt, who looks as if
+he had spent his life listening to the voices of the night in Heaven
+knows what Lithuanian forests, with wolves and wild-boars for his
+familiars, and the wind in the trees for his teacher, seats himself at
+the great brass-bound oaken Broadwood piano-forte. And under his
+phenomenal fingers, a haunting, tender, world-sorrow, full of
+questionings--a dark mystery of moonless, starlit nature--exhales itself
+in nocturnes, in impromptus, in preludes--in mere waltzes and mazourkas
+even! But waltzes and mazourkas such as the most frivolous would never
+dream of dancing to. A capricious, charming sorrow--not too deep for
+tears, if one be at all inclined to shed them--so delicate, so fresh,
+and yet so distinguished, so ethereally civilized and worldly and
+well-bred that it has crystallized itself into a drawing-room ecstasy,
+to last forever. It seems as though what was death (or rather
+euthanasia) to him who felt it, is play for us--surely an immortal
+sorrow whose recital will never, never pall--the sorrow of Chopin.
+
+Though why Chopin should have been so sorry we cannot even guess; for
+mere sorrow's sake, perhaps; the very luxury of woe--the real sorrow
+which has no real cause (like mine in those days); and that is the best
+and cheapest kind of sorrow to make music of, after all!
+
+And this great little gypsy pianist, who plays his Chopin so well;
+evidently he has not spent his life in Lithuanian forests, but hard at
+the key-board, night and day; and he has had a better master than the
+wind in the trees--namely, Chopin himself (for it is printed in the
+programme). It was his father and mother before him, and theirs, who
+heard the voices of the night; but he remembers it all, and puts it all
+into his master's music, and makes us remember it, too.
+
+Or else behold the chorus, rising tier upon tier, and culminating in the
+giant organ. But their thunder is just hushed.
+
+Some Liliputian figure, male or female, as the case may be, rises on its
+little legs amid the great Liliputian throng, and through the sacred
+stillness there peals forth a perfect voice (by no means Liliputian). It
+bids us "Rest in the Lord," or else it tells us that "He was despised
+and rejected of men"; but, again, what matter the words? They are almost
+a hinderance, beautiful though they be.
+
+The hardened soul melts at the tones of the singer, at the unspeakable
+pathos of the sounds that cannot lie; one almost believes--one believes
+at least in the belief of others. At last one understands, and is purged
+of intolerance and cynical contempt, and would kneel with the rest, in
+sheer human sympathy!
+
+Oh, wretched outsider that one is (if it all be true)--one whose
+heart, so hopelessly impervious to the written word, so helplessly
+callous to the spoken message, can be reached only by the organized
+vibrations of a trained larynx, a metal pipe, a reed, a
+fiddle-string--by invisible, impalpable, incomprehensible little
+air-waves in mathematical combination, that beat against a tiny drum at
+the back of one's ear. And these mathematical combinations and the laws
+that govern them have existed forever, before Moses, before Pan, long
+before either a larynx or a tympanum had been evolved. They
+are absolute!
+
+Oh, mystery of mysteries!
+
+Euterpe, Muse of Muses, what a personage hast thou become since first
+thou sattest for thy likeness (with that ridiculous lyre in thy untaught
+hands) to some Greek who could carve so much better than thou
+couldst play!
+
+Four strings; but not the fingerable strings of Stradivarius. Nay, I beg
+thy pardon--five; for thy scale was pentatonic, I believe. Orpheus
+himself had no better, it is true. It was with just such an instrument
+that he all but charmed his Eurydice out of Hades. But, alas, she went
+back; on second thoughts, she liked Hades best!
+
+Couldst thou fire and madden and wring the heart, and then melt and
+console and charm it into the peace that passeth all understanding, with
+those poor five rudimentary notes, and naught between?
+
+Couldst thou, out of those five sounds of fixed, unalterable pitch,
+make, not a sixth sound, but a star?
+
+What were they, those five sounds? "Do, re, mi, fa, sol?" What must thy
+songs without words have been, if thou didst ever make any?
+
+Thou wast in very deed a bread-and-butter miss in those days, Euterpe,
+for all that thy eight twin sisters were already grown up, and out; and
+now thou toppest them all by half a head, at least. "Tu leur mangerais
+des petits pâtés sur la tête--comme Madame Seraskier!"
+
+And oh, how thou beatest them all for beauty! In _my_ estimation, at
+least--like--like Madame Seraskier again!
+
+And hast thou done growing at last?
+
+Nay, indeed; thou art not even yet a bread-and-butter miss--thou art but
+a sweet baby, one year old, and seven feet high, tottering midway
+between some blessed heaven thou hast only just left and the dull home
+of us poor mortals.
+
+The sweet one-year-old baby of our kin puts its hands upon our knees and
+looks up into our eyes with eyes full of unutterable meaning. It has so
+much to say! It can only say "ga-ga" and "ba-ba"; but with oh! how
+searching a voice, how touching a look--that is, if one is fond of
+babies! We are moved to the very core; we want to understand, for it
+concerns us all; we were once like that ourselves--the individual and
+the race--but for the life of us we cannot _remember_.
+
+And what canst _thou_ say to us yet, Euterpe, but thy "ga-ga" and thy
+"ba-ba," the inarticulate sweetness whereof we feel and cannot
+comprehend? But how beautiful it is--and what a look thou hast, and
+what a voice--that is, if one is fond of music!
+
+     "Je suis las des mois--je suis d'entendre
+        Ce qui peut mentir;
+      J'aime mieux les sons, qu'au lieu de comprendre
+        je n'ai qu'à sentir."
+
+Next day I would buy or beg or borrow the music that had filled me with
+such emotion and delight, and take it home to my little square piano,
+and try to finger it all out for myself. But I had begun too late
+in life.
+
+To sit, longing and helpless, before an instrument one cannot play, with
+a lovely score one cannot read! Even Tantalus was spared such an
+ordeal as that.
+
+It seemed hard that my dear father and mother, so accomplished in music
+themselves, should not even have taught me the musical notes, at an age
+when it was so easy to learn them; and thus have made me free of that
+wonder-world of sound in which I took such an extraordinary delight, and
+might have achieved distinction--perhaps.
+
+But no, my father had dedicated me to the Goddess of Science from before
+my very birth; that I might some day be better equipped than he for the
+pursuit, capture, and utilization of Nature's sterner secrets. There
+must be no dallying with light Muses. Alas! I have fallen between
+two stools!
+
+And thus, Euterpe absent, her enchantment would pass away; her
+handwriting was before me, but I had not learned how to decipher it, and
+my weary self would creep back into its old prison--my soul.
+
+[Illustration: (no caption)]
+
+Self-sickness-_selbstschmerz, le mal do soi!_ What a disease! It is not
+to be found in any dictionary, medical or otherwise.
+
+I ought to have been whipped for it, I know; but nobody was big enough,
+or kind enough, to whip me!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At length there came a day when that weary, weak, and most ridiculous
+self of mine was driven out--and exorcised for good--by a still more
+potent enchanter than even Handel or Beethoven or Schubert!
+
+There was a certain Lord Cray, for whom Lintot had built some laborers'
+cottages in Hertfordshire, and I sometimes went there to superintend the
+workmen. When the cottages were finished, Lord Cray and his wife (a very
+charming, middle-aged lady) came to see them, and were much pleased with
+all that had been done, and also seemed to be much interested in _me_,
+of all people in the world! and a few days later I received a card of
+invitation to their house in town for a concert.
+
+At first I felt much too shy to go; but Mr. Lintot insisted that it was
+my duty to do so, as it might lead to business; so that when the night
+came, I screwed up my courage to the sticking-place, and went.
+
+That evening was all enchantment, or would have been but for the
+somewhat painful feeling that I was such an outsider.
+
+But I was always well content to be the least observed of all observers,
+and felt happy in the security that here I should at least be left
+alone; that no perfect stranger would attempt to put me at my ease by
+making me the butt of his friendly and familiar banter; that no gartered
+duke, or belted earl (I have no doubt they were as plentiful there as
+blackberries, though they did not wear their insignia) would pat me on
+the back and ask me if I would sooner look a bigger fool than I was, or
+be a bigger fool than I looked. (I have not found a repartee for that
+insidious question yet; that is why it rankles so.)
+
+I had always heard that the English were a stiff people. There seemed to
+be no stiffness at Lady Cray's; nor was there any facetiousness; it put
+one at one's ease merely to look at them. They were mostly big, and
+strong, and healthy, and quiet, and good-humored, with soft and
+pleasantly-modulated voices. The large, well-lighted rooms were neither
+hot nor cold; there were beautiful pictures on the walls, and an
+exquisite scent of flowers came from an immense conservatory. I had
+never been to such a gathering before; all was new and a surprise, and
+very much to my taste, I confess. It was my first glimpse of "Society;"
+and last--but one!
+
+There were crowds of people--but no crowd; everybody seemed to know
+everybody else quite intimately, and to resume conversations begun an
+hour ago somewhere else.
+
+Presently these conversations were hushed, and Grisi and Mario sang! It
+was as much as I could do to restrain my enthusiasm and delight. I could
+have shouted out loud--I could almost have sung myself!
+
+In the midst of the applause that followed that heavenly duet, a lady
+and gentleman came into the room, and at the sight of that lady a new
+interest came into my life; and all the old half-forgotten sensations of
+mute pain and rapture that the beauty of Madame Seraskier used to make
+me feel as a child were revived once more; but with a depth and
+intensity, in comparison, that were as a strong man's barytone to a
+small boy's treble.
+
+It was the quick, sharp, cruel blow, the _coup de poignard_, that beauty
+of the most obvious, yet subtle, consummate, and highly-organized order
+can deal to a thoroughly prepared victim.
+
+And what a thoroughly prepared victim was I! A poor, shy,
+over-susceptible, virginal savage--Uncas, the son of Chingachgook,
+astray for the first time in a fashionable London drawing-room.
+
+A chaste mediaeval knight, born out of his due time, ascetic both from
+reverence and disgust, to whom woman in the abstract was the one
+religion; in the concrete, the cause of fifty disenchantments a day!
+
+A lusty, love-famished, warm-blooded pagan, stranded in the middle of
+the nineteenth century; in whom some strange inherited instinct had
+planted a definite, complete, and elaborately-finished conception of
+what the ever-beloved shape of woman should be--from the way the hair
+should grow on her brow and her temples and the nape of her neck, down
+to the very rhythm that should regulate the length and curve and
+position of every single individual toe! and who had found, to his pride
+and delight, that his preconceived ideal was as near to that of Phidias
+as if he had lived in the time of Pericles and Aspasia.
+
+For such was this poor scribe, and such he had been from a child, until
+this beautiful lady first swam into his ken.
+
+She was so tall that her eyes seemed almost on a level with mine, but
+she moved with the alert lightness and grace of a small person. Her
+thick, heavy hair was of a dark coppery brown, her complexion clear and
+pale, her eyebrows and eyelashes black, her eyes a light bluish gray.
+Her nose was short and sharp, and rather tilted at the tip, and her red
+mouth large and very mobile; and here, deviating from my preconceived
+ideal, she showed me how tame a preconceived ideal can be. Her perfect
+head was small, and round her long, thick throat two slight creases went
+parallel, to make what French sculptors call _le collier de Vénus;_ the
+skin of her neck was like a white camellia, and slender and
+square-shouldered as she was, she did not show a bone. She was that
+beautiful type the French define as _la fausse maigre_, which does not
+mean a "false, thin woman."
+
+She seemed both thoughtful and mirthful at once, and genial as I had
+never seen any one genial before--a person to confide in, to tell all
+one's troubles to, without even an introduction! When she laughed she
+showed both top and bottom teeth, which were perfect, and her eyes
+nearly closed, so that they could no longer be seen for the thick lashes
+that fringed both upper and under eyelids; at which time the expression
+of her face was so keenly, cruelly sweet that it went through one like a
+knife. And then the laugh would suddenly cease, her full lips would
+meet, and her eyes beam out again like two mild gray suns, benevolently
+humorous and kindly inquisitive, and full of interest in everything and
+everybody around her. But there--I cannot describe her any more than one
+can describe a beautiful tune.
+
+Out of those magnificent orbs kindness, kindness, kindness was shed like
+a balm; and after a while, by chance, that balm was shed for a few
+moments on me, to my sweet but terrible confusion. Then I saw that she
+asked my hostess who I was, and received the answer; on which she shed
+her balm on me for one moment more, and dismissed me from her thoughts.
+
+Madame Grisi sang again--Desdemona's song from _Othello_--and the
+beautiful lady thanked the divine singer, whom she seemed to know quite
+intimately; and I thought her thanks--Italian thanks--even diviner than
+the song--not that I could quite understand them or even hear them
+well--I was too far; but she thanked with eyes and hands and shoulders--
+slight, happy movements--as well as words; surely the sweetest and
+sincerest words ever spoken.
+
+She was much surrounded and made up to--evidently a person of great
+importance; and I ventured to ask another shy man standing in my corner
+who she was, and he answered--
+
+"The Duchess of Towers."
+
+She did not stay long, and when she departed all turned dull and
+commonplace that had seemed so bright before she came; and seeing that
+it was not necessary to bid my hostess good-night and thank her for a
+pleasant evening, as we did in Pentonville, I got myself out of the
+house and walked back to my lodgings an altered man.
+
+I should probably never meet that lovely young duchess again, and
+certainly never know her; but her shaft had gone straight and true into
+my very heart, and I felt how well barbed it was, beyond all possibility
+of its ever being torn out of that blessed wound; might this never heal;
+might it bleed on forever!
+
+She would be an ideal in my lonely life, to live up to in thought and
+word and deed. An instinct which I felt to be infallible told me she was
+as good as she was fair--
+
+    _"Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, the love of
+    love."_
+
+[Illustration: THE DUCHESS OP TOWERS.]
+
+And just as Madame Seraskier's image was fading away, this new star had
+arisen to guide me by its light, though seen but for a moment; breaking
+once, through a parted cloud, I knew in which portion of the heavens it
+dwelt and shone apart, among the fairest constellations; and ever after
+turned my face that way. Nevermore in my life would I do or say or think
+a mean thing, or an impure, or an unkind one, if I could help it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Next day, as we walked to the Foundling Hospital for divine service,
+Mrs. Lintot severely deigned--under protest, as it were--to
+cross-examine me on the adventures of the evening.
+
+I did not mention the Duchess of Towers, nor was I able to describe the
+different ladies' dresses; but I described everything else in a manner I
+thought calculated to interest her deeply--the flowers, the splendid
+pictures and curtains and cabinets, the beautiful music, the many lords
+and ladies gay.
+
+She disapproved of them all.
+
+Existence on such an opulent scale was unconducive to any qualities of
+real sterling value, either moral or intellectual. Give _her_, for one,
+plain living and high thinking!
+
+"By-the-way," she asked, "what kind of supper did they give you?
+Something extremely _recherché_, I have no doubt. Ortolans,
+nightingales' tongues, pearls dissolved in wine?"
+
+Candor obliged me to confess there had been no supper, or that if there
+had I had managed to miss it. I suggested that perhaps everybody had
+dined late; and all the pearls, I told her, were on the ladies' necks
+and in their hair; and not feeling hungry, I could not wish them
+anywhere else; and the nightingales' tongues were in their throats to
+sing heavenly Italian duets with.
+
+"And they call that hospitality!" exclaimed Lintot, who loved his
+supper; and then, as he was fond of summing up and laying down the law
+when once his wife had given him the lead, he did so to the effect that
+though the great were all very well in their superficial way, and might
+possess many external charms for each other, and for all who were so
+deplorably weak as to fall within the sphere of their attraction, there
+was a gulf between the likes of them and the likes of us, which it would
+be better not to try and bridge if one wished to preserve one's
+independence and one's self-respect; unless, of course, it led to
+business; and this, he feared, it would never do with me.
+
+"They take you up one day and they drop you like a 'ot potato the next;
+and, moreover, my dear Peter," he concluded, affectionately linking his
+arm in mine, as was often his way when we walked together (although he
+was twelve good inches shorter than myself), "inequality of social
+condition is a bar to any real intimacy. It is something like disparity
+of physical stature. One can walk arm in arm only with a man of about
+one's own size."
+
+This summing up seemed so judicious, so incontrovertible, that feeling
+quite deplorably weak enough to fall within the sphere of Lady Cray's
+attraction if I saw much of her, and thereby losing my self-respect, I
+was deplorably weak enough not to leave a card on her after the happy
+evening I had spent at her house.
+
+Snob that I was, I dropped her--"like a 'ot potato" for fear of her
+dropping me.
+
+Besides which I had on my conscience a guilty, snobby feeling that in
+merely external charms at least these fine people were more to my taste
+than the charmed circle of my kind old friends the Lintots, however
+inferior they might be to these (for all that I knew) in sterling
+qualities of the heart and head--just as I found the outer aspect of
+Park Lane and Piccadilly more attractive than that of Pentonville,
+though possibly the latter may have been the more wholesome for such as
+I to live in.
+
+But people who can get Mario and Grisi to come and sing for them (and
+the Duchess of Towers to come and listen); people whose walls are
+covered with beautiful pictures; people for whom the smooth and
+harmonious ordering of all the little external things of social life has
+become a habit and a profession--such people are not to be dropped
+without a pang.
+
+So with a pang I went back to my usual round as though nothing had
+happened; but night and day the face of the Duchess of Towers was ever
+present to me, like a fixed idea that dominates a life.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On reading and rereading these past pages, I find that I have been
+unpardonably egotistic, unconscionably prolix and diffuse; and with such
+small beer to chronicle!
+
+And yet I feel that if I strike out this, I must also strike out that;
+which would lead to my striking out all, in sheer discouragement; and I
+have a tale to tell which is more than worth the telling!
+
+Once having got into the way of it, I suppose, I must have found the
+temptation to talk about myself irresistible.
+
+It is evidently a habit easy to acquire, even in old age--perhaps
+especially in old age, for it has never been my habit through life. I
+would sooner have talked to you about yourself, reader, or about you to
+somebody else--your friend, or even your enemy; or about them to you.
+
+But, indeed, at present, and until I die, I am without a soul to talk to
+about anybody or anything worth speaking of, so that most of my talking
+is done in pen and ink--a one-sided conversation, O patient reader, with
+yourself. I am the most lonely old man in the world, although perhaps
+the happiest.
+
+Still, it is not always amusing where I live, cheerfully awaiting my
+translation to another sphere.
+
+There is the good chaplain, it is true, and the good priest; who talk to
+me about myself a little too much, methinks; and the doctor, who talks
+to me about the priest and the chaplain, which is better. He does not
+seem to like them. He is a very witty man.
+
+But, my brother maniacs!
+
+They are lamentably _comme tout le monde_, after all. They are only
+interesting when the mad fit seizes them. When free from their awful
+complaint they are for the most part very common mortals: conventional
+Philistines, dull dogs like myself, and dull dogs do not like
+each other.
+
+Two of the most sensible (one a forger, the other a kleptomaniac on an
+important scale) are friends of mine. They are fairly well educated,
+respectable city men, clean, solemn, stodgy, punctilious, and resigned,
+but they are both unhappy; not because they are cursed with the double
+brand of madness and crime, and have forfeited their freedom in
+consequence; but because they find there are so few "ladies and
+gentlemen" in a criminal lunatic asylum, and they have always been used
+to "the society of ladies and gentlemen." Were it not for this, they
+would be well content to live here. And each is in the habit of
+confiding to me that he considers the other a very high-minded,
+trustworthy fellow, and all that, but not altogether "quite a
+gentleman." I do not know what they consider me; they probably confide
+that to each other.
+
+Can anything be less odd, less eccentric or interesting?
+
+Another, when quite sane, speaks English with a French accent and
+demonstrative French gestures, and laments the lost glories of the old
+French régime, and affects to forget the simplest English words. He
+doesn't know a word of French, however. But when his madness comes on,
+and he is put into a strait-waistcoat, all his English comes back, and
+very strong, fluent, idiomatic English it is, of the cockneyest kind,
+with all its "h's" duly transposed.
+
+Another (the most unpleasant and ugliest person here) has chosen me for
+the confidant of his past amours; he gives me the names and dates and
+all. The less I listen the more he confides. He makes me sick. What can
+I do to prevent his believing that I believe him? I am tired of killing
+people for lying about women. If I call him a liar and a cad, it may
+wake in him Heaven knows what dormant frenzy--for I am quite in the dark
+as to the nature of his mental infirmity.
+
+Another, a weak but amiable and well-intentioned youth, tries to think
+that he is passionately fond of music; but he is so exclusive, if you
+please, that he can only endure Bach and Beethoven, and when he hears
+Mendelssohn or Chopin, is obliged to leave the room. If I want to please
+him I whistle "Le Bon Roi Dagobert," and tell him it is the _motif_ of
+one of Bach's fugues; and to get rid of him I whistle it again and tell
+him it is one of Chopin's impromptus. What his madness is I can never be
+quite sure, for he is very close, but have heard that he is fond of
+roasting cats alive; and that the mere sight of a cat is enough to rouse
+his terrible propensity, and drive all wholesome, innocent, harmless,
+natural affectation out of his head.
+
+There is a painter here who (like others one has met outside) believes
+himself the one living painter worthy of the name. Indeed, he has
+forgotten the names of all the others, and can only despise and abuse
+them in the lump. He triumphantly shows you his own work, which consists
+of just the kind of crude, half-clever, irresponsible, impressionist
+daubs you would expect from an amateur who talks in that way; and you
+wonder why on earth he should be in a lunatic asylum, of all places in
+the world. And (just as would happen outside, again) some of his
+fellow-sufferers take him at his own valuation and believe him a great
+genius; some of them want to kick him for an impudent impostor (but that
+he is so small); and the majority do not care.
+
+His mania is arson, poor fellow; and when the terrible wish comes over
+him to set the place on fire he forgets his artistic conceit, and his
+mean, weak, silly face becomes almost grand.
+
+And with the female inmates it is just the same. There is a lady who has
+spent twenty years of her life here. Her father was a small country
+doctor, called Snogget; her husband an obscure, hard-working curate; and
+she is absolutely normal, common-place, and even vulgar. For her hobby
+is to discourse of well-born and titled people and county families, with
+whom (and with no others) it has always been her hope and desire to mix;
+and is still, though her hair is nearly white, and she is still here.
+She thinks and talks and cares about nothing else but "smart people,"
+and has conceived a very warm regard for me, on account of
+Lieutenant-colonel Ibbetson, of Ibbetson Hall, Hopshire; not because I
+killed him and was sentenced to be hanged for it, or because he was a
+greater criminal than I (all of which is interesting enough); but
+because he was my relative, and that through him I must be distantly
+connected, she thinks, with the Ibbetsons of Lechmere--whoever they may
+be, and whom neither she nor I have ever met (indeed, I had never heard
+of them), but whose family history she knows almost by heart. What can
+be tamer, duller, more prosaic, more sordidly humdrum, more hopelessly
+sane, more characteristic of common, under-bred, provincial
+feminine cackle?
+
+And yet this woman, in a fit of conjugal jealousy, murdered her own
+children; and her father went mad in consequence, and her husband cut
+his throat.
+
+In fact, during their lucid intervals it would never enter one's mind
+that they were mad at all, they are so absolutely like the people one
+meets every day in the world--such narrow-minded idiots, such deadly
+bores! One might as well be back in Pentonville or Hopshire again, or
+live in Passionate Brompton (as I am told it is called); or even in
+Belgravia, for that matter!
+
+For we have a young lord and a middle-aged baronet--a shocking pair, who
+should not be allowed to live; but for family influence they would be
+doing their twenty years' penal servitude in jail, instead of living
+comfortably sequestered here. Like Ouida's high-born heroes, they "stick
+to their order," and do not mingle with the rest of us. They ignore us
+so completely that we cannot help looking up to them in spite of their
+vices--just as we should do outside.
+
+And we, of the middle class, we stick to our order, too, and do not
+mingle with the small shop-keepers--who do not mingle with the laborers,
+artisans, and mechanics--who (alas, for them!) have nobody to look down
+upon but each other--but they do not; and are the best-bred people in
+the place.
+
+Such are we! It is only when our madness is upon us that we cease to be
+commonplace, and wax tragical and great, or else original and grotesque
+and humorous, with that true deep humor that compels both our laughter
+and our tears, and leaves us older, sadder, and wiser than it found us.
+
+"_Sunt lacrimae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt_."
+
+(So much, if little more, can I recall of the benign Virgil.)
+
+And now to my small beer again, which will have more of a head to it
+henceforward.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thus did I pursue my solitary way, like Bryant's Water-fowl, only with a
+less definite purpose before me--till at last there dawned for me an
+ever-memorable Saturday in June.
+
+I had again saved up enough money to carry my long longed-for journey to
+Paris into execution. The _Seine's_ boiler got up its steam, the
+_Seine's_ white awning was put up for me as well as others; and on a
+beautiful cloudless English morning I stood by the man at the wheel, and
+saw St. Paul's and London Bridge and the Tower fade out of sight; with
+what hope and joy I cannot describe. I almost forgot that I was me!
+
+And next morning (a beautiful French morning) how I exulted as I went up
+the Champs Elysées and passed under the familiar Arc de Triomphe on my
+way to the Rue de la Pompe, Passy, and heard all around the familiar
+tongue that I still knew so well, and rebreathed the long-lost and
+half-forgotten, but now keenly remembered, fragrance of the _genius
+loci_; that vague, light, indescribable, almost imperceptible scent of a
+place, that is so heavenly laden with the past for those who have lived
+there long ago--the most subtly intoxicating ether that can be!
+
+When I came to the meeting of the Rue de la Tour and the Rue de la
+Pompe, and, looking in at the grocer's shop at the corner, I recognized
+the handsome mustachioed groceress, Madame Liard (whose mustache twelve
+prosperous years had turned gray), I was almost faint with emotion. Had
+any youth been ever so moved by that face before?
+
+There, behind the window (which was now of plate-glass), and among
+splendid Napoleonic wares of a later day, were the same old India-rubber
+balls in colored net-work; the same quivering lumps of fresh paste in
+brown paper, that looked so cool and tempting; the same three-sou boxes
+of water-colors (now marked seventy-five centimes), of which I had
+consumed so many in the service of Mimsey Seraskier! I went in and
+bought one, and resmelt with delight the smell of all my by-gone
+dealings there, and received her familiar sounding--
+
+"Merci, monsieur! faudrait-il autre chose?" as if it had been a
+blessing; but I was too shy to throw myself into her arms and tell her
+that I was the "lone, wandering, but not lost" Gogo Pasquier. She might
+have said--
+
+"Eh bien, et après?"
+
+The day had begun well.
+
+Like an epicure, I deliberated whether I should walk to the old gate in
+the Rue de la Pompe, and up the avenue and back to our old garden, or
+make my way round to the gap in the park hedge that we had worn of old
+by our frequent passage in and out, to and from the Bois de Boulogne.
+
+I chose the latter as, on the whole, the more promising in exquisite
+gradations of delight.
+
+The gap in the park hedge, indeed! The park hedge had disappeared, the
+very park itself was gone, cut up, demolished, all parcelled out into
+small gardens, with trim white villas, except where a railway ran
+through a deep cutting in the chalk. A train actually roared and panted
+by, and choked me with its filthy steam as I looked round in
+stupefaction on the ruins of my long-cherished hope.
+
+If that train had run over me and I had survived it, it could not have
+given me a greater shock; it all seemed too cruel and brutal an outrage.
+
+A winding carriage-road had been pierced through the very heart of the
+wilderness; and on this, neatly-paled little brand-new gardens abutted,
+and in these I would recognize, here and there, an old friend in the
+shape of some well-remembered tree that I had often climbed as a boy,
+and which had been left standing out of so many, but so changed by the
+loss of its old surroundings that it had a tame, caged, transplanted
+look--almost apologetic, and as if ashamed of being found out at last!
+
+Nothing else remained. Little hills and cliffs and valleys and
+chalk-pits that had once seemed big had been levelled up, or away, and I
+lost my bearings altogether, and felt a strange, creeping chill of
+blankness and bereavement.
+
+But how about the avenue and my old home? I hastened back to the Rue de
+la Pompe with the quick step of aroused anxiety. The avenue was
+gone--blocked within a dozen yards of the gate by a huge brick building
+covered with newly-painted trellis-work! My old house was no more, but
+in its place a much larger and smarter edifice of sculptured stone. The
+old gate at least had not disappeared, nor the porter's lodge; and I
+feasted my sorrowful eyes on these poor remains, that looked snubbed
+and shabby and out of place in the midst of all this new splendor.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Presently a smart concierge, with a beautiful pink ribboned cap, came
+out and stared at me for a while, and inquired if monsieur
+desired anything.
+
+I could not speak.
+
+"Est-ce que monsieur est indisposé? Cette chaleur! Monsieur ne parle pas
+le Français, peut-être?"
+
+When I found my tongue I explained to her that I had once lived there in
+a modest house overlooking the street, but which had been replaced by
+this much more palatial abode.
+
+"O, oui, monsieur--on a balayé tout ça!" she replied.
+
+"Balayé!" What an expression for _me_ to hear!
+
+And she explained how the changes had taken place, and how valuable the
+property had become. She showed me a small plot of garden, a fragment of
+my old garden, that still remained, and where the old apple-tree might
+still have been, but that it had been sawed away. I saw the stump; that
+did duty for a rustic table.
+
+Presently, looking over a new wall, I saw another small garden,
+and in it the ruins of the old shed where I had found the toy
+wheelbarrow--soon to disappear, as they were building there too.
+
+I asked after all the people I could think of, beginning with those of
+least interest--the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker.
+
+Some were dead; some had retired and had left their "commerce" to their
+children and children-in-law. Three different school-masters had kept
+the school since I had left. Thank Heaven, there was still the
+school--much altered, it is true. I had forgotten to look for it.
+
+[Illustration: THE OLD APPLE-TREE.]
+
+She had no remembrance of my name, or the Seraskiers'--I asked, with a
+beating heart. We had left no trace. Twelve short years had effaced all
+memory of us! But she told me that a gentleman, _décoré, mais tombé en
+enfance_, lived at a _maison de santé_ in the Chaussée de la Muette,
+close by, and that his name was le Major Duquesnois; and thither I
+went, after rewarding and warmly thanking her.
+
+I inquired for le Major Duquesnois, and I was told he was out for a
+walk, and I soon found him, much aged and bent, and leaning on the arm
+of a Sister of Charity. I was so touched that I had to pass him two or
+three times before I could speak. He was so small--so pathetically small!
+
+[Illustration: M. LE MAJOR.]
+
+It was a long time before I could give him an idea of who I was--Gogo
+Pasquier!
+
+Then after a while he seemed to recall the past a little.
+
+"Ha, ha! Gogo--gentil petit Gogo!--oui--oui--l'exercice? Portez ...
+arrrmes! arrmes ... bras? Et Mimsé? bonne petite Mimsé! toujours mal
+à la tête?"
+
+He could just remember Madame Seraskier; and repeated her name several
+times and said, "Ah! elle était bien belle, Madame Seraskier!"
+
+In the old days of fairy-tale telling, when he used to get tired and I
+still wanted him to go on, he had arranged that if, in the course of the
+story, he suddenly brought in the word "Cric," and I failed to
+immediately answer "Crac," the story would be put off till our next walk
+(to be continued in our next!) and he was so ingenious in the way he
+brought in the terrible word that I often fell into the trap, and had to
+forego my delight for that afternoon.
+
+I suddenly thought of saying "Cric!" and he immediately said "Crac!" and
+laughed in a touching, senile way--"Cric!--Crac! c'est bien ça!" and
+then he became quite serious and said--
+
+"Et la suite au prochain numéro!"
+
+After this he began to cough, and the good Sister said--
+
+"Je crains que monsieur ne le fatigue un peu!"
+
+So I had to bid him good-bye; and after I had squeezed and kissed his
+hand, he made me a most courtly bow, as though I had been a
+complete stranger.
+
+I rushed away, tossing up my arms like a madman in my pity and sorrow
+for my dear old friend, and my general regret and disenchantment. I
+made for the Bois de Boulogne, there to find, instead of the old
+rabbit-and-roebuck-haunted thickets and ferneries and impenetrable
+growth, a huge artificial lake, with row-boats and skiffs, and a rockery
+that would have held its own in Rosherville gardens. And on the way
+thither, near the iron gates in the fortifications, whom should I meet
+but one of my friends the couriers, on his way from St. Cloud to the
+Tuileries! There he rode with his arms jogging up and down, and his low
+glazed hat, and his immense jack-boots, just the same as ever, never
+rising in his stirrups, as his horse trotted to the jingle of the sweet
+little chime round its neck.
+
+[Illustration: GREEN AND GOLD]
+
+Alas! his coat was no longer the innocent, unsophisticated blue and
+silver livery of the bourgeois king, but the hateful green and gold of
+another régime.
+
+Farther on the Mare d'Auteuil itself had suffered change and become
+respectable--imperially respectable. No more frogs or newts or
+water-beetles, I felt sure; but gold and silver fish in vulgar
+Napoleonic profusion.
+
+No words that I can find would give any idea of the sadness and longing
+that filled me as I trod once more that sunlit grassy brink--the goal of
+my fond ambition for twelve long years.
+
+It was Sunday, and many people were about--many children, in their best
+Sunday clothes and on their best behavior, discreetly throwing crumbs to
+the fish. A new generation, much quieter and better dressed than my
+cousins and I, who had once so filled the solitude with the splashing of
+our nets, and the excited din of our English voices.
+
+As I sat down on a bench by the old willow (where the rat lived), and
+gazed and gazed, it almost surprised me that the very intensity of my
+desire did not of itself suffice to call up the old familiar faces and
+forms, and conjure away these modern intruders. The power to do this
+seemed almost within my reach; I willed and willed and willed with all
+my might, but in vain; I could not cheat my sight or hearing for a
+moment. There they remained, unconscious and undisturbed, those happy,
+well-mannered, well-appointed little French people, and fed the gold and
+silver fish; and there, with an aching heart, I left them.
+
+Oh, surely, surely, I cried to myself, we ought to find some means of
+possessing the past more fully and completely than we do. Life is not
+worth living for many of us if a want so desperate and yet so natural
+can never be satisfied. Memory is but a poor, rudimentary thing that we
+had better be without, if it can only lead us to the verge of
+consummation like this, and madden us with a desire it cannot slake. The
+touch of a vanished hand, the sound of a voice that is still, the tender
+grace of a day that is dead, should be ours forever, at out beck and
+call, by some exquisite and quite conceivable illusion of the senses.
+
+Alas! alas! I have hardly the hope of ever meeting my beloved ones again
+in another life. Oh, to meet their too dimly remembered forms in _this_,
+just as they once were, by some trick of my own brain! To see them with
+the eye, and hear them with the ear, and tread with them the old
+obliterated ways as in a waking dream! It would be well worth going mad
+to become such a self-conjurer as that.
+
+Thus musing sadly, I reached St. Cloud, and _that_, at least, and the
+Boulogne that led me to it, had not been very perceptibly altered, and
+looked as though I had only left them a week ago. The sweet aspect from
+the bridge, on either side and beyond, filled me with the old
+enchantment. There, at least, the glory had not departed.
+
+I hastened through the gilded gates and up the broad walk to the grand
+cascade. There, among the lovely wreathed urns and jars of geranium,
+still sat or reclined or gesticulated, the old, unalterable gods; there
+squatted the grimly genial monsters in granite and marble and bronze,
+still spouting their endless gallons for the delectation of hot Parisian
+eyes. Unchanged, and to all appearance unchangeable (save that they were
+not nearly so big as I had imagined), their cold, smooth, ironical
+patience shamed and braced me into better cheer. Beautiful, hideous,
+whatever you please, they seemed to revel in the very sense of their
+insensibility of their eternal stability--their stony scorn of time and
+wind and weather, and the peevish, weak-kneed, short-lived discontent of
+man. It was good to fondly pat them on the back once more--when one
+could reach them--and cling to them for a little while, after all the
+dust and drift and ruin I had been tramping through all day.
+
+Indeed, they woke in me a healthy craving for all but forgotten earthly
+joys--even for wretched meat and drink--so I went and ordered a
+sumptuous repast at the Tête Noire--a brand-new Tête Noire, alas! quite
+white, all in stone and stucco, and without a history!
+
+It was a beautiful sunset. Waiting for my dinner, I gazed out of the
+first-floor window, and found balm for my disappointed and regretful
+spirit in all that democratic joyousness of French Sunday life. I had
+seen it over and over again just like that in the old days; _this_, at
+least, was like coming back home to something I had known and loved.
+
+The cafés on the little "Place" between the bridge and the park were
+full to overflowing. People chatting over their _consommations_ sat
+right out, almost into the middle of the square, so thickly packed that
+there was scarcely room for the busy, lively, white-aproned waiters to
+move between them. The air was full of the scent of trodden grass and
+macaroons and French tobacco, blown from the park; of gay French
+laughter and the music of _mirlitons_; of a light dusty haze, shot with
+purple and gold by the setting sun. The river, alive with boats and
+canoes, repeated the glory of the sky, and the well-remembered,
+thickly-wooded hills rose before me, culminating in the Lanterne
+de Diogène.
+
+I could have threaded all that maze of trees blindfolded.
+
+Two Roman pifferari came on to the Place and began to play an
+extraordinary and most exciting melody that almost drew me out of the
+window; it seemed to have no particular form, no beginning or middle or
+end; it went soaring higher and higher, like the song of a lark, with
+never a pause for breath, to the time of a maddening jig--a tarantella,
+perhaps--always on the strain and stress, always getting nearer and
+nearer to some shrill climax of ecstasy quite high up and away, beyond
+the scope of earthly music; while the persistent drone kept buzzing of
+the earth and the impossibility to escape. All so gay, so sad, there is
+no name for it!
+
+Two little deformed and discarded-looking dwarfs, beggars, brother and
+sister, with large toothless gaps for mouths and no upper lip, began to
+dance; and the crowd laughed and applauded. Higher and higher, nearer
+and nearer to the impossible, rose the quick, piercing notes of the
+piffero. Heaven seemed almost within reach--the nirvana of music after
+its quick madness--the region of the ultra-treble that lies beyond
+the ken of ordinary human ears!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+A carriage and four, with postilions and "guides," came clattering
+royally down the road from the palace, and dispersed the crowd as it
+bowled on its way to the bridge. In it were two ladies and two
+gentlemen. One of the ladies was the young Empress of the French; the
+other looked up at my window--for a moment, as in a soft flash of summer
+lightning, her face seemed ablaze with friendly recognition--with a
+sweet glance of kindness and interest and surprise--a glance that
+pierced me like a sudden shaft of light from heaven.
+
+It was the Duchess of Towers!
+
+I felt as though the bagpipes had been leading up to this! In a moment
+more the carriage was out of sight, the sun had quite gone down, the
+pifferari had ceased to play and were walking round with the hat, and
+all was over.
+
+I dined, and made my way back to Paris on foot through the Bois de
+Boulogne, and by the Mare d'Auteuil, and saw my old friend the water-rat
+swim across it, trailing the gleam of his wake after him like a silver
+comet's tail.
+
+"Allons-nous-en, gens de la nous!
+Allons-nous-en chacun chez nous!"
+
+So sang a festive wedding-party as it went merrily
+arm in arm through the long high street of Passy,
+with a gleeful trust that would have filled the heart
+with envy but for sad experience of the vanity of
+human wishes.
+
+_Chacun chez nous!_ How charming it sounds!
+
+Was each so sure that when he reached his home
+he would find his heart's desire? Was the bridegroom
+himself so very sure?
+
+[Illustration: THE OLD WATER-RAT.]
+
+The heart's desire--the heart's regret! I flattered
+myself that I had pretty well sounded the uttermost
+depths of both on that eventful Sunday!
+
+
+
+
+Part Four
+
+[Illustration]
+
+I got back to my hotel in the Rue de la Michodière.
+
+Prostrate with emotion and fatigue, the tarantella still jingling in my
+ears, and that haunting, beloved face, with its ineffable smile still
+printed on the retina of my closed eyes, I fell asleep.
+
+And then I dreamed a dream, and the first phase of my real, inner life
+began!
+
+All the events of the day, distorted and exaggerated and jumbled
+together after the usual manner of dreams, wove themselves into a kind
+of nightmare and oppression. I was on my way to my old abode: everything
+that I met or saw was grotesque and impossible, yet had now the strange,
+vague charm of association and reminiscence, now the distressing sense
+of change and loss and desolation.
+
+As I got near to the avenue gate, instead of the school on my left there
+was a prison; and at the door a little thick-set jailer, three feet high
+and much deformed, and a little deformed jaileress no bigger than
+himself, were cunningly watching me out of the corners of their eyes,
+and toothlessly smiling. Presently they began to waltz together to an
+old, familiar tune, with their enormous keys dangling at their sides;
+and they looked so funny that I laughed and applauded. But soon I
+perceived that their crooked faces were not really funny; indeed, they
+were fatal and terrible in the extreme, and I was soon conscious that
+these deadly dwarfs were trying to waltz between me and the avenue gate
+for which I was bound--to cut me off, that they might run me into the
+prison, where it was their custom to hang people of a Monday morning.
+
+In an agony of terror I made a rush for the avenue gate, and there stood
+the Duchess of Towers, with mild surprise in her eyes and a kind
+smile--a heavenly vision of strength and reality.
+
+"You are not dreaming true!" she said. "Don't be afraid--those little
+people don't exist! Give me your hand and come in here."
+
+And as I did so she waved the troglodytes away, and they vanished; and
+I felt that this was no longer a dream, but something else--some strange
+thing that had happened to me, some new life that I had woke up to.
+
+For at the touch of her hand my consciousness, my sense of being I,
+myself, which hitherto in my dream (as in all previous dreams up to
+then) had been only partial, intermittent, and vague, suddenly blazed
+into full, consistent, practical activity--just as it is in life, when
+one is well awake and much interested in what is going on--only with
+perceptions far keener and more alert.
+
+I knew perfectly who I was and what I was, and remembered all the events
+of the previous day. I was conscious that my real body, undressed and in
+bed, now lay fast asleep in a small room on the fourth floor of an
+_hôtel garni_ in the Rue de la Michodière. I knew this perfectly; and
+yet here was my body, too, just as substantial, with all my clothes on;
+my boots rather dusty, my shirt-collar damp with the heat, for it was
+hot. With my disengaged hand I felt in my trousers-pocket; there were my
+London latch-keys, my purse, my penknife; my handkerchief in the
+breastpocket of my coat, and in its tail-pockets my gloves and
+pipe-case, and the little water-color box I had bought that morning. I
+looked at my watch; it was going, and marked eleven. I pinched myself, I
+coughed, I did all one usually does under the pressure of some immense
+surprise, to assure myself that I was awake; and I _was_, and yet here I
+stood, actually hand in hand with a great lady to whom I had never been
+introduced (and who seemed much tickled at my confusion); and staring
+now at her, now at my old school.
+
+The prison had tumbled down like a house of cards, and loi! in its place
+was M. Saindou's _maison d'éducation_, just as it had been of old. I
+even recognized on the yellow wall the stamp of a hand in dry mud, made
+fifteen years ago by a day boy called Parisot, who had fallen down in
+the gutter close by, and thus left his mark on getting up again; and it
+had remained there for months, till it had been whitewashed away in the
+holidays. Here it was anew, after fifteen years.
+
+The swallows were flying and twittering. A yellow omnibus was drawn up
+to the gates of the school; the horses stamped and neighed, and bit each
+other, as French horses always did in those days. The driver swore at
+them perfunctorily.
+
+A crowd was looking on--le Père et la Mère François, Madame Liard, the
+grocer's wife, and other people, whom I remembered at once with delight.
+Just in front of us a small boy and girl were looking on, like the rest,
+and I recognized the back and the cropped head and thin legs of Mimsey
+Seraskier.
+
+A barrel-organ was playing a pretty tune I knew quite well, and had
+forgotten.
+
+The school gates opened, and M. Saindou, proud and full of
+self-importance (as he always was), and half a dozen boys whose faces
+and names were quite familiar to me, in smart white trousers and shining
+boots, and silken white bands round their left arms, got into the
+omnibus, and were driven away in a glorified manner--as it seemed--to
+heaven in a golden chariot. It was beautiful to see and hear.
+
+I was still holding the duchess's hand, and felt the warmth of it
+through her glove; it stole up my arm like a magnetic current. I was in
+Elysium; a heavenly sense had come over me that at last my periphery had
+been victoriously invaded by a spirit other than mine--a most powerful
+and beneficent spirit. There was a blessed fault in my impenetrable
+armor of self, after all, and the genius of strength and charity and
+loving-kindness had found it out.
+
+"Now you're dreaming true," she said. "Where are those boys going?"
+
+"To church, to make their _première communion_," I replied.
+
+"That's right. You're dreaming true because I've got you by the hand. Do
+you know that tune?"
+
+I listened, and the words belonging to it came out of the past and I
+said them to her, and she laughed again, with her eyes screwed up
+deliciously.
+
+"Quite right--quite!" she exclaimed. "How odd that you should know them!
+How well you pronounce French for an Englishman! For you are Mr.
+Ibbetson, Lady Cray's architect?"
+
+I assented, and she let go my hand.
+
+The street was full of people--familiar forms and faces and voices,
+chatting together and looking down the road after the yellow omnibus;
+old attitudes, old tricks of gait and manner, old forgotten French ways
+of speech--all as it was long ago. Nobody noticed us, and we walked up
+the now deserted avenue.
+
+The happiness, the enchantment of it all! Could it be that I was dead,
+that I had died suddenly in my sleep, at the hotel in the Rue de la
+Michodière! Could it be that the Duchess of Towers was dead too--had
+been killed by some accident on her way from St. Cloud to Paris? and
+that, both having died so near each other, we had begun our eternal
+afterlife in this heavenly fashion?
+
+That was too good to be true, I reflected; some instinct told me that
+this was not death, but transcendent earthly life--and also, alas! that
+it would not endure forever!
+
+I was deeply conscious of every feature in her face, every movement of
+her body, every detail of her dress--more so then I could have been in
+actual life--and said to myself, "Whatever this is, it is no dream." But
+I felt there was about me the unspeakable elation which can come to us
+only in our waking moments when we are at our very best; and then only
+feebly, in comparison with this, and to many of us never, ft never had
+to me, since that morning when I had found the little wheelbarrow.
+
+I was also conscious, however, that the avenue itself had a slight touch
+of the dream in it. It was no longer quite right, and was getting out of
+drawing and perspective, so to speak. I had lost my stay--the touch
+of her hand.
+
+"Are you still dreaming true, Mr. Ibbetson?"
+
+"I am afraid not quite," I replied.
+
+"You must try by yourself a little--try hard. Look at this house; what
+is written on the portico?"
+
+I saw written in gold letters the words, "Tête Noire," and said so.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+She rippled with laughter, and said, "No; try again"; and just touched
+me with the tip of her finger for a moment.
+
+I tried again and said, "Parvis Notre Dame."
+
+"That's rather better," she said, and touched me again; and I read,
+"Parva sed Apta," as I had so often read there before in old days.
+
+"And now look at that old house over there," pointing to my old home;
+"how many windows are there in the top story?"
+
+I said seven.
+
+"No; there are five. Look again!" and there were five; and the whole
+house was exactly, down to its minutest detail, as it had been once upon
+a time. I could see Thérèse through one of the windows, making my bed.
+
+"That's better," said the duchess; "you will soon do it--it's very
+easy--_ce n'est que le premier pas!_ My father taught me; you must
+always sleep on your back with your arms above your head, your hands
+clasped under it and your feet crossed, the right one over the left,
+unless you are left-handed; and you must never for a moment cease
+thinking of where you want to be in your dream till you are asleep and
+get there; and you must never forget in your dream where and what you
+were when awake. You must join the dream on to reality. Don't forget.
+And now I will say good-bye; but before I go give me both hands and look
+round everywhere as far as your eyes can see."
+
+It was hard to look away from her; her face drew my eyes, and through
+them all my heart; but I did as she told me, and took in the whole
+familiar scene, even to the distant woods of Ville d'Avray, a glimpse
+of which was visible through an opening in the trees; even to the smoke
+of a train making its way to Versailles, miles off; and the old
+telegraph, working its black arms on the top of Mont Valérien.
+
+[Illustration: "It was hard to look away from her."]
+
+"Is it all right?" she asked. "That's well. Henceforward, whenever you
+come here, you will be safe as far as your sight can reach--from this
+spot--all through my introduction. See what it is to have a friend at
+court! No more little dancing jailers! And then you can gradually get
+farther by yourself.
+
+"Out there, through that park, leads to the Bois de Boulogne--there's a
+gap in the hedge you can get through; but mind and make everything plain
+in front of you--_true_, before you go a step farther, or else you'll
+have to wake and begin it all over again. You have only to will it, and
+think of yourself as awake, and it will come--on condition, of course,
+that you have been there before. And mind, also, you must take care how
+you touch things or people--you may hear, and see, and smell; but you
+mustn't touch, nor pick flowers or leaves, nor move things about. It
+blurs the dream, like breathing on a window-pane. I don't know why, but
+it does. You must remember that everything here is dead and gone by.
+With you and me it is different; we're alive and real--that is, _I_ am;
+and there would seem to be no mistake about your being real too, Mr.
+Ibbetson, by the grasp of your hands. But you're _not_; and why you are
+here, and what business you have in this, my particular dream, I cannot
+understand; no living person has ever come into it before. I can't make
+it out. I suppose it's because I saw your reality this afternoon,
+looking out of the window at the 'Tête Noire,' and you are just a stray
+figment of my overtired brain--a very agreeable figment, I admit; but
+you don't exist here just now--you can't possibly; you are somewhere
+else, Mr. Ibbetson; dancing at Mabille, perhaps, or fast asleep
+somewhere, and dreaming of French churches and palaces, and public
+fountains, like a good young British architect--otherwise I shouldn't
+talk to you like this, you may be sure!
+
+"Never mind. I am very glad to dream that I have been of use to you, and
+you are very welcome here, if it amuses you to come--especially as you
+are only a false dream of mine, for what else _can_ you be? And now I
+must leave you, so good-bye."
+
+She disengaged her hands, and laughed her angelic laugh, and then
+turned towards the park. I watched her tall, straight figure and blowing
+skirts, and saw her follow some ladies and children into a thicket that
+I remembered well, and she was soon out of sight.
+
+I felt as if all warmth had gone out of my life; as if a joy had taken
+flight; as if a precious something had withdrawn itself from my
+possession, and the gap in my periphery had closed again.
+
+Long I stood in thought, with my eyes fixed on the spot where she had
+disappeared; and I felt inclined to follow, but then considered this
+would not have been discreet. For although she was only a false dream of
+mine, a mere recollection of the exciting and eventful day, a stray
+figment of my overtired and excited brain--a _more_ than agreeable
+figment (what else _could_ she be!)--she was also a great lady, and had
+treated me, a perfect stranger and a perfect nobody, with singular
+courtesy and kindness; which I repaid, it is true, with a love so deep
+and strong that my very life was hers, to do what she liked with, and
+always had been since I first saw her, and always would be as long as
+there was breath in my body! But this did not constitute an acquaintance
+without a proper introduction, even in France--even in a dream. Even in
+dreams one must be polite, even to stray figments of one's tired,
+sleeping brain.
+
+And then what business had _she_, in _this_, _my_ particular dream--as
+she herself had asked of me?
+
+But _was_ it a dream? I remembered my lodgings at Pentonville, that I
+had left yesterday morning. I remembered what I was--why I came to
+Paris; I remembered the very bedroom at the Paris hotel where I was now
+fast asleep, its loudly-ticking clock, and all the meagre furniture. And
+here was I, broad awake and conscious, in the middle of an old avenue
+that had long ceased to exist--that had been built over by a huge brick
+edifice covered with newly-painted trellis-work. I saw it, this edifice,
+myself, only twelve hours ago. And yet here was everything as it had
+been when I was a child; and all through the agency of this solid
+phantom of a lovely young English duchess, whose warm gloved hands I had
+only this minute been holding in mine! The scent of her gloves was still
+in my palm. I looked at my watch; it marked twenty-three minutes to
+twelve. All this had happened in less than three-quarters of an hour!
+
+Pondering over all this in hopeless bewilderment, I turned my steps
+towards my old home, and, to my surprise, was just able to look over the
+garden wall, which I had once thought about ten feet high.
+
+Under the old apple-tree in full bloom sat my mother, darning small
+socks; with her flaxen side-curls (as it was her fashion to wear them)
+half-concealing her face. My emotion and astonishment were immense. My
+heart beat fast. I felt its pulse in my temples, and my breath
+was short.
+
+At a little green table that I remembered well sat a small boy, rather
+quaintly dressed in a by-gone fashion, with a frill round his wide
+shirt-collar, and his golden hair cut quite close at the top, and rather
+long at the sides and back. It was Gogo Pasquier. He seemed a very nice
+little boy. He had pen and ink and copy-book before him, and a
+gilt-edged volume bound in red morocco. I knew it at a glance; it was
+_Elegant Extracts_. The dog Médor lay asleep in the shade. The bees
+were droning among the nasturtiums and convolvulus.
+
+A little girl ran up the avenue from the porter's lodge and pushed the
+garden gate, which rang the bell as it opened, and she went into the
+garden, and I followed her; but she took no notice of me, nor did the
+others. It was Mimsey Seraskier.
+
+I went out and sat at my mother's feet, and looked long in her face.
+
+I must not speak to her, nor touch her--not even touch her busy hand
+with my lips, or I should "blur the dream."
+
+I got up and looked over the boy Gogo's shoulder. He was translating
+Gray's _Elegy_ into French; he had not got very far, and seemed to be
+stumped by the line--
+
+_"And leaves the world to darkness and to me."_
+
+Mimsey was silently looking over his other shoulder, her thumb in her
+mouth, one arm on the back of his chair. She seemed to be stumped also:
+it was an awkward line to translate.
+
+I stooped and put my hand to Médor's nose, and felt his warm breath. He
+wagged his rudiment of a tail, and whimpered in his sleep. Mimsey said--
+
+"Regarde Médor, comme il remue la queue! _C'est le Prince Charmant qui
+lui chatouille le bout du nez._"
+
+Said my mother, who had not spoken hitherto: "Do speak English, Mimsey,
+please."
+
+Oh, my God! My mother's voice, so forgotten, yet so familiar, so
+unutterably dear! I rushed to her, and threw myself on my knees at her
+feet, and seized her hand and kissed it, crying, "Mother, mother!"
+
+A strange blur came over everything; the sense of reality was lost. All
+became as a dream--a beautiful dream--but only a dream; and I woke.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I woke in my small hotel bedroom, and saw all the furniture, and my hat
+and clothes, by the light of a lamp outside, and heard the ticking of
+the clock on the mantel-piece, and the rumbling of a cart and cracking
+of a whip in the street, and yet felt I was not a bit more awake than I
+had been a minute ago in my strange vision--not so much!
+
+I heard my watch ticking its little tick on the mantel-piece by the side
+of the clock, like a pony trotting by a big horse. The clock struck
+twelve, I got up and looked at my watch by the light of the gas-lit
+streets; it marked the same. My dream had lasted an hour--I had gone to
+bed at half-past ten.
+
+I tried to recall it all, and did so to the smallest particular--all
+except the tune the organ had played, and the words belonging to it;
+they were on the tip of my tongue, and refused to come further, I got up
+again and walked about the room, and felt that it had not been like a
+dream at all; it was more "recollectable" than all my real adventures of
+the previous day. It had ceased to be like a dream, and had become an
+actuality from the moment I first touched the duchess's hand to the
+moment I kissed my mother's, and the blur came. It was an entirely new
+and utterly bewildering experience that I had gone through.
+
+In a dream there are always breaks, inconsistencies, lapses,
+incoherence, breaches of continuity, many links missing in the chain;
+only at points is the impression vivid enough to stamp itself afterwards
+on the waking mind, and even then it is never so really vivid as the
+impression of real life, although it ought to have seemed so in the
+dream: One remembers it well on awaking, but soon it fades, and then it
+is only one's remembrance of it that one remembers.
+
+[Illustration: "MOTHER, MOTHER!"]
+
+There was nothing of this in my dream.
+
+It was something like the "camera-obscura" on Ramsgate pier: one goes
+in and finds one's self in total darkness; the eye is prepared; one is
+thoroughly expectant and wide-awake.
+
+Suddenly there flashes on the sight the moving picture of the port and
+all the life therein, and the houses and cliffs beyond; and farther
+still the green hills, the white clouds, and blue sky.
+
+Little green waves chase each other in the harbor, breaking into crisp
+white foam. Sea-gulls wheel and dash and dip behind masts and ropes and
+pulleys; shiny brass fittings on gangway and compass flash in the sun
+without dazzling the eye; gay Liliputians walk and talk, their white
+teeth, no bigger than a pin's point, gleam in laughter, with never a
+sound; a steamboat laden with excursionists comes in, its paddles
+churning the water, and you cannot hear them. Not a detail is
+missed--not a button on a sailor's jacket, not a hair on his face. All
+the light and color of sea and earth and sky, that serve for many a
+mile, are here concentrated within a few square feet. And what color it
+is! A painter's despair! It is light itself, more beautiful than that
+which streams through old church windows of stained glass. And all is
+framed in utter darkness, so that the fully dilated pupils can see their
+very utmost. It seems as though all had been painted life-size and then
+shrunk, like a Japanese picture on crape, to a millionth of its natural
+size, so as to intensify and mellow the effect.
+
+It is all over: you come out into the open sunshine, and all seems
+garish and bare and bald and commonplace. All magic has faded out of
+the scene; everything is too far away from everything else; everybody
+one meets seems coarse and Brobdingnagian and too near. And one has been
+looking at the like of it all one's life!
+
+Thus with my dream, compared to common, waking, every-day experience;
+only instead of being mere flat, silent little images moving on a dozen
+square feet of Bristol-board, and appealing to the eye alone, the things
+and people in my dream had the same roundness and relief as in life, and
+were life-size; one could move among them and behind them, and feel as
+if one could touch and clasp and embrace them if one dared. And the ear,
+as well as the eye, was made free of this dark chamber of the brain: one
+heard their speech and laughter as in life. And that was not all, for
+soft breezes fanned the cheek, the sparrows twittered, the sun gave out
+its warmth, and the scent of many flowers made the illusion complete.
+
+And then the Duchess of Towers! She had been not only visible and
+audible like the rest, but tangible as well, to the fullest extent of
+the sensibility that lay in my nerves of touch; when my hands held hers
+I felt as though I were drawing all her life into mine.
+
+With the exception of that one figure, all had evidently been as it
+_had_ been in _reality_ a few years ago, to the very droning of an
+insect, to the very fall of a blossom!
+
+Had I gone mad by any chance? I had possessed the past, as I had longed
+to do a few hours before.
+
+What are sight and hearing and touch and the rest?
+
+Five senses in all.
+
+The stars, worlds upon worlds, so many billions of miles away, what are
+they for us but mere shiny specks on a net-work of nerves behind the
+eye? How does one _feel_ them there?
+
+The sound of my friend's voice, what is it? The clasp of his hand, the
+pleasant sight of his face, the scent of his pipe and mine, the taste of
+the bread and cheese and beer we eat and drink together, what are they
+but figments (stray figments, perhaps) of the brain--little thrills
+through nerves made on purpose, and without which there would be no
+stars, no pipe, no bread and cheese and beer, no voice, no friend,
+no me?
+
+And is there, perchance, some sixth sense embedded somewhere in the
+thickness of the flesh--some survival of the past, of the race, of our
+own childhood even, etiolated by disuse? or some rudiment, some effort
+to begin, some priceless hidden faculty to be developed into a future
+source of bliss and consolation for our descendants? some nerve that now
+can only be made to thrill and vibrate in a dream, too delicate as yet
+to ply its function in the light of common day?
+
+And was I, of all people in the world--I, Peter Ibbetson, architect and
+surveyor, Wharton Street, Pentonville--most futile, desultory, and
+uneducated dreamer of dreams--destined to make some great psychical
+discovery?
+
+Pondering deeply over these solemn things, I sent myself to sleep again,
+as was natural enough--but no more to dream. I slept soundly until late
+in the morning, and breakfasted at the Bains Deligny, a delightful
+swimming-bath near the Pont de la Concorde (on the other side), and
+spent most of the day there, alternately swimming, and dozing, and
+smoking cigarettes, and thinking of the wonders of the night before, and
+hoping for their repetition on the night to follow.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+I remained a week in Paris, loafing about by day among old haunts of my
+childhood--a melancholy pleasure--and at night trying to "dream true" as
+my dream duchess had called it. Only once did I succeed.
+
+I had gone to bed thinking most persistently of the "Mare d'Auteuil,"
+and it seemed to me that as soon as I was fairly asleep I woke up there,
+and knew directly that I had come into a "true dream" again, by the
+reality and the bliss. It was transcendent _life_ once more--a very
+ecstasy of remembrance made actual, and _such_ an exquisite surprise!
+
+There was M. le Major, in his green frock-coat, on his knees near a
+little hawthorn-tree by the brink, among the water-logged roots of which
+there dwelt a cunning old dytiscus as big as the bowl of a
+table-spoon--a prize we had often tried to catch in vain.
+
+M. le Major had a net in his hand, and was watching the water intently;
+the perspiration was trickling down his nose; and around him, in silent
+expectation and suspense, were grouped Gogo and Mimsey and my three
+cousins, and a good-humored freckled Irish boy I had quite forgotten,
+and I suddenly remembered that his name was Johnstone, that he was very
+combative, and that he lived in the Rue Basse (now Rue Raynouard).
+
+On the other side of the pond my mother was keeping Médor from the
+water, for fear of his spoiling the sport, and on the bench by the
+willow sat Madame Seraskier--lovely Madame Seraskier--deeply
+interested. I sat down by her side and gazed at her with a joy there is
+no telling.
+
+An old woman came by, selling conical wafer-cakes, and singing--"_V'lâ
+l'plaisir, mesdames--V'lâ l'plaisir!_" Madame Seraskier bought ten sous'
+worth--a mountain!
+
+M. le Major made a dash with his net--unsuccessfully, as usual. Médor
+was let loose, and plunged with a plunge that made big waves all round
+the mare, and dived after an imaginary stone, amid general shouts and
+shrieks of excitement. Oh, the familiar voices! I almost wept.
+
+Médor came out of the water without his stone and shook himself,
+twisting and barking and grinning and gyrating, as was his way, quite
+close to me. In my delight and sympathy I was ill-advised enough to try
+and stroke him, and straight the dream was "blurred"--changed to an
+ordinary dream, where all things were jumbled up and incomprehensible; a
+dream pleasant enough, but different in kind and degree--an ordinary
+dream; and in my distress thereat I woke, and failed to dream again (as
+I wished to dream) that night.
+
+Next morning (after an early swim) I went to the Louvre, and stood
+spellbound before Leonardo da Vinci's "Lisa Gioconda," trying hard to
+find where the wondrous beauty lay that I had heard so extravagantly
+extolled; and not trying very successfully, for I had seen Madame
+Seraskier once more, and felt that "Gioconda" was a fraud.
+
+Presently I was conscious of a group just behind me, and heard a
+pleasant male English voice exclaim--
+
+[Illustration: "Lisa Giaconda"]
+
+"And now, duchess, let me present to you my first and last and only
+love, Mona Lisa." I turned round, and there stood a soldier-like old
+gentleman and two ladies (one of whom was the Duchess of Towers),
+staring at the picture.
+
+As I made way for them I caught her eye, and in it again, as I felt
+sure, a kindly look of recognition--just for half a second. She
+evidently recollected having seen me at Lady Cray's, where I had stood
+all the evening alone in a rather conspicuous corner. I was so
+exceptionally tall (in those days of not such tall people as now) that
+it was easy to notice and remember me, especially as I wore my beard,
+which it was unusual to do then among Englishmen.
+
+She little guessed how _I_ remembered _her_; she little knew all she was
+and had been to me--in life and in a dream!
+
+My emotion was so great that I felt it in my very knees; I could
+scarcely walk; I was as weak as water. My worship for the beautiful
+stranger was becoming almost a madness. She was even more lovely than
+Madame Seraskier. It was cruel to be like that.
+
+It seems that I was fated to fall down and prostrate myself before very
+tall, slender women, with dark hair and lily skins and light angelic
+eyes. The fair damsel who sold tripe and pigs' feet in Clerkenwell was
+also of that type, I remembered; and so was Mrs. Deane. Fortunately for
+me it is not a common one!
+
+All that day I spent on quays and bridges, leaning over parapets, and
+looking at the Seine, and nursing my sweet despair, and calling myself
+the biggest fool in Paris, and recalling over and over again that
+gray-blue kindly glance--my only light, the Light of the World for ME!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My brief holiday over, I went back to London--to Pentonville--and
+resumed my old occupations; but the whole tenor of my existence
+was changed.
+
+The day, the working-day (and I worked harder than ever, to Lintot's
+great satisfaction), passed as in an unimportant dream of mild content
+and cheerful acquiescence in everything, work or play.
+
+There was no more quarrelling with my destiny, nor wish to escape from
+myself for a moment. My whole being, as I went about on business or
+recreation bent, was suffused with the memory of the Duchess of Towers
+as with a warm inner glow that kept me at peace with all mankind and
+myself, and thrilled by the hope, the enchanting hope, of once more
+meeting her image at night in a dream, in or about my old home at Passy,
+and perhaps even feeling once more that ineffable bliss of touching her
+hand. Though why should she be there?
+
+When the blessed hour came round for sleep, the real business of my life
+began. I practised "dreaming true" as one practises a fine art, and
+after many failures I became a professed expert--a master.
+
+I lay straight on my back, with my feet crossed, and my hands clasped
+above my head in a symmetrical position; I would fix my will intently
+and persistently on a certain point in space and time that was within my
+memory--for instance, the avenue gate on a certain Christmas afternoon,
+when I remembered waiting for M. le Major to go for a walk--at the same
+time never losing touch of my own present identity as Peter Ibbetson,
+architect, Wharton Street, Pentonville; all of which is not so easy to
+manage as one might think, although the dream duchess had said, "Ce
+n'est que le premier pas qui coûte;" and finally one night, instead of
+dreaming the ordinary dreams I had dreamed all my life (but twice), I
+had the rapture of _waking up_, the minute I was fairly asleep, by
+the avenue gate, and of seeing Gogo Pasquier sitting on one of the stone
+posts and looking up the snowy street for the major. Presently he jumped
+up to meet his old friend, whose bottle-green-clad figure had just
+appeared in the distance. I saw and heard their warm and friendly
+greeting, and walked unperceived by their side through Auteuil to the
+_mare_, and back by the fortifications, and listened to the thrilling
+adventures of one Fier-à-bras, which, I confess, I had completely
+forgotten.
+
+[Illustration: THE STORY OF THE GIANT FIER-A-BRAS.]
+
+As we passed all three together through the "Porte de la Muette," M. le
+Major's powers of memory (or invention) began to flag a little--for he
+suddenly said, "_Cric!_" But Gogo pitilessly answered, "_Crac!_" and
+the story had to go on, till we reached at dusk the gate of the
+Pasquiers' house, where these two most affectionately parted, after
+making an appointment for the morrow; and I went in with Gogo, and sat
+in the school-room while Thérèse gave him his tea, and heard her tell
+him all that had happened in Passy that afternoon. Then he read and
+summed and translated with his mother till it was time to go up to bed,
+and I sat by his bedside as he was lulled asleep by his mother's
+harp... how I listened with all my ears and heart, till the sweet strain
+ceased for the night! Then out of the hushed house I stole, thinking
+unutterable things--through the snow-clad garden, where Médor was baying
+the moon--through the silent avenue and park--through the deserted
+streets of Passy--and on by desolate quays and bridges to dark quarters
+of Paris; till I fell awake in my tracks and found that another dreary
+and commonplace day had dawned over London--but no longer dreary and
+commonplace for me, with such experiences to look back and forward
+to--such a strange inheritance of wonder and delight!
+
+I had a few more occasional failures, such as, for instance, when the
+thread between my waking and sleeping life was snapped by a moment's
+carelessness, or possibly by some movement of my body in bed, in which
+case the vision would suddenly get blurred, the reality of it destroyed,
+and an ordinary dream rise in its place. My immediate consciousness of
+this was enough to wake me on the spot, and I would begin again, _da
+capo_ till all went as I wished.
+
+Evidently our brain contains something akin both to a photographic
+plate and a phonographic cylinder, and many other things of the same
+kind not yet discovered; not a sight or a sound or a smell is lost; not
+a taste or a feeling or an emotion. Unconscious memory records them all,
+without our even heeding what goes on around us beyond the things that
+attract our immediate interest or attention.
+
+Thus night after night I saw reacted before me scenes not only fairly
+remembered, but scenes utterly forgotten, and yet as unmistakably true
+as the remembered ones, and all bathed in that ineffable light, the
+light of other days--the light that never was on sea or land, and yet
+the light of absolute truth.
+
+How it transcends in value as well as in beauty the garish light of
+common day, by which poor humanity has hitherto been content to live and
+die, disdaining through lack of knowledge the shadow for the substance,
+the spirit for the matter! I verified the truth of these sleeping
+experiences in every detail: old family letters I had preserved, and
+which I studied on awaking, confirmed what I had seen and heard in my
+dream; old stories explained themselves. It was all by-gone truth,
+garnered in some remote corner of the brain, and brought out of the dim
+past as I willed, and made actual once more.
+
+And strange to say, and most inexplicable, I saw it all as an
+independent spectator, an outsider, not as an actor going again through
+scenes in which he has played a part before!
+
+Yet many things perplexed and puzzled me.
+
+For instance, Gogo's back, and the back of his head, when I stood
+behind him, were as visible and apparently as true to life as his face,
+and I had never seen his back or the back of his head; it was much later
+in life that I learned the secret of two mirrors. And then, when Gogo
+went out of the room, sometimes apparently passing through me as he did
+so and coming out at the other side (with a momentary blurring of the
+dream), the rest would go on talking just as reasonably, as naturally,
+as before. Could the trees and walls and furniture have had ears and
+eyes, those long-vanished trees and walls and furniture that existed now
+only in my sleeping brain, and have retained the sound and shape and
+meaning of all that passed when Gogo, my only conceivable
+remembrancer, was away?
+
+Françoise, the cook, would come into the drawing-room to discuss the
+dinner with my mother when Gogo was at school; and I would hear the
+orders given, and later I would assist at the eating of the meal (to
+which Gogo would invariably do ample justice), and it was just as my
+mother had ordered. Mystery of mysteries!
+
+What a pleasant life it was they led together, these ghosts of a by-gone
+time! Such a genial, smooth, easygoing, happy-go-lucky state of
+things--half bourgeois, half Bohemian, and yet with a well-marked
+simplicity, refinement, and distinction of bearing and speech that were
+quite aristocratic.
+
+The servants (only three--Thérèse the house-maid, Françoise the cook,
+and English Sarah, who had been my nurse and was now my mother's maid)
+were on the kindliest and most familiar terms with us, and talked to us
+like friends, and interested themselves in our concerns, and we in
+theirs; I noticed that they always wished us each good-morning and
+good-night--a pretty French fashion of the Passy bourgeoisie in Louis
+Philippe's time (he was a bourgeois king).
+
+Our cuisine was bourgeoise also. Peter Ibbetson's mouth watered (after
+his tenpenny London dinner) to see and smell the steam of "soupe à la
+bonne femme," "soupe aux choux," "pot au feu," "blanquette de veau,"
+"boeuf à la mode," "cotelettes de porc à la sauce piquante,"
+"vinaigrette de boeuf bouilli"--that endless variety of good things on
+which French people grow fat so young--and most excellent claret (at one
+franc a bottle in those happy days): its bouquet seemed to fill the room
+as soon as the cork was drawn!
+
+Sometimes, such a repast ended, "le beau Pasquier," in the fulness of
+his heart, would suddenly let off impossible fireworks of vocalization,
+ascending rockets of chromatic notes which would explode softly very
+high up and come down in full cadences, trills, roulades, like beautiful
+colored stars; and Thérèse would exclaim, "Ah, q'c'est beau!" as if she
+had been present at a real pyrotechnic display; and Thérèse was quite
+right. I have never heard the like from any human throat, and should not
+have believed it possible. Only Joachim's violin can do such beautiful
+things so beautifully.
+
+Or else he would tell us of wolves he had shot in Brittany, or
+wild-boars in Burgundy--for he was a great sportsman--or of his
+adventures as a _garde du corps_ of Charles Dix, or of the wonderful
+inventions that were so soon to bring us fame and fortune; and he would
+loyally drink to Henri Cinq; and he was so droll and buoyant and witty
+that it was as good to hear him speak as to hear him sing.
+
+But there was another and a sad side to all this strange comedy of
+vanished lives.
+
+They built castles in the air, and made plans, and talked of all the
+wealth and happiness that would be theirs when my father's ship came
+home, and of all the good they would do, pathetically unconscious of the
+near future; which, of course, was all past history to their loving
+audience of one.
+
+And then my tears would flow with the unbearable ache of love and pity
+combined; they would fall and dry on the waxed floors of my old home in
+Passy, and I would find them still wet on my pillow in Pentonville
+when I woke.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Soon I discovered by practice that I was able for a second or two to be
+more than a mere spectator--to be an actor once more; to turn myself
+(Ibbetson) into my old self (Gogo), and thus be touched and caressed by
+those I had so loved. My mother kissed me and I felt it; just as long as
+I could hold my breath I could walk hand in hand with Madame Seraskier,
+or feel Mimsey's small weight on my back and her arms round my neck for
+four or five yards as I walked, before blurring the dream; and the blur
+would soon pass away, if it did not wake me, and I was Peter Ibbetson
+once more, walking and sitting among them, hearing them talk and laugh,
+watching them at their meals, in their walks; listening to my father's
+songs, my mother's sweet playing, and always unseen and unheeded by
+them. Moreover, I soon learned to touch things without sensibly blurring
+the dream. I would cull a rose, and stick it in my buttonhole, and
+there it remained--but lo! the very rose I had just culled was still on
+the rose-bush also! I would pick up a stone and throw it at the wall,
+where it disappeared without a sound--and the very same stone still lay
+at my feet, however often I might pick it up and throw it!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+No waking joy in the world can give, can equal in intensity, these
+complex joys I had when asleep; waking joys seem so slight, so vague in
+comparison--so much escapes the senses through lack of concentration and
+undivided attention--the waking perceptions are so blunt.
+
+It was a life within a life--an intenser life--in which the fresh
+perceptions of childhood combined with the magic of dream-land, and in
+which there was but one unsatisfied longing; but its name was Lion.
+
+It was the passionate longing to meet the Duchess of Towers once more in
+that land of dreams.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thus for a time I went on, more solitary than ever, but well compensated
+for all my loneliness by this strange new life that had opened itself to
+me, and never ceasing to marvel and rejoice--when one morning I received
+a note from Lady Cray, who wanted some stables built at Cray, their
+country-seat in Hertfordshire, and begged I would go there for the day
+and night.
+
+I was bound to accept this invitation, as a mere matter of business, of
+course; as a friend, Lady Cray seemed to have dropped me long ago, "like
+a 'ot potato," blissfully unconscious that it was I who had dropped her.
+
+But she received me as a friend--an old friend. All my shyness and
+snobbery fell from me at the mere touch of her hand.
+
+I had arrived at Cray early in the afternoon, and had immediately set
+about my work, which took several hours, so that I got to the house only
+just in time to dress for dinner.
+
+When I came into the drawing-room there were several people there, and
+Lady Cray presented me to a young lady, the vicar's daughter, whom I was
+to take in to dinner.
+
+I was very much impressed on being told by her that the company
+assembled in the drawing-room included no less a person than Sir Edwin
+Landseer. Many years ago I had copied an engraving of one of his
+pictures for Mimsey Seraskier. It was called "The Challenge," or "Coming
+Events cast their Shadows before Them." I feasted my eyes on the
+wondrous little man, who seemed extremely chatty and genial, and quite
+unembarrassed by his fame.
+
+A guest was late, and Lord Cray, who seemed somewhat peevishly impatient
+for his food, exclaimed--
+
+"Mary wouldn't be Mary if she were punctual!"
+
+Just then Mary came in--and Mary was no less a person than the Duchess
+of Towers!
+
+My knees trembled under me; but there was no time to give way to any
+such tender weakness. Lord Cray walked away with her; the procession
+filed into the dining room, and somewhere at the end of it my young
+vicaress and myself.
+
+The duchess sat a long way from me, but I met her glance for a moment,
+and fancied I saw again in it that glimmer of kindly recognition.
+
+My neighbor, who was charming, asked me if I did not think the Duchess
+of Towers the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.
+
+I assented with right good-will, and was told that she was as good as
+she was beautiful, and as clever as she was good (as if I did not know
+it); that she would give away the very clothes off her back; that there
+was no trouble she would not take for others; that she did not get on
+well with her husband, who drank, and was altogether bad and vile; that
+she had a great sorrow--an only child, an idiot, to whom she was
+devoted, and who would some day be the Duke of Towers; that she was
+highly accomplished, a great linguist, a great musician, and about the
+most popular woman in all English society.
+
+Ah! Who loved the Duchess of Towers better than this poor scribe, in
+whose soul she lived and shone like a bright particular star--like the
+sun; and who, without his knowing, was being rapidly drawn into the
+sphere of her attraction, as Lintot called it; one day to be finally
+absorbed, I trust, forever!
+
+"And who was this wonderful Duchess of Towers before she married?" I
+asked.
+
+"She was a Miss Seraskier. Her father was a Hungarian, a physician, and
+a political reformer--a most charming person; that's where she gets her
+manners. Her mother, whom she lost when she was quite a child, was a
+very beautiful Irish girl of good family, a first cousin of Lord
+Cray's--a Miss Desmond, who ran away with the interesting patriot. They
+lived somewhere near Paris. It was there that Madame Seraskier died of
+cholera--... What is the matter--are you ill?"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+I made out that I was faint from the heat, and concealed as well as I
+could the flood of emotion and bewilderment that overwhelmed me.
+
+I dared not look again at the Duchess of Towers.
+
+"Oh! little Mimsey dear, with your poor thin arms round my neck, and
+your cold, pale cheek against mine. I felt them there only last night!
+To have grown into such a splendid vision of female health and strength
+and beauty as this--with that enchanting, ever-ready laugh and smile!
+Why, of course, those eyes, so lashless then, so thickly fringed
+to-day!--how could I have mistaken them? Ah, Mimsey, you never smiled or
+laughed in those days, or I should have known your eyes again! Is it
+possible--is it possible?"
+
+Thus I went on to myself till the ladies left, my fair young companion
+expressing her kind anxiety and polite hope that I would soon be
+myself again.
+
+I sat silent till it was time to join the ladies (I could not even
+follow the witty and brilliant anecdotes of the great painter, who held
+the table); and then I went up to my room. I could not face _her_ again
+so soon after what I had heard.
+
+The good Lord Cray came to make kind inquiries, but I soon satisfied him
+that my indisposition was nothing. He stayed on, however, and talked;
+his dinner seemed to have done him a great deal of good, and he wanted
+to smoke (and somebody to smoke with), which he had not been able to do
+in the dining-room on account of some reverend old bishop who was
+present. So he rolled himself a little cigarette, like a Frenchman, and
+puffed away to his heart's content.
+
+He little guessed how his humble architect wished him away, until he
+began to talk of the Duchess of Towers--"Mary Towers," as he called
+her--and to tell me how "Towers" deserved to be kicked, and whipped at
+the cart's tail. "Why, she's the best and most beautiful woman in
+England, and as sharp as a needle! If it hadn't been for her, he'd have
+been in the bankruptcy court long ago," etc. "There's not a duchess in
+England that's fit to hold the candle to her, either for looks or
+brains, or breedin' either. Her mother (the loveliest woman that ever
+lived, except Mary) was a connection of mine; that's where she gets her
+manners!" etc.
+
+Thus did this noble earl make music for me--sweet and bitter music.
+
+Mary! It is a heavenly name, especially on English lips, and spelled in
+the English mode with the adorable _y_! Great men have had a passion for
+it--Byron, Shelley, Burns. But none, methinks, a greater passion than I,
+nor with such good cause.
+
+And yet there must be a bad Mary now and then, here or there, and even
+an ugly one. Indeed, there was once a Bloody Mary who was both! It seems
+incredible!
+
+Mary, indeed! Why not Hecuba? For what was I to the Duchess of Towers?
+
+When I was alone again I went to bed, and tried to sleep on my back,
+with my arms up, in the hope of a true dream; but sleep would not come,
+and I passed a white night, as the French say. I rose early and walked
+about the park, and tried to interest my self in the stables till it was
+breakfast-time. Nobody was up, and I breakfasted alone with Lady Cray,
+who was as kind as she could be. I do not think she could have found me
+a very witty companion. And then I went back to the stables to think,
+and fell into a doze.
+
+At about twelve I heard the sound of wooden balls, and found a lawn
+where some people were playing "croquet." It was quite a new game, and a
+few years later became the fashion.
+
+[Illustration: SWEET AND BITTER MUSIC.]
+
+I sat down under a large weeping-ash close to the lawn; it was like a
+tent, with chairs and tables underneath.
+
+Presently Lady Cray came there with the Duchess of Towers. I wanted to
+fly, but was rooted to the spot.
+
+[Illustration: The Introduction.]
+
+Lady Cray presented me, and almost immediately a servant came with a
+message for her, and I was left with the One Woman in the World! My
+heart was in my mouth, my throat was dry, my pulse was beating in
+my temples.
+
+She asked me, in the most natural manner, if I played "croquet."
+
+"Yes--no--at least, sometimes--that is, I never of it--oh--I forget!" I
+groaned at my idiocy and hid my face in my hands. She asked if I were
+still unwell, and I said no; and then she began to talk quite easily
+about anything, everything, till I felt more at my ease.
+
+Her voice! I had never heard it well but in a dream, and it was the
+same--a very rich and modulated voice--low--contralto, with many varied
+and delightful inflexions; and she used more action in speaking than the
+generality of Englishwomen, thereby reminding me of Madame Seraskier. I
+noticed that her hands were long and very narrow, and also her feet, and
+remembered that Mimsey's were like that--they were considered poor
+Mimsey's only beauty. I also noticed an almost imperceptible scar on her
+left temple, and remembered with a thrill that I had noticed it in my
+dream as we walked up the avenue together. In waking life I had never
+been near enough to her to notice a small scar, and Mimsey had no scar
+of the kind in the old days--of that I felt sure, for I had seen much of
+Mimsey lately.
+
+I grew more accustomed to the situation, and ventured to say that I had
+once met her at Lady Cray's in London.
+
+"Oh yes; I remember. Giulia Grisi sand the 'Willow Song.'" And then she
+crinkled up her eyes, and laughed, and blushed, and went on: "I noticed
+you standing in a corner, under the famous Gainsborough. You reminded me
+of a dear little French boy I once knew who was very kind to me when I
+was a little girl in France, and whose father you happen to be like. But
+I found that you were Mr. Ibbetson, an English architect, and, Lady Cray
+tells me, a very rising one"
+
+"I _was_ a little French boy once. I had to change my name to please a
+relative, and become English--that is, I was always _really_ English,
+you know."
+
+"Good Heavens, what an extraordinary thing! What _was_ your name, then?"
+
+"Pasquier-Gogo Pasquier!" I groaned, and the tears came into my eyes,
+and I looked away. The duchess made no answer, and when I turned and
+looked at her she was looking at me, very pale, her lips quite white,
+her hands tightly clasped in her lap, and trembling all over.
+
+I said, "You used to be little Mimsey Seraskier, and I used to carry you
+pickaback!"
+
+"Oh don't! oh don't!" she said, and began to cry.
+
+I got up and walked about under the ash-tree till she had dried her
+eyes. The croquet-players were intent upon their game.
+
+I again sat down beside her; she had dried her eyes, and at length she
+said--
+
+"What a dreadful thing it was about your poor father and mother, and
+_my_ dear mother! Do you remember her? She died a week after you left. I
+went to Russia with papa--Dr. Seraskier. What a terrible break-up it
+all was!"
+
+And then we gradually fell to talking quite naturally about old times,
+and dear dead people. She never took her eyes off mine. After a while
+I said--
+
+"I went to Passy, and found everything changed and built over. It
+nearly drove me mad to see. I went to St. Cloud, and saw you driving
+with the Empress of the French. That night I had such an extraordinary
+dream! I dreamed I was floundering about the Rue de la Pompe, and had
+just got to the avenue gate, and you were there."
+
+"Good heavens!" she whispered, and turned white again, and trembled all
+over, "what do you mean?"
+
+"Yes," I said, "you came to my rescue. I was pursued by gnomes and
+horrors."
+
+_She._ "Good heavens! by--by two little jailers, a man and his wife, who
+danced and were trying to hem you in?"
+
+It was now my turn to ejaculate "Good heavens!" We both shook and
+trembled together.
+
+I said: "You gave me your hand, and all came straight at once. My old
+school rose in place of the jail."
+
+_She._ "With a yellow omnibus? And boys going off to their _première
+communion?_"
+
+_I._ "Yes; and there was a crowd--le Père et la Mère
+François, and Madame Liard, the grocer's wife, and--and
+Mimsey Seraskier, with her cropped head. And
+an organ was playing a tune I knew quite well, but
+cannot now recall." ...
+
+_She._ "Wasn't it 'Maman, les p'tits bateaux?'"
+
+_I._ Oh, of _course!_
+
+     _"'Maman, les p'tits bateaux
+     Qui vont sur l'eau,
+     Ont-ils des jambes?'"_
+
+_She_. "That's it!"
+
+     _"'Eh oui, petit bêta!
+     S'ils n'avaient pas
+     Ils n'march'raient pas!'"_
+
+She sank back in her chair, pale and prostrate. After a while--
+
+_She_. "And then I gave you good advice about how to dream true, and we
+got to my old house, and I tried to make you read the letters on the
+portico, and you read them wrong, and I laughed."
+
+_I_. "Yes; I read 'Tête Noire.' Wasn't it idiotic?"
+
+_She_. "And then I touched you again and you read 'Parvis Notre Dame.'"
+
+_I_. "Yes! and you touched me _again_, and I read 'Parva sed
+Apta'--small but fit."
+
+_She_. "Is _that_ what it means? Why, when you were a boy, you told me
+_sed apta_ was all one word, and was the Latin for 'Pavilion.' I
+believed it ever since, and thought 'Parva sed Apta' meant _petit
+pavillon_!"
+
+_I_. "I blush for my bad Latin! After this you gave me good advice
+again, about not touching anything or picking flowers. I never have. And
+then you went away into the park--the light went out of my life,
+sleeping or waking. I have never been able to dream of you since. I
+don't suppose I shall ever meet you again after to-day!"
+
+After this we were silent for a long time, though I hummed and hawed now
+and then, and tried to speak. I was sick with the conflict of my
+feelings. At length she said--
+
+"Dear Mr. Ibbetson, this is all so extraordinary that I must go away
+and think it all over. I cannot tell you what it has been to me to meet
+you once more. And that double dream, common to us both! Oh, I am dazed
+beyond expression, and feel as if I were dreaming now--except that this
+all seems so unreal and impossible--so untrue! We had better part now. I
+don't know if I shall ever meet you again. You will be often in my
+thoughts, but never in my dreams again--that, at least, I can
+command--nor I in yours; it must not be. My poor father taught me how to
+dream before he died, that I might find innocent consolation in dreams
+for my waking troubles, which are many and great, as his were. If I can
+see that any good may come of it, I will write--but no--you must not
+expect a letter. I will now say good-bye and leave you. You go to-day,
+do you not? That is best. I think this had better be a final adieu. I
+cannot tell you of what interest you are to me and always have been. I
+thought you had died long ago. We shall often think of each other--that
+is inevitable--_but never, never dream. That will not do._
+
+"Dear Mr. Ibbetson, I wish you all the good that one human being can
+wish another. And now goodbye, and may God in heaven bless you!"
+
+She rose, trembling and white, and her eyes wet with tears, and wrung
+both my hands, and left me as she had left me in the dream.
+
+The light went out of my life, and I was once more alone--more
+wretchedly and miserably alone than if I had never met her.
+
+I went back to Pentonville, and outwardly took up the thread of my
+monotonous existence, and ate, drank, and worked, and went about as
+usual, but as one in an ordinary dream. For now dreams--true dreams--had
+become the only reality for me.
+
+[Illustration: A FAREWELL.]
+
+So great, so inconceivable and unexampled a wonder had been wrought in a
+dream that all the conditions of life had been altered and reversed.
+
+I and another human being had met--actually and really met--in a double
+dream, a dream common to us both, and clasped each other's hands! And
+each had spoken words to the other which neither ever would or ever
+could forget.
+
+And this other human being and I had been enshrined in each other's
+memory for years--since childhood--and were now linked together by a tie
+so marvellous, an experience so unprecedented, that neither could ever
+well be out of the other's thoughts as long as life and sense and
+memory lasted.
+
+Her very self, as we talked to each other under the ash-tree at Cray,
+was less vividly present to me than that other and still dearer self of
+hers with whom I had walked up the avenue in that balmy dream
+atmosphere, where we had lived and moved and had our being together for
+a few short moments, yet each believing the other at the time to be a
+mere figment of his own (and her) sleeping imagination; such stuff as
+dreams are made of!
+
+And lo! it was all true--as true as the common experience of every-day
+life--more (ten times more), because through our keener and more exalted
+sense perceptions, and less divided attention, we were more conscious of
+each other's real inner being--linked closer together for a space--than
+two mortals had probably ever been since the world began.
+
+That clasp of the hands in the dream--how infinitely more it had
+conveyed of one to the other than even that sad farewell clasp at Cray!
+
+In my poor outer life I waited in vain for a letter; in vain I haunted
+the parks and streets--the street where she lived--in the hope of seeing
+her once more. The house was shut; she was away--in America, as I
+afterwards learned--with her husband and child.
+
+At night, in the familiar scenes I had learned so well to conjure up, I
+explored every nook and corner with the same yearning desire to find a
+trace of her. I was hardly ever away from "Parva sed Apta." There were
+Madame Seraskier and Mimsey and the major, and my mother and Gogo, at
+all times, in and out, and of course as unconscious of my solid presence
+as though I had never existed. And as I looked at Mimsey and her mother
+I wondered at my obtuseness in not recognizing at the very first glance
+who the Duchess of Towers had been, and whose daughter. The height, the
+voice, the eyes, certain tricks of gait and gesture--how could I have
+failed to know her again after such recent dream opportunities?
+
+And Seraskier, towering among them all, as his daughter now towered
+among women. I saw that he lived again in his daughter; _his_ was the
+smile that closed up the eyes, as hers did; had Mimsey ever smiled in
+those days, I should have known her again by this very characteristic
+trait.
+
+Of this daughter of his (the Mimsey of the past years, not the duchess
+of to-day) I never now could have enough, and made her go through again
+and again all the scenes with Gogo, so dear to my remembrance, and to
+hers. I was, in fact, the Prince Charmant, of whose unseen attendance
+she had been conscious in some inconceivable way. What a strange
+foresight! But where was the fée Tarapatapoum? Never there during this
+year of unutterable longing; she had said it; never, never again should
+I be in her dream, or she in mine, however constantly we might dwell in
+each other's thoughts.
+
+So sped a twelvemonth after that last meeting in the flesh at Gray.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now with an unwilling heart and most reluctant pen, I must come to
+the great calamity of my life which I will endeavor to tell in as few
+words as possible.
+
+The reader, if he has been good enough to read without skipping, will
+remember the handsome Mrs. Deane, to whom I fancied I lost my heart, in
+Hopshire, a few years back.
+
+I had not seen her since--had, indeed, almost forgotten her--but had
+heard vaguely that she had left Hopshire, and come to London, and
+married a wealthy man much older than herself.
+
+Well, one day I was in Hyde Park, gazing at the people in the drive,
+when a spick-and-span and very brand-new open carriage went by, and in
+it sad Mrs. Deane (that was), all alone in her glory, and looking very
+sulky indeed. She recognized me and bowed, and I bowed back again, with
+just a moment's little flutter of the heart--an involuntary tribute to
+auld lang syne--and went on my way, wondering that I could ever had
+admired her so.
+
+Presently, to my surprise, I was touched on the elbow. It was Mrs. Deane
+again--I will call her Mrs. Deane still. She had got out and followed
+me on foot. It was her wish that I should drive round the park with her
+and talk of old times. I obeyed, and for the first and last time found
+myself forming part of that proud and gay procession I had so often
+watched with curious eyes.
+
+She seemed anxious to know whether I had ever made it up with Colonel
+Ibbetson, and pleased to hear that I had not, and that I probably never
+should, and that my feeling against him was strong and bitter and
+likely to last.
+
+She appeared to hate him very much.
+
+She inquired kindly after myself and my prospects in life, but did not
+seem deeply interested in my answers--until later, when I talked of my
+French life, and my dear father and mother, when she listened with eager
+sympathy, and I was much touched. She asked if I had portraits of them;
+I had--most excellent miniatures; and when we parted I had promised to
+call upon her next afternoon, and bring these miniatures with me.
+
+She seemed a languid woman, much ennuyée, and evidently without a large
+circle of acquaintance. She told me I was the only person in the whole
+park whom she had bowed to that day. Her husband was in Hamburg, and she
+was going to meet him in Paris in a day or two.
+
+I had not so many friends but what I felt rather glad than otherwise to
+have met her, and willingly called, as I had promised, with the
+portraits.
+
+She lived in a large, new house, magnificently up near the Marble Arch.
+She was quite alone when I called, and asked me immediately if I had
+brought the miniatures; and looked at them quite eagerly, and then at
+me, and exclaimed--
+
+"Good heavens, you are your father's very image!"
+
+Indeed, I had always been considered so.
+
+Both his eyebrows and mine, especially, met in a singular and
+characteristic fashion at the bridge of the nose, and she seemed much
+struck by this. He was represented in the uniform of Charles X's _gardes
+du corps_, in which he had served for two years, and had acquired the
+nickname of "le beau Pasquier." Mrs. Deane seemed never to tire of
+gazing at it, and remarked that my father "must have been the very ideal
+of a young girl's dream" (an indirect compliment which made me blush
+after what she had just said of the likeness between us. I almost began
+to wonder whether she was going to try and make a fool of me again, as
+she had so successfully done a few years ago).
+
+Then she became interested again in my early life and recollections, and
+wanted to know whether my parents were fond of each other. They were a
+most devoted and lover-like pair, and had loved each other at first
+sight and until death, and I told her so; and so on until I became quite
+excited, and imagined she must know of some good fortune to which I was
+entitled, and had been kept out of by the machinations of a
+wicked uncle.
+
+For I had long discovered in my dreams that he had been my father's
+bitterest enemy and the main cause of his financial ruin, by selfish,
+heartless, and dishonest deeds too complicated to explain here--a
+regular Shylock.
+
+I had found this out by listening (in my dreams) to long conversations
+between my father and mother in the old drawing-room at Passy, while
+Gogo was absorbed in his book; and every word that had passed through
+Gogo's inattentive ears into his otherwise preoccupied little brain had
+been recorded there as in a phonograph, and was now repeated over and
+over again for Peter Ibbetson, as he sat unnoticed among them.
+
+I asked her, jokingly, if she had discovered that I was the rightful
+heir to Ibbetson Hall by any chance.
+
+She replied that nothing would give her greater pleasure, but there was
+no such good fortune in store for either her or me; that she had
+discovered long ago that Colonel Ibbetson was the greatest blackguard
+unhung, and nothing new she might discover could make him worse.
+
+I then remembered how he would often speak of her, even to me, and hint
+and insinuate things which were no doubt untrue, and which I
+disbelieved. Not that the question of their truth or untruth made him
+any the less despicable and vile for telling.
+
+She asked me if he had ever spoken of her to me, and after much
+persuasion and cunning cross-examination I told her as much of the truth
+as I dared, and she became a tigress. She assured me that he had managed
+so to injure and compromise her in Hopshire that she and her mother had
+to leave, and she swore to me most solemnly (and I thoroughly believe
+she spoke the truth) that there had never been any relation between
+them that she could not have owned to before the whole world.
+
+She had wished to marry him, it is true, for his wealth and position;
+for both she and her mother were very poor, and often hard put to it to
+make both ends meet and keep up a decent appearance before the world;
+and he had singled her out and paid her marked attention from the first,
+and given her every reason to believe that his attentions were serious
+and honorable.
+
+At this juncture her mother came in, Mrs. Glyn, and we renewed our old
+acquaintance. She had quite forgiven me my school-boy admiration for her
+daughter; all her power of hating, like her daughter's, had concentrated
+itself on Ibbetson; and as I listened to the long story of their wrongs
+and his infamy, I grew to hate him worse than ever, and was ready to be
+their champion on the spot, and to take up their quarrel there and then.
+
+But this would not do, it appeared, for their name must nevermore be in
+any way mixed up with his.
+
+Then suddenly Mrs. Glyn asked me if I knew when he went to India.
+
+I could satisfy her, for I knew that it was just after my parents'
+marriage, nearly a year before my birth; upon which she gave the exact
+date of his departure with his regiment, and the name of the transport,
+and everything; and also, to my surprise, the date of my parents'
+marriage at Marylebone Church, and of my baptism there fifteen months
+later--just fourteen weeks after my birth in Passy. I was growing quite
+bewildered with all this knowledge of my affairs, and wondered more
+and more.
+
+We sat silent for a while, the two women looking at each other and at me
+and at the miniatures. It was getting grewsome. What could it all mean?
+
+Presently Mrs. Glyn, at a nod from her daughter, addressed me thus:
+
+"Mr. Ibbetson, your uncle, as you call him, though he is not your uncle,
+is a very terrible villain, and has done you and your parents a very
+foul wrong. Before I tell you what it is (and I think you ought to know)
+you must give me your word of honor that you will do or say nothing that
+will get our name publicly mixed up in any way with Colonel Ibbetson's.
+The injury to my daughter, now she is happily married to an excellent
+man, would be irreparable."
+
+With a beating heart I solemnly gave the required assurance.
+
+"Then, Mr. Ibbetson, it is right that you should know that Colonel
+Ibbetson, when he was paying his infamous addresses to my daughter, gave
+her unmistakably to understand that you were his natural son, by his
+cousin, Miss Catherine Biddulph, afterwards Madame Pasquier de
+la Marière!"
+
+"Oh, oh, oh!" I cried, "surely you must be mistaken--he knew it was
+impossible--he had been refused by my mother three times--he went to
+India nearly a year before I was born--he--"
+
+Then Mrs. Deane said, producing an old letter from her pocket:
+
+"Do you know his handwriting and his crest? Do you happen to recollect
+once bringing me a note from at Ibbetson Hall? Here it is," and she
+handed it to me. It was unmistakably his, and I remembered it at once,
+and this is what it said:
+
+"For Heaven's sake, dear friend, don't breathe a word to any living soul
+of what you were clever enough to guess last night! There is a likeness,
+of course.
+
+"Poor Antinoüs! He is quite ignorant of the true relationship, which has
+caused me many a pang of shame and remorse....
+
+"'Que voulez-vous? Elle était ravissaure!' ... We were cousins, much
+thrown together; 'both were so young, and one so beautiful!' ... I was
+but a penniless cornet in those days--hardly more than a boy. Happily an
+unsuspecting Frenchman of good family was there who had loved her long,
+and she married him. 'Il était temps!' ...
+
+"Can you forgive me this 'entraînement de jeunesse?' I have repented in
+sackcloth and ashes, and made what reparation I could by adopting and
+giving my name to one who is a perpetual reminder to me of a moment's
+infatuation. He little knows, poor boy, and never will, I hope. 'Il n'a
+plus que moi au monde!'
+
+"Burn this as soon as you have read it, and never let the subject be
+mentioned between us again.
+
+"R. ('Qui sait aimer')."
+
+Here was a thunderbolt out of the blue!
+
+I sat stunned and saw scarlet, and felt as if I should see scarlet
+forever.
+
+[Illustration: THE FATAL LETTER.]
+
+After a long silence, during which I could feel my pulse beat to
+bursting-point in my temples, Mrs. Glyn said:
+
+"Now, Mr. Ibbetson, I hope you will do nothing rash--nothing that can
+bring my daughter's name into any quarrel between yourself and your
+uncle. For the sake of your mother's good name, you will be prudent, I
+know. If he could speak like this of his cousin, with whom he had been
+in love when he was young, what lies would he not tell of my poor
+daughter? He _has_--terrible lies! Oh, what we have suffered! When he
+wrote that letter I believe he really meant to marry her. He had the
+greatest trust in her, or he would never have committed himself so
+foolishly."
+
+"Does he know of this letter's existing?" I asked.
+
+"No. When he and my daughter quarrelled she sent him back his
+letters--all but this one, which she told him she had burned immediately
+after reading it, as he had told her to do."
+
+"May I keep it?"
+
+"Yes. I know you may be trusted, and my daughter's name has been removed
+from the outside, as you see. No one but ourselves has ever seen it, nor
+have we mentioned to a soul what it contains, as we never believed it
+for a moment. Two or three years ago we had the curiosity to find out
+when and where your parents had married, and when you were born, and
+when _he_ went to India, it was no surprise to us at all. We then tried
+to find you, but soon gave it up, and thought it better to leave matters
+alone. Then we heard he was in mischief again--just the same sort of
+mischief; and then my daughter saw you in the park, and we concluded you
+ought to know."
+
+Such was the gist of that memorable conversation, which I have condensed
+as much as I could.
+
+When I left these two ladies I walked twice rapidly round the park. I
+saw scarlet often during that walk. Perhaps I looked scarlet. I remember
+people staring at me.
+
+Then I went straight to Lintot's, with the impulse to tell him my
+trouble and ask his advice.
+
+He was away from home, and I waited in his smoking-room for a while,
+reading the letter over and over again.
+
+Then I decided not to tell him, and left the house, taking with me as I
+did so (but without any definite purpose) a heavy loaded stick, a most
+formidable weapon, even in the hands of a boy, and which I myself had
+given to Lintot on his last birthday. [Greek: Anagkae]!
+
+Then I went to my usual eating-house near the circus and dined. To the
+surprise of the waiting-maid, I drank a quart of bitter ale and two
+glasses of sherry. It was my custom to drink water. She plied me with
+questions as to whether I was ill or in trouble. I answered her no, and
+at last begged she would leave me alone.
+
+Ibbetson lived in St. James's Street. I went there. He was out. It was
+nine o'clock, and his servant seemed uncertain when he would return. I
+came back at ten. He was not yet home, and the servant, after thinking a
+while, and looking up and down the street, and finding my appearance
+decent and by no means dangerous, asked me to go upstairs and wait, as I
+told him it was a matter of great importance.
+
+So I went and sat in my uncle's drawing-room and waited.
+
+The servant came with me and lit the candles, and remarked on the
+weather, and handed me the _Saturday Review_ and _Punch_. I must have
+looked quite natural--as I tried to look--and he left me.
+
+I saw a Malay creese on the mantel-piece and hid it behind a
+picture-frame. I locked a door leading to another drawing-room where
+there was a grand piano, and above it a trophy of swords, daggers,
+battle-axes, etc., and put the key in my pocket.
+
+The key of the room where I waited was inside the door.
+
+All this time I had a vague idea of possible violence on his part, but
+no idea of killing him. I felt far too strong for that. Indeed, I had a
+feeling of quiet, irresistible strength--the result of suppressed
+excitement.
+
+I sat down and meditated all I would say. I had settled it over and over
+again, and read and reread the fatal letter.
+
+The servant came up with glasses and soda-water. I trembled lest he
+should observe that the door to the other room was locked, but he did
+not. He opened the window and looked up and down the street. Presently
+he said, "Here's the colonel at last, sir," and went down to open
+the door.
+
+I heard him come in and speak to his servant. Then he came straight up,
+humming _"la donna e mobile,"_ and walked in with just the jaunty, airy
+manner I remembered. He was in evening dress, and very little changed.
+He seemed much surprised to see me, and turned very white.
+
+"Well, my Apollo of the T square, _pourquoi cet honneur?_ Have you come,
+like a dutiful nephew, to humble yourself and beg for forgiveness?"
+
+I forgot all I meant to say (indeed, nothing happened as I had meant),
+but rose and said, "I have come to have a talk with you," as quietly as
+I could, though with a thick voice.
+
+He seemed uneasy, and went towards the door.
+
+I got there before him, and closed it, and locked it, and put the key
+in my pocket.
+
+He darted to the other door and found it locked.
+
+Then he went to the mantel-piece and looked for the creese, and not
+finding it, he turned round with his back to the fireplace and his arms
+akimbo, and tried to look very contemptuous and determined. His chin was
+quite white under his dyed mustache--like wax--and his eyes blinked
+nervously.
+
+I walked up to him and said: "You told Mrs. Deane that I was your
+natural son."
+
+"It's a lie! Who told you so?"
+
+"She did--this afternoon."
+
+"It's a lie--a spiteful invention of a cast-off mistress!"
+
+"She never was your mistress!"
+
+"You fool! I suppose she told you that too. Leave the room, you pitiful
+green jackass, or I'll have you turned out," and he rang the bell.
+
+"Do you know your own handwriting?" I said, and handed him the letter.
+
+He read a line or two and gasped out that it was a forgery, and rang the
+bell again, and looked again behind the clock for his creese. Then he
+lit the letter at a candle and threw it in the fireplace, where it
+blazed out.
+
+I made no attempt to prevent him.
+
+The servant tried to open the door, and Ibbetson went to the window and
+called out for the police. I rushed to the picture where I had hidden
+the creese, and threw it on the table. Then I swung him away from the
+window by his coat-tails, and told him to defend himself, pointing to
+the creese.
+
+He seized it, and stood on the defensive; the servant had apparently run
+down-stairs for assistance.
+
+"Now, then," I said, "down on your knees, you infamous cur, and confess;
+it's your only chance."
+
+"Confess what, you fool?"
+
+"That you're a coward and a liar; that you wrote that letter; that Mrs.
+Deane was no more your mistress than my mother was!"
+
+There was a sound of people running up-stairs. He listened a moment and
+hissed out:
+
+"They _both_ were, you idiot! How can I tell for certain whether you are
+my son or not? It all comes to the same. Of course I wrote the letter.
+Come on, you cowardly assassin, you bastard parricide!" ... and he
+advanced on me with his creese low down in his right hand, the point
+upward, and made a thrust, shrieking out, "Break open the door! quick!"
+They did; but too late!
+
+[Illustration: "BASTARD! PARRICIDE!"]
+
+I saw crimson!
+
+He missed me, and I brought down my stick on his left arm, which he held
+over his head, and then on his head, and he fell, crying:
+
+"O my God! O Christ!"
+
+I struck him again on his head as he was falling, and once again when he
+was on the ground. It seemed to crash right in.
+
+That is why and how I killed Uncle Ibbetson.
+
+
+
+
+Part Five
+
+[Illustration]
+
+     "_Grouille, grève, grève, grouille,
+     File, file, ma quenouille!
+     File sa corde au bourreau
+     Qui siffle dans le préau..._"
+
+
+So sang the old hag in _Notre Dame de Paris!_
+
+So sang to me night and day, for many nights and days, the thin small
+voice that always went piping inside me, now to one tune, now to
+another, but always the same words--that terrible refrain that used to
+haunt me so when I was a school-boy at Bluefriars!
+
+Oh, to be a school-boy again in a long gray coat and ridiculous pink
+stockings--innocent and free--with Esmeralda for my only love, and Athos
+and Porthos and D'Artagnan for my bosom friends, and no worse
+tribulation than to be told on a Saturday afternoon that the third
+volume was in hand--_volume trois en lecture_'.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Sometimes, I remember, I could hardly sleep on a Sunday night, for pity
+of the poor wretch who was to be hanged close by on Monday morning, and
+it has come to that with _me_!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Oh, Mary, Mary, Duchess of Towers, sweet friend of my childhood, and
+love of my life, what must you think of me now?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+How blessed are the faithful! How good it must be to trust in God and
+heaven, and the forgiveness of sin, and be as a little child in all but
+innocence! A whole career of crime wiped out in a moment by just one
+cheap little mental act of faith at the eleventh hour, in the extreme
+terror of well-merited dissolution; and all the evil one has worked
+through life (that goes on breeding evil for ages to come) taken off
+one's shoulders like a filthy garment, and just cast aside, anywhere,
+anyhow, for the infecting of others--who do not count.
+
+What matter if it be a fool's paradise? Paradise is paradise, for
+whoever owns it!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They say a Sicilian drum-major, during the French occupation of Palermo,
+was sentenced to be shot. He was a well-known coward, and it was feared
+he would disgrace his country at the last moment in the presence of the
+French soldiers, who had a way of being shot with a good grace and a
+light heart: they had grown accustomed to it.
+
+For the honor of Sicily his confessor told him, in the strictest
+confidence, that his sentence was a mock one, and that he would be fired
+at with blank cartridges.
+
+It was a pious fraud. All but two of the twelve cartridges had bullets,
+and he fell, riddled through and through. No Frenchman ever died with a
+lighter heart, a better grace. He was superb, and the national honor
+was saved.
+
+Thrice happy Sicilian drum-major, if the story be true! That trust in
+blank cartridges was his paradise.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Oh, it is uphill work to be a stoic when the moment comes and the tug!
+But when the tug lasts for more than a moment--days and nights, days and
+nights! Oh, happy Sicilian drum-major!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Pray? Yes, I will pray night and morning, and all day long, to whatever
+there is left of inherited strength and courage in that luckless,
+misbegotten waif, Peter Ibbetson; that it may bear him up a little while
+yet; that he may not disgrace himself in the dock or on the gallows.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Repent? Yes, of many things. But of the thing for which I am here?
+Never!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is a ghastly thing to be judge and jury and executioner all in one,
+and for a private and personal wrong--to condemn and strike and kill.
+
+Pity comes after--when it is too late, fortunately--the wretched
+weakness of pity! Pooh! no Calcraft will ever pity _me_, and I do not
+want him to.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He had his long, snaky knife against my stick; he, too, was a big strong
+man, well skilled in self-defence! Down he went, and I struck him again
+and again. "O my God! O Christ!" he shrieked....
+
+"It will ring in my heart and my ears till I die--till I die!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was no time to lose--no time to think for the best. It is all for
+the best as it is. What might he not have said if he had lived!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thank Heaven, pity is not remorse or shame; and what crime could well
+be worse than his? To rob one's dearly beloved dead of their fair shame!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He might have been mad, perhaps, and have grown in time to believe the
+lies he told himself. Such things have been. But such a madman should no
+more be suffered to live than a mad dog. The only way to kill the lie
+was to kill the liar--that is, if one _can_ ever kill a lie!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Poor worm! after all, he could not help it, I suppose! he was _built_
+like that! and _I_ was built to kill him for it, and be hanged.'
+[Greek: Anagkae]!
+
+What an exit for "Gogo--gentil petit Gogo!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Just opposite that wall, on the other side, was once a small tripe and
+trotter shop, kept by a most lovely daughter of the people, so fair and
+good in my eyes that I would have asked her to be my wife. What would
+she think of me now? That I should have dared to aspire! What a
+King Cophetua!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What does everybody think? I can never breathe the real cause to a soul.
+Only two women know the truth, and they will take good care not to tell.
+Thank Heaven for that!
+
+What matters what anybody thinks? "It will be all the same as a hundred
+years hence." That is the most sensible proverb ever invented.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But meanwhile!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The judge puts on the black cap, and it is all for you! Every eye is
+fixed on you, so big and young and strong and full of life! Ugh!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They pinion you, and you have to walk and be a man, and the chaplain
+exhorts and prays and tries to comfort. Then a sea of faces; people
+opposite, who have been eating and drinking and making merry, waiting for
+_you!_ A cap is pulled over your eyes--oh, horror! horror! horror!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Heureux tambour-major de Sicile!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Il faut laver son ligne sale en famille, et c'est ce que j'ai fait.
+Mais ça va ma coûter cher!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Would I do it all over again? Oh, let me hope, yes!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Ah, he died too quick; I dealt him those four blows in less than as
+many seconds. It was five minutes, perhaps--or, at the most, ten--from
+the moment he came into the room to that when I finished him and was
+caught red-handed. And I--what a long agony!
+
+Oh, that I might once more dream a "true dream," and see my dear people
+once more! But it seems that I have lost the power of dreaming true
+since that fatal night. I try and try, but it will not come. My dreams
+are dreadful; and, oh, the _waking_!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After all, my life hitherto, but for a few happy years of childhood, has
+not been worth living; it is most unlikely that it ever would have been,
+had I lived to a hundred! Oh, Mary! Mary!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And penal servitude! Better any death than that. It is good that my
+secret must die with me--that there will be no extenuating
+circumstances, no recommendation to mercy, no commutation of the swift
+penalty of death.
+
+"File, file... File sa corde au bourreau!"
+
+By such monotonous thoughts, and others as dreary and hopeless,
+recurring again and again in the same dull round, I beguiled the
+terrible time that intervened between Ibbetson's death and my trial at
+the Old Bailey.
+
+It all seems very trivial and unimportant now--not worth
+recording--even hard to remember.
+
+But at the time my misery was so great, my terror of the gallows so
+poignant, that each day I thought I must die of sheer grief before
+another twenty-four hours could possibly pass over me.
+
+The intolerable strain would grow more and more severe till a climax of
+tension was reached, and a hysterical burst of tears would relieve me
+for a while, and I would feel reconciled to my fate, and able to face
+death like a man.... Then the anguish would gradually steal over me
+again, and the uncontrollable weakness of the flesh....
+
+And each of these two opposite moods, while it lasted, made the other
+seem impossible, and as if it never could come back again; yet back it
+came with the regularity of a tide--the most harrowing seesaw that
+ever was.
+
+I had always been unstable like that; but whereas I had hitherto
+oscillated between high elation and despondency, it was now from a dumb,
+resigned despair to the wildest agony and terror.
+
+I sought in vain for the only comfort it was in me to seek; but when,
+overdone with suffering, I fell asleep at last, I could no longer dream
+true; I could dream only as other wretches dream.
+
+I always dreamed those two little dancing, deformed jailers, man and
+wife, had got me at last; and that I shrieked aloud for my beloved
+duchess to succor me, as they ran me in, each butting at me sideways,
+and showing their toothless gums in a black smile, and poisoning me
+with their hot sour breath! The gate was there, and the avenue, all
+distorted and quite unlike; and, opposite, a jail; but no powerful
+Duchess of Towers to wave the horror away.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It will be remembered by some, perhaps, how short was my trial.
+
+The plea of "not guilty" was entered for me. The defence set up was
+insanity, based on the absence of any adequate motive. This defence was
+soon disposed of by the prosecution; witnesses to my sanity were not
+wanting, and motives enough were found in my past relations with Colonel
+Ibbetson to "make me--a violent, morose, and vindictive-natured
+man--imbrue my hands in the gore of my relative and benefactor--a man
+old enough to be my father--who, indeed, might have been my father, for
+the love he had bestowed upon me, with his honored name, when I was left
+a penniless, foreign orphan on his hands."
+
+Here I laughed loud and long, and made a most painful impression, as is
+duly recorded in the reports of the trial.
+
+The jury found me guilty quite early in the afternoon of the second day,
+without leaving the box; and I, "preserving to the last the callous and
+unmoved demeanor I had borne all through the trial," was duly sentenced
+to death without any hope of mercy, but with an expression of regret on
+the part of the judge--a famous hanging judge--that a man of my
+education and promise should be brought by his own evil nature and
+uncontrollable passions to so deplorable an end.
+
+Now whether the worst of certainties is better than suspense--whether my
+nerves of pain had been so exercised during the period preceding my
+trial that I had really become callous, as they say a man's back does
+after a certain number of strokes from the "cat"--certain it was that I
+knew the worst, and acquiesced in it with a surprised sense of actual
+relief, and found it in me to feel it not unbearable.
+
+Such, at least, was my mood that night. I made the most of it. It was
+almost happiness by comparison with what I had gone through. I remember
+eating with a heartiness that surprised me. I could have gone straight
+from my dinner to the gallows, and died with a light heart and a good
+grace--like a Sicilian drum-major.
+
+I resolved to write the whole true story to the Duchess of Towers, with
+an avowal of my long and hopeless adoration for her, and the expression
+of a hope that she would try to think of me only as her old playfellow,
+and as she had known me before this terrible disaster. And thinking of
+the letter I would write till very late, I fell asleep in my cell, with
+two warders to watch over me; and then--Another phase of my inner
+life began.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Without effort, without let or hindrance of any kind, I was at the
+avenue gate.
+
+The pink and white may, the lilacs and laburnums were in full bloom, the
+sun made golden paths everywhere. The warm air was full of fragrance,
+and alive with all the buzz and chirp of early summer.
+
+I was half crying with joy to reach the land of my true dreams again, to
+feel at home once more--_chez moi! chez moi!_
+
+La Mère François sat peeling potatoes at the door of her _loge_; she was
+singing a little song about _cinq sous, sinq sous, pour monter notre
+ménage._ I had forgotten it, but it all came back now.
+
+[Illustration: "CINQ SOUS, CINQ SOUS, POUR MONTER NOTRE MÉNAGE."]
+
+The facetious postman, Yverdon, went in at the gate of my old garden;
+the bell rang as he pushed it, and I followed him.
+
+Under the apple-tree, which was putting forth shoots of blossom in
+profusion, sat my mother and Monsieur le Major. My mother took the
+letter from the postman's hand as he said, "Pour Vous? Oh yes, Madame
+Pasquier, God sev ze Kveen!" and paid the postage. It was from Colonel
+Ibbetson, then in Ireland, and not yet a colonel.
+
+Médor lay snoring on the grass, and Gogo and Mimsey were looking at the
+pictures in the _musée des familles._
+
+In a garden chair lolled Dr. Seraskier, apparently asleep, with his long
+porcelain pipe across his knees.
+
+Madame Seraskier, in a yellow nankeen gown with gigot sleeves, was
+cutting curl-papers out of the _Constitutionnel_.
+
+I gazed on them all with unutterable tenderness. I was gazing on them
+perhaps for the last time.
+
+I called out to them by name.
+
+"Oh, speak to me, beloved shades! Oh, my father! oh, mother, I want you
+so desperately! Come out of the past for a few seconds, and give me some
+words of comfort! I'm in such woful plight! If you could only
+_know_ ..."
+
+But they could neither hear nor see me.
+
+Then suddenly another figure stepped forth from behind the
+apple-tree--no old-fashioned, unsubstantial shadow of by-gone days that
+one can only see and hear, and that cannot hear and see one back again;
+but one in all the splendid fulness of life, a pillar of help and
+strength--Mary, Duchess of Towers!
+
+I fell on my knees as she came to me with both hands extended.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Ibbetson, I have been seeking and waiting for you here night
+after night! I have been frantic! If you hadn't come at last, I must
+have thrown everything to the winds, and gone to see you in Newgate,
+waking and before the world, to have a talk with you--an _abboccamento_.
+I suppose you couldn't sleep, or were unable to dream."
+
+I could not answer at first. I could only cover her hands with kisses,
+as I felt her warm life-current mixing with mine--a rapture!
+
+And then I said--
+
+"I swear to you by all I hold most sacred--by _my_ mother's memory and
+_yours_--by yourself--that I never meant to take Ibbetson's life, or
+even strike him; the miserable blow was dealt...."
+
+"As if you need tell me that! As if I didn't know you of old, my poor
+friend, kindest and gentlest of men! Why, I am holding your hands, and
+see into the very depths of your heart!"
+
+(I put down all she said as she said it. Of course I am not, and never
+have been, what her old affectionate regard made me seem in her eyes,
+any more than I am the bloodthirsty monster I passed for. Woman-like,
+she was the slave of her predilections.)
+
+"And now, Mr. Ibbetson," she went on, "let me first of all tell you, for
+a certainty, that the sentence will be commuted. I saw the Home
+Secretary three or four hours ago. The real cause of your deplorable
+quarrel with your uncle is an open secret. His character is well known.
+A Mrs. Gregory (whom you knew in Hopshire as Mrs. Deane) has been with
+the Home Secretary this afternoon. Your chivalrous reticence at the
+trial...."
+
+"Oh," I interrupted, "I don't care to live any longer! Now that I have
+met you once more, and that you have forgiven me and think well of me in
+spite of everything, I am ready to die. There has never been anybody but
+you in the world for _me_--never a ghost of a woman, never even a friend
+since my mother died and yours. Between that time and the night I first
+saw you at Lady Cray's concert, I can scarcely be said to have lived at
+all. I fed on scraps of remembrance. You see I have no talent for making
+new friends, but oh, such a genius for fidelity to old ones! I was
+waiting for Mimsey to come back again, I suppose, the one survivor to me
+of that sweet time, and when she came at last I was too stupid to
+recognize her. She suddenly blazed and dazzled into my poor life like a
+meteor, and filled it with a maddening love and pain. I don't know which
+of the two has been the sweetest; both have been my life. You cannot
+realize what it has been. Trust me, I have lived my fill. I am ready and
+willing to die. It is the only perfect consummation I can think of.
+Nothing can ever equal this moment--nothing on earth or in heaven. And
+if I were free to-morrow, life would not be worth having without _you_.
+I would not take it as a gift."
+
+She sat down by me on the grass with her hands clasped across her knees,
+close to the unconscious shadows of our kith and kin, within hearing of
+their happy talk and laughter.
+
+Suddenly we both heard Mimsey say to Gogo--
+
+"O, ils sont joliment bien ensemble, le Prince Charmant et la fée
+Tarapatapoum!"
+
+We looked at each other and actually laughed aloud. The duchess said--
+
+"Was there ever, since the world began, such a _muse en scène_, and for
+such a meeting, Mr. Ibbetson? Think of it! Conceive it! _I_ arranged it
+all. I chose a day when they were all together. As they would say in
+America, _I_ am the boss of this particular dream."
+
+And she laughed again, through her tears, that enchanting ripple of a
+laugh that closed her eyes and made her so irresistible.
+
+"Was there ever," said I--"ever since the world began, such ecstasy as I
+feel now? After this what can there be for me but death--well earned and
+well paid for? Welcome and lovely death!"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"You have not yet thought, Mr. Ibbetson--you have not realized what life
+may have in store for you if--if all you have said about your affection
+for me is true. Oh, it is too terrible for me to think of, I know, that
+you, scarcely more than a boy, should have to spend the rest of your
+life in miserable confinement and unprofitable monotonous toil. But
+there is _another_ side to that picture.
+
+"Now listen to your old friend's story--poor little Mimsey's confession.
+I will make it as short as I can.
+
+"Do you remember when you first saw me, a sickly, plain, sad little
+girl, at the avenue gate, twenty years ago?
+
+"Le Père François was killing a fowl--cutting its throat with a
+clasp-knife--and the poor thing struggled frantically in his grasp as
+its blood flowed into the gutter. A group of boys were looking on in
+great glee, and all the while Père François was gossiping with M. le
+Curé, who didn't seem to mind in the least. I was fainting with pity and
+horror. Suddenly you came out of the school opposite with Alfred and
+Charlie Plunket, and saw it all, and in a fit of noble rage you called
+Père François a 'sacred pig of assassin'--which, as you know, is very
+rude in French--and struck him as near his face as you could reach.
+
+"Have you forgotten that? Ah, _I_ haven't! It was not an effectual deed,
+perhaps, and certainly came too late to save the fowl. Besides, Père
+François struck you back again, and left some of the fowl's blood on
+your cheek. It was a baptism! You became on the spot my hero--my angel
+of light. Look at Gogo over there. Is he beautiful enough? That was
+_you_, Mr. Ibbetson.
+
+"M. le Curé said something about 'ces _Anglais_' who go mad if a man
+whips his horse, and yet pay people to box each other to death. Don't
+you really remember? Oh, the recollection to _me!_
+
+"And that little language we invented and used to talk so fluently!
+Don't you _rappel_ it to yourself? 'Ne le _récollectes_ tu pas?' as we
+would have said in those days, for it used to be _thee_ and _thou_
+with us then.
+
+"Well, at all events, you must remember how for five happy years we were
+so often together; how you drew for me, read to me, played with me; took
+my part in everything, right or wrong; carried me pickaback when I was
+tired. Your drawings--I have them all. And oh! you were so funny
+sometimes! How you used to make mamma laugh, and M. le Major! Just look
+at Gogo again. Have you forgotten what he is doing now? I haven't.... He
+has just changed the _musée des familles_ for the _Penny Magazine_, and
+is explaining Hogarth's pictures of the 'Idle and Industrious
+Apprentices' to Mimsey, and they are both agreed that the idle one is
+much the less objectionable of the two!
+
+"Mimsey looks passive enough, with her thumb in her mouth, doesn't she?
+Her little heart is so full of gratitude and love for Gogo that she
+can't speak. She can only suck her thumb. Poor, sick, ungainly child!
+She would like to be Gogo's slave--she would die for Gogo. And her
+mother adores Gogo too; she is almost jealous of dear Madame Pasquier
+for having so sweet a son. In just one minute from now, when she has
+cut that last curl-paper, poor long-dead mamma will call Gogo to her and
+give him a good 'Irish hug,' and make him happy for a week. Wait a
+minute and see. _There!_ What did I tell you?
+
+"Well, all that came to an end. Madame Pasquier went away and never came
+back, and so did Gogo. Monsieur and Madame Pasquier were dead, and dear
+mamma died in a week from the cholera. Poor heartbroken Mimsey was taken
+away to St. Petersburg, Warsaw, Leipsic, Venice, all over Europe, by her
+father, as heart-broken as herself.
+
+"It was her wish and her father's that she should become a pianist by
+profession, and she studied hard for many years in almost every capital,
+and under almost every master in Europe, and she gave promise
+of success.
+
+"And so, wandering from one place to another, she became a young
+woman--a greatly petted and spoiled and made-much-of young woman, Mr.
+Ibbetson, although she says it who shouldn't; and had many suitors of
+all kinds and countries.
+
+"But the heroic and angelic Gogo, with his lovely straight nose, and his
+hair _aux enfants d'Edouard_, and his dear little white silk chimney-pot
+hat and Eton jacket, was always enshrined in her memory, in her inmost
+heart, as the incarnation of all that was beautiful and brave and good.
+But alas! what had become of this Gogo in the mean time? Ah, he was
+never even heard of--he was dead!
+
+"Well, this long-legged, tender-hearted, grown-up young Mimsey of
+nineteen was attracted by a very witty and accomplished English attaché
+at Vienna--a Mr. Harcourt, who seemed deeply in love with her, and
+wished her to be his wife.
+
+"He was not rich, but Dr. Seraskier liked and trusted him so much that
+he dispossessed himself of almost everything he had to enable this young
+couple to marry--and they did. And truth compels me to admit that for a
+year they were very happy and contented with fate and each other.
+
+"Then a great misfortune befell them both. In a most unexpected manner,
+through four or five consecutive deaths in Mr. Harcourt's family, he
+became, first, Lord Harcourt, and then the Duke of Towers. And since
+then, Mr. Ibbetson, I have not had an hour's peace or happiness.
+
+"In the first place a son was born to me--a cripple, poor dear! and
+deformed from his birth; and as he grew older it soon became evident
+that he was also born without a mind.
+
+"Then my unfortunate husband changed completely; he drank and gambled
+and worse, till we came to live together as strangers, and only spoke to
+each other in public and before the world...."
+
+"Ah," I said, "you were still a great lady--an English duchess!"
+
+I could not endure the thought of that happy twelvemonth with that
+bestial duke! I, sober, chaste, and clean--of all but blood, alas!--and
+a condemned convict!
+
+Oh, Mr. Ibbetson, you must make no mistake about _me_! I was never
+intended by nature for a duchess--especially an English one. Not but
+what, if dukes and duchesses are necessary, the English are the
+best--and, of course, by dukes and duchesses I mean all that
+upper-ten-thousand in England which calls itself 'society'--as if there
+were no other worth speaking of. Some of them are almost angelic, but
+they are not for outsiders like me. Perpetual hunting and shooting and
+fishing and horseracing--eating, drinking, and killing, and making
+love--eternal court gossip and tittle-tattle--the Prince--the
+Queen--whom and what the Queen likes, whom and what she doesn't!--tame
+English party politics--the Church--a Church that doesn't know its own
+mind, in spite of its deans, bishops, archbishops, and their wives and
+daughters--and all their silly, solemn sense of social rank and dignity!
+Endless small-talk, dinners, and drums, and no society from year's end
+to year's end but each other! Ah, one must be caught young, and put in
+harness early, to lead such an existence as that and be content! And I
+had met and known _such_ men and women with my father! They _were_
+something to know!
+
+There is another society in London and elsewhere--a freemasonry of
+intellect and culture and hard work--_la haute bohême du talent_--men
+and women whose names are or ought to be household words all over the
+world; many of them are good friends of mine, both here and abroad; and
+that society, which was good enough for my father and mother, is quite
+good enough for me.
+
+I am a republican, Mr. Ibbetson--a cosmopolite--a born Bohemian!
+
+_"'Mon grand père était rossignol; Ma grand mère était hirondelle!"_
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Look at my dear people there--look at your dear people! What waifs and
+strays, until their ship comes home, which we know it never will! Our
+fathers forever racking their five wits in the pursuit of an idea! Our
+mothers forever racking theirs to save money and make both ends
+meet!... Why, Mr. Ibbetson, you are nearer to the _rossignol_ than I am.
+Do you remember your father's voice? Shall I ever forget it! He sang to
+me only last night, and in the midst of my harrowing anxiety about you I
+was beguiled into listening outside the window. He sang Rossini's
+_'Cujus Animam.'_ He _was_ the nightingale; that was his vocation, if he
+could but have known it. And you are my brother Bohemian; that is
+_yours!_ ... Ah, _my_ vocation! It was to be the wife of some busy
+brain-worker--man of science--conspirator--writer--artist--architect,
+if you like; to fence him round and shield him from all the little
+worries and troubles and petty vexations of life. I am a woman of
+business _par excellence_--a manager, and all that. He would have had a
+warm, well-ordered little nest to come home to after hunting his idea!
+
+"Well, I thought myself the most unhappy woman alive, and wrapped myself
+up in my affection for my much-afflicted little son; and as I held him
+to my breast, and vainly tried to warm and mesmerize him into feeling
+and intelligence, Gogo came back into my heart, and I was forever
+thinking, 'Oh, if I had a son like Gogo what a happy woman I should be!'
+and pitied Madame Pasquier for dying and leaving him so soon, for I had
+just begun to dream true, and had seen Gogo and his sweet mother
+once again.
+
+"And then one night--one never-to-be-forgotten night--I went to Lady
+Gray's concert, and saw you standing in a corner by yourself; and I
+thought, with a leap of my heart, 'Why, that must be Gogo, grown dark,
+and with a beard and mustache like a Frenchman!' But alas, I found that
+you were only a Mr. Ibbetson, Lady Cray's architect, whom she had asked
+to her house because he was 'quite the handsomest young man she had
+ever seen!'
+
+"You needn't laugh. You looked very nice, I assure you!
+
+"Well, Mr. Ibbetson, although you were not Gogo, you became suddenly so
+interesting to me that I never forgot you--you were never quite out of
+my mind. I wanted to counsel and advise you, and take you by the hand,
+and be an elder sister to you, for I felt myself already older than you
+in the world and its ways. I wanted to be twenty years older still, and
+to have you for my son. I don't know _what_ I wanted! You seemed so
+lonely, and fresh, and unspotted from the world, among all those smart
+worldlings, and yet so big and strong and square and invincible--oh, so
+strong! And then you looked at me with such sincere and sweet and
+chivalrous admiration and sympathy--there, I cannot speak of it--and
+then you were _so_ like what Gogo might have become! Oh, you made as
+warm and devoted a friend of me at first sight as any one might desire!
+
+"And at the same time you made me feel so self-conscious and shy that I
+dared not ask to be introduced to you--I, who scarcely know what
+shyness is.
+
+"Dear Giulia Grisi sang '_Sedut' al Pie d' un' Salice,' and that tune
+has always been associated in my mind with your tongue ever since, and
+always will be. Your dear mother used to play it on the harp. Do
+you remember?
+
+"Then came that extraordinary dream, which you remember as well as I do:
+_wasn't_ it a wonder? You see, my dear father had learned a strange
+secret of the brain--how in sleep to recall past things and people and
+places as they had once been seen or known by him--even unremembered
+things. He called it 'dreaming true,' and by long practice, he told me,
+he had brought the art of doing this to perfection. It was the one
+consolation of his troubled life to go over and over again in sleep all
+his happy youth and childhood, and the few short years he had spent with
+his beloved young wife. And before he died, when he saw I had become so
+unhappy that life seemed to have no longer any possible hope of pleasure
+for me, he taught me his very simple secret.
+
+"Thus have I revisited in sleep every place I have ever lived in, and
+especially this, the beloved spot where I first as a little girl
+knew _you_!"
+
+That night when we met again in our common dream I was looking at the
+boys from Saindou's school going to their _première communion_, and
+thinking very much of you, as I had seen you, when awake, a few hours
+before, looking out of the window at the 'Tête Noire;' when you suddenly
+appeared in great seeming trouble and walking like a tipsy man; and my
+vision was disturbed by the shadow of a prison--alas! alas!--and two
+little jailers jingling their keys and trying to hem you in.
+
+My emotion at seeing you again so soon was so great that I nearly woke.
+But I rescued you from your imaginary terrors and held you by the hand.
+You remember all the rest.
+
+I could not understand why you should be in my dream, as I had almost
+always dreamed true--that is, about things that _had_ been in my
+life--not about things that _might_ be; nor could I account for the
+solidity of your hand, nor understand why you didn't fade away when I
+took it, and blur the dream. It was a most perplexing mystery that
+troubled many hours of both my waking and sleeping life. Then came that
+meeting with you at Cray, and part of the mystery was accounted for, for
+you were my old friend Gogo, after all. But it is still a mystery, an
+awful mystery, that two people should meet as we are meeting now in one
+and the same dream--should dovetail so accurately into each other's
+brains. What a link between us two, Mr. Ibbetson, already linked by
+such memories!
+
+After meeting you at Cray I felt that I must never meet you again,
+either waking or dreaming. The discovery that you were Gogo, after all,
+combined with the preoccupation which as a mere stranger you had already
+caused me for so long, created such a disturbance in my spirit
+that--that--there, you must try and imagine it for yourself.
+
+Even before that revelation at Cray I had often known you were here in
+my dream, and I had carefully avoided you ... though little dreaming
+you were here in your own dream too! Often from that little
+dormer-window up there I have seen you wandering about the park and
+avenue in seeming search of _me_, and wondered why and how you came. You
+drove me into attics and servants' bedrooms to conceal myself from you.
+It was quite a game of hide-and-seek--_cache-cache_, as we used to
+call it.
+
+But after our meeting at Cray I felt there must be no more
+_cache-cache_; I avoided coming here at all; you drove me away
+altogether.
+
+Now try to imagine what I felt when the news of your terrible quarrel
+with Mr. Ibbetson burst upon the world. I was beside myself! I came here
+night after night; I looked for you everywhere--in the park, in the Bois
+de Boulogne, at the Mare d'Auteuil, at St. Cloud--in every place I could
+think of! And now here you are at last--at last!
+
+Hush! Don't speak yet! I have soon done!
+
+Six months ago I lost my poor little son, and, much as I loved him, I
+cannot wish him back again. In a fortnight I shall be legally separated
+from my wretched husband--I shall be quite alone in the world! And then,
+Mr. Ibbetson--oh, _then_, dearest friend that child or woman ever
+had--every hour that I can steal from my waking existence shall
+henceforward be devoted to you as long as both of us live, and sleep the
+same hours out of the twenty-four. My one object and endeavor shall be
+to make up for the wreck of your sweet and valuable young life. 'Stone
+walls shall not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage!' [And here she
+laughed and cried together, so that her eyes, closing up, squeezed out
+her tears, and I thought, "Oh, that I might drink them!"]
+
+And now I will leave you. I am a weak and loving woman, and must not
+stay by your side till I can do so without too much self-reproach.
+
+And indeed I feel I shall soon fall awake from sheer exhaustion of joy.
+Oh, selfish and jealous wretch that I am, to talk of joy!
+
+"I cannot help rejoicing that no other woman can be to you what I hope
+to be. No other woman can ever come _near_ you! I am your tyrant and
+your slave--your calamity has made you mine forever; but all my
+life--all--all--shall be spent in trying to make you forget yours, and I
+think I shall succeed."
+
+"Oh, don't make such dreadful haste!" I exclaimed. "Am _I_ dreaming
+true? What is to prove all this to me when I wake? Either I am the most
+abject and wretched of men, or life will never have another unhappy
+moment. How am I to _know_?'
+
+"Listen. Do you remember 'Parva sed Apta, le petit pavilion,' as you
+used to call it? That is still my home when I am here. It shall be
+yours, if you like, when the time comes. You will find much to interest
+you there. Well, to-morrow early, in your cell, you will receive from me
+an envelope with a slip of paper in it, containing some violets, and the
+words 'Parva sed Apta--à bientôt' written in violet ink. Will that
+convince you?"
+
+"Oh yes, yes!"
+
+"Well, then, give me your hands, dearest and best--both hands! I shall
+soon be here again, by this apple-tree; I shall count the hours.
+Good-bye!" and she was gone, and I woke.
+
+I woke to the gaslit darkness of my cell. It was just before dawn. One
+of the warders asked me civilly if I wanted anything, and gave me a
+drink of water.
+
+I thanked him quietly, and recalled what had just happened to me, with a
+wonder, an ecstasy, for which I can find no words.
+
+No, it had _not_ been a _dream_--of that I felt quite sure--not in any
+one single respect; there had been nothing of the dream about it except
+its transcendent, ineffable enchantment.
+
+Every inflexion of that beloved voice, with its scarcely perceptible
+foreign accent that I had never noticed before; every animated gesture,
+with its subtle reminiscence of both her father and her mother; her
+black dress trimmed with gray; her black and gray hat; the scent of
+sandal-wood about her--all were more distinctly and vividly impressed
+upon me than if she had just been actually, and in the flesh, at my
+bedside. Her tones still rang in my ears. My eyes were full of her: now
+her profile, so pure and chiselled; now her full face, with her gray
+eyes (sometimes tender and grave and wet with tears, sometimes half
+closed in laughter) fixed on mine; her lithe sweet body curved forward,
+as she sat and clasped her knees; her arched and slender smooth straight
+feet so delicately shod, that seemed now and then to beat time to
+her story....
+
+And then that strange sense of the transfusion of life at the touching
+of the hands! Oh, it was _no dream_! Though what it was I
+cannot tell....
+
+I turned on my side, happy beyond expression, and fell asleep again--a
+dreamless sleep that lasted till I was woke and told to dress.
+
+[Illustration: "MY EYES WERE FULL OF HER."]
+
+Some breakfast was brought to me, and _with it an envelope, open, which
+contained some violets, and a slip of paper, scented with sandal-wood,
+on which were written, in violet ink, the words--
+
+"Parva sed Apla--à bientôt!
+Tarapatapoum."_
+
+I will pass over the time that elapsed between my sentence and its
+commutation; the ministrations and exhortations of the good chaplain;
+the kind and touching farewells of Mr. and Mrs. Lintot, who had also
+believed that I was Ibbetson's son (I undeceived them); the visit of my
+old friend Mrs. Deane ... and her strange passion of gratitude and
+admiration.
+
+I have no doubt it would all be interesting enough, if properly
+remembered and ably told. But it was all too much like a
+dream--anybody's dream--not one of _mine_--all too slight and flimsy to
+have left an abiding remembrance, or to matter much.
+
+In due time I was removed to the jail at----, and bade farewell to the
+world, and adapted myself to the conditions of my new outer life with a
+good grace and with a very light heart.
+
+The prison routine, leaving the brain so free and unoccupied; the
+healthy labor, the pure air, the plain, wholesome food were delightful
+to me--a much-needed daily mental rest after the tumultuous emotions of
+each night.
+
+For I was soon back again in Passy, where I spent every hour of my
+sleep, you may be sure, never very far from the old apple-tree, which
+went through all its changes, from bare bough to tender shoots and
+blossoms, from blossom to ripe fruit, from fruit to yellow falling leaf,
+and then to bare boughs again, and all in a few peaceful nights, which
+were my days. I flatter myself by this time that I know the habits of a
+French apple-tree, and its caterpillars!
+
+And all the dear people I loved, and of whom I could never tire, were
+about--all but one. _The_ One!
+
+At last she arrived. The garden door was pushed, the bell rang, and she
+came across the lawn, radiant and tall and swift, and opened wide her
+arms. And there, with our little world around us--all that we had ever
+loved and cared for, but quite unseen and unheard by them--for the first
+time in my life since my mother and Madame Seraskier had died I held a
+woman in my arms, and she pressed her lips to mine.
+
+[Illustration: "AT LAST SHE ARRIVED."]
+
+Round and round the lawn we walked and talked, as we had often done
+fifteen, sixteen, twenty years ago. There were many things to say. "The
+Charming Prince" and the "Fairy Tarapatapoum" were "prettily well
+together"--at last!
+
+The time sped quickly--far too quickly. I said--
+
+"You told me I should see your house--'Parva sed Apta'--that I should
+find much to interest me there." ...
+
+She blushed a little and smiled, and said--
+
+"You mustn't expect _too_ much," and we soon found ourselves walking
+thither up the avenue. Thus we had often walked as children, and once--a
+memorable once--besides.
+
+There stood the little white house with its golden legend, as I had seen
+it a thousand times when a boy--a hundred since.
+
+How sweet and small it looked in the mellow sunshine! We mounted the
+stone _perron_, and opened the door and entered. My heart beat
+violently.
+
+Everything was as it had always been, as far as I could see. Dr.
+Seraskier sat in a chair by the window reading Schiller, and took no
+notice of us. His hair moved in the gentle breeze. Overhead we heard the
+rooms being swept and the beds made.
+
+I followed her into a little lumber-room, where I did not remember to
+have been before; it was full of odds and ends.
+
+"Why have you brought me here?" I asked.
+
+She laughed and said--
+
+"Open the door in the wall opposite."
+
+There was no door, and I said so.
+
+Then she took my hand, and lo! there _was_ a door! And she pushed, and
+we entered another suite of apartments that never could have been there
+before; there had never been room for them--nor ever could have been--in
+all Passy!
+
+[Illustration: "'AND NEUHA LED HER TORQUIL BY THE HAND.'"]
+
+"Come," she said, laughing and blushing at once; for she seemed nervous
+and excited and shy--do you remember--
+
+      'And Neuha led her Torquil by the hand,
+       And waved along the vault her flaming brand!'
+
+--do you remember your little drawing out of _The Island_, in the green
+morocco Byron? Here it is, in the top drawer of this beautiful cabinet.
+Here are all the drawings you ever did for me--plain and colored--with
+dates, explanations, etc., all written by myself--_l'album de la fee
+Tarapatapoum_. They are only duplicates. I have the real ones at my
+house in Hampshire.
+
+The cabinet also is a duplicate;--isn't it a beauty?--it's from the
+Czar's Winter Palace. Everything here is a duplicate, more or less. See,
+this is a little dining-room;--did you ever see anything so perfect?--it
+is the famous _salle à manger_ of Princesse de Chevagné. I never use it,
+except now and then to eat a slice of English household bread with
+French butter and 'cassonade.' Little Mimsey, out there, does so
+sometimes, when Gogo brings her one, and it makes big Mimsey's mouth
+water to see her, so she has to go and do likewise. Would you like
+a slice?
+
+You see the cloth is spread, _deux couverts_. There is a bottle of
+famous champagne from Mr. De Rothschild's; there's plenty more where
+that came from. The flowers are from Chatsworth, and this is a lobster
+salad for _you_. Papa was great at lobster salads and taught me. I mixed
+it myself a fortnight ago, and, as you see, it is as fresh and sweet as
+if I had only just made it, and the flowers haven't faded a bit.
+
+Here are cigarettes and pipes and cigars. I hope they are good. I don't
+smoke myself.
+
+Isn't all the furniture rare and beautiful? I have robbed every palace
+in Europe of its very best, and yet the owners are not a penny the
+worse. You should see up-stairs.
+
+Look at those pictures--the very pick of Raphael and Titian and
+Velasquez. Look at that piano--I have heard Liszt play upon it over and
+over again, in Leipsic!
+
+Here is my library. Every book I ever read is there, and every binding
+I ever admired. I don't often read them, but I dust them carefully. I've
+arranged that dust shall fall on them in the usual way to make it real,
+and remind one of the outer life one is so glad to leave. All has to be
+taken very seriously here, and one must put one's self to a little
+trouble. See, here is my father's microscope, and under it a small
+spider caught on the premises by myself. It is still alive. It seems
+cruel, doesn't it? but it only exists in our brains.
+
+Look at the dress I've got on--feel it; how every detail is worked out.
+And you have unconsciously done the same: that's the suit you wore that
+morning at Cray under the ash-tree--the nicest suit I ever saw. Here is
+a spot of ink on your sleeve as real as can be (bravo!). And this button
+is coming off--quite right; I will sew it on with a dream needle, and
+dream thread, and a dream thimble!
+
+This little door leads to every picture-gallery in Europe. It took me a
+long time to build and arrange them all by myself--quite a week of
+nights. It is very pleasant to walk there with a good catalogue, and
+make it rain cats and dogs outside.
+
+Through this curtain is an opera box--the most comfortable one I've
+ever been in; it does for theatres as well, and oratorios and concerts
+and scientific lectures. You shall see from it every performance I've
+ever been at, in half a dozen languages; you shall hold my hand and
+understand them all. Every singer that I ever heard, you shall hear.
+Dear Giulia Grisi shall sing the 'Willow Song' again and again, and you
+shall hear the applause. Ah, what applause!
+
+Come into this little room--my favorite; out of _this_ window and down
+these steps we can walk or drive to any place you or I have ever been
+to, and other places besides. Nothing is far, and we have only to go
+hand in hand. I don't know yet where my stables and coach-houses are;
+you must help me to find out. But so far I have never lacked a carriage
+at the bottom of those steps when I wanted to drive, nor a steam-launch,
+nor a gondola, nor a lovely place to go to.
+
+Out of _this_ window, from this divan, we can sit and gaze on whatever
+we like. What shall it be? Just now, you perceive, there is a wild and
+turbulent sea, with not a ship in sight. Do you hear the waves tumbling
+and splashing, and see the albatross? I had been reading Keats's 'Ode to
+the Nightingale,' and was so fascinated by the idea of a lattice opening
+on the foam
+
+     '_Of perilous seas by faery lands forlorn_'
+
+that I thought it would be nice to have a lattice like that myself. I
+tried to evolve that sea from my inner consciousness, you know, or
+rather from seas that I have sailed over. Do you like it? It was done a
+fortnight ago, and the waves have been tumbling about ever since. How
+they roar! and hark at the wind! I couldn't manage the 'faery lands.' It
+wants one lattice for the sea, and one for the land, I'm afraid. You
+must help me. Mean while, what would you like there tonight--the
+Yosemite Valley? the Nevski Prospect in the winter, with the sledges?
+the Rialto? the Bay of Naples after sunset, with Vesuvius in eruption?...
+
+--"Oh Mary--Mimsey--what do I care for Vesuvius, and sunsets, and the
+Bay of Naples ... _just now_? ... Vesuvius is in my heart!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thus began for us both a period of twenty-five years, during which we
+passed eight or nine hours out of the twenty-four in each other's
+company--except on a few rare occasions, when illness or some other
+cause prevented one of us from sleeping at the proper time.
+
+Mary! Mary!
+
+I idolized her while she lived; I idolize her memory.
+
+For her sake all women are sacred to me, even the lowest and most
+depraved and God-forsaken. They always found a helping friend in _her_.
+
+How can I pay a fitting tribute to one so near to me--nearer than any
+woman can ever have been to any man?
+
+I know her mind as I know my own! No two human souls can ever have
+interpenetrated each other as ours have done, or we should have heard of
+it. Every thought she ever had from her childhood to her death has been
+revealed--every thought of mine! Living as we did, it was inevitable.
+The touch of a finger was enough to establish the strange circuit, and
+wake a common consciousness of past and present, either hers or mine.
+
+And oh, how thankful am I that some lucky chance has preserved me,
+murderer and convict as I am, from anything she would have found it
+impossible to condone!
+
+I try not to think that shyness and poverty, ungainliness and social
+imbecility combined, have had as much to do as self-restraint and
+self-respect in keeping me out of so many pitfalls that have been fatal
+to so many men better and more gifted than myself.
+
+I try to think that her extraordinary affection, the chance result of a
+persistent impression received in childhood, has followed me through
+life without my knowing it, and in some occult, mysterious way has kept
+me from thoughts and deeds that would have rendered me unworthy, even in
+her too indulgent eyes.
+
+Who knows but that her sweet mother's farewell kiss and blessing, and
+the tender tears she shed over me when I bade her good-bye at the avenue
+gate so many years ago, may have had an antiseptic charm? Mary! I have
+followed her from her sickly, suffering childhood to her girlhood--from
+her half-ripe, gracefully lanky girlhood to the day of her retirement
+from the world of which she was so great an ornament. From girl to woman
+it seems like a triumphal procession through all the courts of
+Europe--scenes the like of which I have never even dreamed--flattery and
+strife to have turned the head of any princess! And she was the simple
+daughter of a working scientist and physician--the granddaughter of
+a fiddler.
+
+Yet even Austrian court etiquette was waived in favor of the child of
+plain Dr. Seraskier.
+
+What men have I seen at her feet--how splendid, handsome, gallant,
+brilliant, chivalrous, lordly, and gay! And to all, from her, the same
+happy geniality--the same kindly, laughing, frolicsome, innocent gayety,
+with never a thought of self.
+
+M. le Major was right--"elle avait toutes les intelligences de la tête
+et du coeur." And old and young, the best and the worst, seemed to love
+and respect her alike--and women as well as men--for her perfect
+sincerity, her sweet reasonableness.
+
+And all this time I was plodding at my dull drawing-board in
+Pentonville, carrying out another's designs for a stable or a pauper's
+cottage, and not even achieving that poor task particularly well!
+
+It would have driven me mad with humiliation and jealousy to see this
+past life of hers, but we saw it all hand in hand together--the magical
+circuit was established! And I knew, as I saw, how it all affected her,
+and marvelled at her simplicity in thinking all this pomp and splendor
+of so little consequence.
+
+And I trembled to find that what space in her heart was not filled by
+the remembrance of her ever-beloved mother and the image of her father
+(one of the noblest and best of men) enshrined the ridiculous figure of
+a small boy in a white silk hat and an Eton jacket. And that small
+boy was I!
+
+Then came a dreadful twelvemonth that I was fain to leave a blank--the
+twelvemonth during which her girlish fancy for her husband lasted--and
+then her life was mine again forever!
+
+And _my_ life!
+
+The life of a convict is not, as a rule, a happy one; his bed is not
+generally thought a bed of roses.
+
+Mine was!
+
+If I had been the most miserable leper that ever crawled to his wattled
+hut in Molokai, I should also have been the happiest of men, could sleep
+but have found me there, and could I but sleeping have been the friend
+of sleeping Mary Seraskier. She would have loved me all the more!
+
+She has filled my long life of bondage with such felicity as no monarch
+has ever dreamed, and has found her own felicity in doing so. That poor,
+plodding existence I led before my great misadventure, and have tried to
+describe--she has witnessed almost every hour of it with passionate
+interest and sympathy, as we went hand in hand together through each
+other's past. She would at any time have been only too glad to share it,
+leaving her own.
+
+I dreaded the effect of such a sordid revelation upon one who had lived
+so brilliantly and at such an altitude. I need have had no fear! Just as
+she thought me an "angelic hero" at eight years old, she remained
+persuaded all through her life that I was an Apollo--a misunderstood
+genius--a martyr!
+
+I am sick with shame when I think of it. But I am not the first unworthy
+mortal on whom blind, undiscriminating love has chosen to lavish its
+most priceless treasures. Tarapatapoum is not the only fairy who has
+idealized a hulking clown with an ass's head into a Prince Charming;
+the spectacle, alas! is not infrequent. But at least I have been humbly
+thankful for the undeserved blessing, and known its value. And,
+moreover, I think I may lay claim to one talent: that of also knowing by
+intuition when and where and how to love--in a moment--in a
+flash--and forever!
+
+Twenty-five years!
+
+It seems like a thousand, so much have we seen and felt and done in that
+busy enchanted quarter of a century. And yet how quickly the time
+has sped!
+
+And now I must endeavor to give some account of our wonderful inner
+life--_à deux_--a delicate and difficult task.
+
+There is both an impertinence and a lack of taste in any man's laying
+bare to the public eye--to any eye--the bliss that has come to him
+through the love of a devoted woman, with whose life his own has
+been bound up.
+
+The most sympathetic reader is apt to be repelled by such a
+revelation--to be sceptical of the beauties and virtues and mental gifts
+of one he has never seen; at all events, to feel that they are no
+concern of his, and ought to be the subject of a sacred reticence on the
+part of her too fortunate lover or husband.
+
+The lack of such reticence has marred the interest of many an
+autobiography--of many a novel, even; and in private life, who does not
+know by painful experience how embarrassing to the listener such tender
+confidences can sometimes be? I will try my best not to transgress in
+this particular. If I fail (I may have failed already), I can only plead
+that the circumstances are quite exceptional and not to be matched; and
+that allowances must be made for the deep gratitude I owe and feel over
+and above even my passionate admiration and love.
+
+For the next three years of my life has nothing to show but the
+alternation of such honeymooning as never was before with a dull but
+contented prison life, not one hour of which is worth recording, or even
+remembering, except as a foil to its alternative.
+
+It had but one hour for me, the bed hour, and fortunately that was an
+early one.
+
+Healthily tired in body, blissfully expectant in mind, I would lie on my
+back, with my hands duly crossed under my head, and sleep would soon
+steal over me like balm; and before I had forgotten who and what and
+where I really was, I would reach the goal on which my will was intent,
+and waking up, find my body in another place, in another garb, on a
+couch by an enchanted window, still with my arms crossed behind my
+head--in the sacramental attitude.
+
+Then would I stretch my limbs and slip myself free of my outer life, as
+a new-born butterfly from the durance of its self-spun cocoon, with an
+unutterable sense of youth and strength and freshness and felicity; and
+opening my eyes I would see on the adjacent couch the form of Mary, also
+supine, but motionless and inanimate as a statue. Nothing could wake her
+to life till the time came: her hours were somewhat later, and she was
+still in the toils of the outer life I had just left behind me.
+
+And these toils, in her case, were more complicated than in mine.
+Although she had given up the world, she had many friends and an immense
+correspondence. And then, being a woman endowed with boundless health
+and energy, splendid buoyancy of animal spirits, and a great capacity
+for business, she had made for herself many cares and occupations.
+
+She was the virtual mistress of a home for fallen women, a reformatory
+for juvenile thieves, and a children's convalescent hospital--to all of
+which she gave her immediate personal superintendence, and almost every
+penny she had. She had let her house in Hampshire, and lived with a
+couple of female servants in a small furnished house on Campden Hill.
+She did without a carriage, and went about in cabs and omnibuses,
+dressed like a daily governess, though nobody could appear more regally
+magnificent than she did when we were together.
+
+She still kept her name and title, as a potent weapon of influence on
+behalf of her charities, and wielded it mercilessly in her constant raid
+on the purse of the benevolent Philistine, who is fond of great people.
+
+All of which gave rise to much comment that did not affect her
+equanimity in the least.
+
+She also attended lectures, committees, boards, and councils; opened
+bazaars and soup kitchens and coffee taverns, etc. The list of her
+self-imposed tasks was endless. Thus her outer life was filled to
+overflowing, and, unlike mine, every hour of it was worth record--as I
+well know, who have witnessed it all. But this is not the place in which
+to write the outer life of the Duchess of Towers; another hand has done
+that, as everybody knows.
+
+Every page henceforward must be sacred to Mary Seraskier, the "fée
+Tarapatapoum" of "Magna sed Apta" (for so we had called the new home
+and palace of art she had added on to "Parva sed Apta," the home of her
+childhood).
+
+To return thither, where we left her lying unconscious. Soon the color
+would come back to her cheeks, the breath to her nostrils, the pulse to
+her heart, and she would wake to her Eden, as she called it--our common
+inner life--that we might spend it in each other's company for the next
+eight hours.
+
+Pending this happy moment, I would make coffee (such coffee!), and smoke
+a cigarette or two; and to fully appreciate the bliss of _that_ one must
+be an habitual smoker who lives his real life in an English jail.
+
+When she awoke from her sixteen hours' busy trance in the outer world,
+such a choice of pleasures lay before us as no other mortal has ever
+known. She had been all her life a great traveller, and had dwelt in
+many lands and cities, and seen more of life and the world and nature
+than most people. I had but to take her hand, and one of us had but to
+wish, and, lo! wherever either of us had been, whatever either of us had
+seen or heard or felt, or even eaten or drunk, there it was all over
+again to choose from, with the other to share in it--such a hypnotism of
+ourselves and each other as was never dreamed of before.
+
+Everything was as life-like, as real to us both, as it had been to
+either at the actual time of its occurrence, with an added freshness and
+charm that never belonged to mortal existence. It was no dream; it was a
+second life, a better land.
+
+We had, however, to stay within certain bounds, and beware of
+transgressing certain laws that we discovered for ourselves, but could
+not quite account for. For instance, it was fatal to attempt exploits
+that were outside of our real experience; to fly, or to jump from a
+height, or do any of these non-natural things that make the charm and
+wonder of ordinary dreams. If we did so our true dream was blurred, and
+became as an ordinary dream--vague, futile, unreal, and untrue--the
+baseless fabric of a vision. Nor must we alter ourselves in any way;
+even to the shape of a finger-nail, we must remain ourselves; although
+we kept ourselves at our very best, and could choose what age we should
+be. We chose from twenty-six to twenty-eight, and stuck to it.
+
+Yet there were many things, quite as impossible in real life, that we
+could do with impunity--most delightful things!
+
+For instance, after the waking cup of coffee, it was certainly
+delightful to spend a couple of hours in the Yosemite Valley, leisurely
+strolling about and gazing at the giant pines--a never-palling source of
+delight to both of us--breathing the fragrant fresh air, looking at our
+fellow-tourists and listening to their talk, with the agreeable
+consciousness that, solid and substantial as we were to each other, we
+were quite inaudible, invisible, and intangible to them. Often we would
+dispense with the tourists, and have the Yosemite Valley all to
+ourselves. (Always there, and in whatever place she had visited with her
+husband, we would dispense with the figure of her former self and him, a
+sight I could not have borne.)
+
+When we had strolled and gazed our fill, it was delightful again, just
+by a slight effort of her will and a few moments' closing of our eyes,
+to find ourselves driving along the Via Cornice to an exquisite garden
+concert in Dresden, or being rowed in a gondola to a Saturday Pop at St.
+James's Hall. And thence, jumping into a hansom, we would be whisked
+through Piccadilly and the park to the Arc de Triomphe home to "Magna
+sed Apta," Rue de la Pompe, Passy (a charming drive, and not a bit too
+long), just in time for dinner.
+
+A very delicious little dinner, judiciously ordered out of _her_
+remembrance, not _mine_ (and served in the most exquisite little
+dining-room in all Paris--the Princesse de Chevagné's): "huîtres
+d'Ostende," let us say, and "soupe à la bonne femme," with a "perdrix
+aux choux" to follow, and pancakes, and "fromage de Brie;" and to drink,
+a bottle of "Romané Conti;" without even the bother of waiters to change
+the dishes; a wish, a moment's shutting of the eyes--_augenblick_! and
+it was done--and then we could wait on each other.
+
+After my prison fare, and with nothing but tenpenny London dinners to
+recollect in the immediate past, I trust I shall not be thought a gross
+materialist for appreciating these small banquets, and in such company.
+(The only dinner I could recall which was not a tenpenny one, except the
+old dinners of my childhood, was that famous dinner at Cray, where I had
+discovered that the Duchess of Towers was Mimsey Seraskier, and I did
+not eat much of _that_.)
+
+Then a cigarette and a cup of coffee, and a glass of curaçoa; and after,
+to reach our private box we had but to cross the room and lift
+a curtain.
+
+And there before us was the theatre or opera-house brilliantly lighted,
+and the instruments tuning up, and the splendid company pouring in:
+crowned heads, famous beauties, world-renowned warriors and statesmen,
+Garibaldi, Gortschakoff, Cavour, Bismarck, and Moltke, now so famous,
+and who not? Mary would point them out to me. And in the next box Dr.
+Seraskier and his tall daughter, who seemed friends with all that
+brilliant crowd.
+
+Now it was St. Petersburg, now Berlin, now Vienna, Paris, Naples, Milan,
+London--every great city in turn. But our box was always the same, and
+always the best in the house, and I the one person privileged to smoke
+my cigar in the face of all that royalty, fashion, and splendor.
+
+Then, after the overture, up went the curtain. If it was a play, and the
+play was in German or Russian or Italian, I had but to touch Mary's
+little finger to understand it all--a true but incomprehensible thing.
+For well as I might understand, I could not have spoken a word of
+either, and the moment that slight contact was discontinued, they might
+as well have been acting in Greek or Hebrew, for _me_.
+
+But it was for music we cared the most, and I think I may say that of
+music during those three years (and ever after) we have had our glut.
+For all through her busy waking life Mary found time to hear whatever
+good music was going on in London, that she might bring it back to me at
+night; and we would rehear it together, again and again, and _da capo_.
+
+It is a rare privilege for two private individuals, and one of them a
+convict, to assist at a performance honored by the patronage and
+presence of crowned heads, and yet be able to encore any particular
+thing that pleases them. How often have we done that!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Oh, Joachim! oh, Clara Schumann! oh, Piattil--all of whom I know so
+well, but have never heard with the fleshly ear! Oh, others, whom it
+would be invidious to mention without mentioning all--a glorious list!
+How we have made you, all unconscious, repeat the same movements over
+and over again, without ever from you a sign of impatience or fatigue!
+How often have we summoned Liszt to play to us on his own favorite
+piano, which adorned our own favorite sitting-room! How little he knew
+(or will ever know now, alas!) what exquisite delight he gave us!
+
+Oh, Pattit, Angelina! Oh, Santley and Sims Reeves! Oh, De Soria,
+nightingale of the drawing-room, I wonder you have a note left!
+
+And you, Ristori, and you, Salvini, et vous, divine Sarah, qui débutiez
+alors! On me dit que votre adorable voix a perdu un peu de sa première
+fraîcheur. Cela ne m'étonne pas! Bien sûr, nous y sommes pour
+quelque chose!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And then the picture-galleries, the museums, the botanical and
+zoological gardens of all countries--"Magna sed Apta" had space for them
+all, even to the Elgin Marbles room of the British Museum, which I
+added myself.
+
+What enchanted hours have we spent among the pictures and statues of the
+world, weeding them here and there, perhaps, or hanging them
+differently, or placing them in what we thought a better light! The
+"Venus of Milo" showed to far greater advantage in "Magna sed Apta" than
+at the Louvre.
+
+And when busied thus delightfully at home, and to enhance the delight,
+we made it shocking bad weather outside; it rained cats and dogs, or
+else the north wind piped, and snow fell on the desolate gardens of
+"Magna sed Apta," and whitened the landscape as far as eye could see.
+
+Nearest to our hearts, however, were many pictures of our own time, for
+we were moderns of the moderns, after all, in spite of our efforts of
+self-culture.
+
+There was scarcely a living or recently living master in Europe whose
+best works were not in our possession, so lighted and hung that even the
+masters themselves would have been content; for we had plenty of space
+at our command, and each picture had a wall to itself, so toned as to do
+full justice to its beauty, and a comfortable sofa for two
+just opposite.
+
+But in the little room we most lived in, the room with the magic window,
+we had crowded a few special favorites of the English school, for we had
+so much foreign blood in us that we were more British than John Bull
+himself--_plus royalistes que le Roi_.
+
+There was Millais's "Autumn Leaves," his "Youth of Sir Walter Raleigh,"
+his "Chill October"; Watts's "Endymion," and "Orpheus and Eurydice";
+Burne-Jones's "Chant d'Amour," and his "Laus Veneris"; Alma-Tadema's
+"Audience of Agrippa," and the "Women of Amphissa"; J. Whistler's
+portrait of his mother; the "Venus and Aesculapius," by E. J. Poynter;
+F. Leighton's "Daphnephoria"; George Mason's "Harvest Moon"; and
+Frederic Walker's "Harbor of Refuge," and, of course, Merridew's
+"Sun-God."
+
+While on a screen, designed by H. S. Marks, and exquisitely decorated
+round the margin with golden plovers and their eggs (which I adore),
+were smaller gems in oil and water-color that Mary had fallen in love
+with at one time or another. The immortal "Moonlight Sonata," by
+Whistler; E, J. Poynter's exquisite "Our Lady of the Fields" (dated
+Paris, 1857); a pair of adorable "Bimbi" by V. Prinsep, who seems very
+fond of children; T. R. Lamont's touching "L'Après Dîner de l'Abbé
+Constantin," with the sweet girl playing the old spinet; and that
+admirable work of T. Armstrong, in his earlier and more realistic
+manner, "Le Zouave et lâ Nounou," not to mention splendid rough sketches
+by John Leech, Charles Keene, Tenniel, Sambourne, Furniss, Caldecott,
+etc.; not to mention, also, endless little sketches in silver point of a
+most impossibly colossal, blackavised, shaggy-coated St. Bernard--signed
+with the familiar French name of some gay troubadour of the pencil, some
+stray half-breed like myself, and who seems to have loved his dog as
+much as I loved mine.
+
+Then suddenly, in the midst of all this unparalleled artistic splendor,
+we felt that a something was wanting. There was a certain hollowness
+about it; and we discovered that in our case the principal motives for
+collecting all these beautiful things were absent.
+
+  1. We were not the sole possessors.
+  2. We had nobody to show them to.
+  3. Therefore we could take no pride in them.
+
+[Illustration: THE NURSERY SCHOOL-ROOM.]
+
+And found that when we wanted bad weather for a change, and the joys of
+home, we could be quite as happy in my old school-room, where the
+squirrels and the monkey and the hedgehog were, with each of us on a
+cane-bottomed arm-chair by the wood-fire, each roasting chestnuts for
+the other, and one book between us, for one of us to read out loud; or,
+better still, the morning and evening papers she had read a few hours
+earlier; and marvellous to relate, she had not even _read_ them when
+awake! she had merely glanced through them carefully, taking in the
+aspect of each column one after another, from top to bottom--and yet she
+was able to read out every word from the dream-paper she held in her
+hands--thus truly chewing the very cud of journalism!
+
+This always seemed to us, in a small but practical way, the most
+complete and signal triumph of mind over matter we had yet achieved.
+
+Not, indeed, that we could read much, we had so much to talk about.
+
+Unfortunately, the weak part of "Magna sed Apta" was its library.
+Naturally it could only consist of books that one or the other of us had
+read when awake. She had led such an active life that but little leisure
+had been left her for books, and I had read only as an every-day young
+man reads who is fond of reading.
+
+However, such books as we _had_ read were made the most of, and so
+magnificently bound that even their authors would have blushed with
+pride and pleasure had they been there to see. And though we had little
+time for reading them over again, we could enjoy the true bibliophilous
+delight of gazing at their backs, and taking them down and fingering
+them and putting them carefully back again.
+
+In most of these treats, excursions, festivities, and pleasures of the
+fireside, Mary was naturally leader and hostess; it could scarcely have
+been otherwise.
+
+There was once a famous Mary, of whom it was said that to know her was a
+liberal education. I think I may say that to have known Mary Seraskier
+has been all that to me!
+
+But now and then I would make some small attempt at returning her
+hospitality.
+
+We have slummed together in Clerkenwell, Smithfield, Cow Cross,
+Petticoat Lane, Ratcliffe Highway, and the East India and West
+India docks.
+
+She has been with me to penny gaffs and music-halls; to Greenwich Fair,
+and Cremorne and Rosherville gardens--and liked them all. She knew
+Pentonville as well as I do; and my old lodgings there, where we have
+both leaned over my former shoulder as I read or drew. It was she who
+rescued from oblivion my little prophetic song about "The Chime," which
+I had quite forgotten. She has been to Mr. Lintot's parties, and found
+them most amusing--especially Mr. Lintot.
+
+And going further back into the past, she has roamed with me all over
+Paris, and climbed with me the towers of Notre Dame, and looked in vain
+for the mystic word [Greek: Anagkae]!
+
+But I had also better things to show, untravelled as I was.
+
+She had never seen Hampstead Heath, which I knew by heart; and Hampstead
+Heath at any time, but especially on a sunny morning in late October, is
+not to be disdained by any one.
+
+Half the leaves have fallen, so that one can see the fading glory of
+those that remain; yellow and brown and pale and hectic red, shining
+like golden guineas and bright copper coins against the rich, dark,
+business-like green of the trees that mean to flourish all the winter
+through, like the tall slanting pines near the Spaniards, and the old
+cedar-trees, and hedges of yew and holly, for which the Hampstead
+gardens are famous.
+
+Before us lies a sea of fern, gone a russet-brown from decay, in which
+are isles of dark green gorse, and little trees with little scarlet and
+orange and lemon-colored leaflets fluttering down, and running after
+each other on the bright grass, under the brisk west wind which makes
+the willows rustle, and turn up the whites of their leaves in pious
+resignation to the coming change.
+
+Harrow-on-the-Hill, with its pointed spire, rises blue in the distance;
+and distant ridges, like receding waves, rise into blueness, one after
+the other, out of the low-lying mist; the last ridge bluely melting into
+space. In the midst of it all gleams the Welsh Harp Lake, like a piece
+of sky that has become unstuck and tumbled into the landscape with its
+shiny side up.
+
+On the other side, all London, with nothing but the gilded cross of St.
+Paul's on a level with the eye; it lies at our feet, as Paris used to do
+from the heights of Passy, a sight to make true dreamers gaze and think
+and dream the more; and there we sit thinking and dreaming and gazing
+our fill, hand in hand, our spirits rushing together.
+
+Once as we sat we heard the clatter of hoofs behind us, and there was a
+troop of my old regiment out exercising. Invisible to all but ourselves,
+and each other, we watched the wanton troopers riding by on their meek
+black chargers.
+
+First came the cornet--a sunny-haired Apollo, a gilded youth, graceful
+and magnificent to the eye--careless, fearless, but stupid, harsh, and
+proud--an English Phébus de Châteaupers--the son of a great contractor;
+I remembered him well, and that he loved me not. Then the rank and file
+in stable jackets, most of them (but for a stalwart corporal here and
+there) raw, lanky youths, giving promise of much future strength, and
+each leading a second horse; and among them, longest and lankiest of
+them all, but ruddy as a ploughboy, and stolidly whistling _"On revient
+toujours à ses premiers amours,"_ rode my former self--a sight (or
+sound) that seemed to touch some tender chord in Mary's nature, where
+there were so many, since it filled her eyes with tears.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+To describe in full a honey-moon filled with such adventures, and that
+lasted for three years, is unnecessary. It would be but another
+superficial record of travel, by another unskilled pen. And what a pen
+is wanted for such a theme! It was not mere life, it was the very cream
+and essence of life, that we shared with each other--all the toil and
+trouble, the friction and fatigue, left out. The necessary earthly
+journey through time and space from one joy to another was omitted,
+unless such a journey were a joy in itself.
+
+For instance, a pleasant hour can be spent on the deck of a splendid
+steamer, as it cleaves its way through a sapphire tropical sea, bound
+for some lovely West Indian islet; with a good cigar and the dearest
+companion in the world, watching the dolphins and the flying-fish, and
+mildly interesting one's self in one's fellow-passengers, the captain,
+the crew. And then, the hour spent and the cigar smoked out, it is well
+to shut one's eyes and have one's self quietly lowered down the side of
+the vessel into a beautiful sledge, and then, half smothered in costly
+furs, to be whirled along the frozen Neva to a ball at the Winter
+Palace, there to valse with one's Mary among all the beauty and chivalry
+of St. Petersburg, and never a soul to find fault with one's valsing,
+which at first was far from perfect, or one's attire, which was not that
+of the fashionable world of the day, nor was Mary's either. We were
+aesthetic people, and very Greek, who made for ourselves fashions of our
+own, which I will not describe.
+
+[Illustration:]
+
+Where have we not waltzed together, from Buckingham Palace downward? I
+confess I grew to take a delight in valsing, or waltzing, or whatever it
+is properly called; and although it is not much to boast of, I may say
+that after a year or two no better dancer than I was to be found in
+all Vienna.
+
+And here, by the way, I may mention what pleasure it gave me (hand in
+hand with Mary, of course, as usual) to renew and improve my
+acquaintance with our British aristocracy, begun so agreeably many years
+ago at Lady Cray's concert.
+
+Our British aristocracy does not waltz well by any means, and lacks
+lightness generally; but it may gratify and encourage some of its
+members to hear that Peter Ibbetson (ex-private soldier, architect and
+surveyor, convict and criminal lunatic), who has had unrivalled
+opportunities for mixing with the cream of European society, considers
+our British aristocracy quite the best-looking, best-dressed, and
+best-behaved aristocracy of them all, and the most sensible and the
+least exclusive--perhaps the most sensible _because_ the least
+exclusive.
+
+It often snubs, but does not altogether repulse, those gifted and
+privileged outsiders who (just for the honor and glory of the thing) are
+ever so ready to flatter and instruct and amuse it, and run its
+errands, and fetch and carry, and tumble for its pleasure, and even to
+marry such of its "ugly ducklings" (or shall we say such of its
+"unprepossessing cygnets?") as cannot hope to mate with birds of their
+own feather.
+
+For it has the true English eye for physical beauty.
+
+Indeed, it is much given to throw the handkerchief--successfully, of
+course--and, most fortunately for itself, beyond the pale of its own
+narrow precincts--nay, beyond the broad Atlantic, even, to the land
+where beauty and dollars are to be found in such happy combination.
+
+Nor does it disdain the comeliness of the daughters of Israel, nor their
+shekels, nor their brains, nor their ancient and most valuable blood. It
+knows the secret virtue of that mechanical transfusion of fluids
+familiar to science under the name of "endosmoses" and "exosmoses" (I
+hope I have spelled them rightly), and practises the same. Whereby it
+shows itself wise in its generation, and will endure the longer, which
+cannot be very long.
+
+Peter Ibbetson (etc., etc.), for one, wishes it no manner of harm.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But to return. With all these temptations of travel and amusement and
+society and the great world, such was our insatiable fondness for "the
+pretty place of our childhood" and all its associations, that our
+greatest pleasure of all was to live our old life over again and again,
+and make Gogo and Mimsey and our parents and cousins and M. le Major go
+through their old paces once more; and to recall _new_ old paces for
+them, which we were sometimes able to do, out of stray forgotten bits of
+the past; to hunt for which was the most exciting sport in the world.
+
+Our tenderness for these beloved shades increased with familiarity. We
+could see all the charm and goodness and kindness of these dear fathers
+and mothers of ours with the eyes of matured experience, for we were
+pretty much of an age with them now; no other children could ever say as
+much since the world began, and how few young parents could bear such a
+scrutiny as ours.
+
+Ah! what would we not have given to extort just a spark of recognition,
+but that was impossible; or to have been able to whisper just a word of
+warning, which would have averted the impending strokes of inexorable
+fate! They might have been alive now, perhaps--old indeed, but honored
+and loved as no parents ever were before. How different everything would
+have been! Alas! alas!
+
+And of all things in the world, we never tired of that walk through the
+avenue and park and Bois de Boulogne to the Mare d'Auteuil; strolling
+there leisurely on an early spring afternoon, just in time to spend a
+midsummer hour or two on its bank, and watch the old water-rat and the
+dytiscus and the tadpoles and newts, and see the frogs jump; and then
+walking home at dusk in the school-room of my old home; and then back to
+war, well-lighted "Magna sed Apta" by moonlight through the avenue on
+New Year's Eve, ankle-deep in snow; all in a few short hours.
+
+Dream winds and dream weathers--what an enchantment! And all real!
+
+Soft caressing rains that do not wet us if we do not wish them to; sharp
+frosts that brace but never chill; blazing suns that neither scorch
+nor dazzle.
+
+Blustering winds of early spring, that seem to sweep right through these
+solid frames of ours, and thrill us to the very marrow with the old
+heroic excitement and ecstasy we knew so well in happy childhood, but
+can no longer feel now when awake!
+
+Bland summer breezes, heavy with the scent of long lost French woods and
+fields and gardens in full flower; swift, soft, moist equinoctial gales,
+blowing from the far-off orchards of Meudon, or the old market gardens
+of Suresnes in their autumnal decay, and laden, we do not know why, with
+strange, mysterious, troubling reminiscence too subtle and elusive to be
+expressed in any tongue--too sweet for any words! And then the dark
+December wind that comes down from the north, and brings the short,
+early twilights and the snow, and drives us home, pleasantly shivering,
+to the chimney-corner and the hissing logs--_chez nous!_
+
+It is the last night of an old year--_la veille du jour de l'an_.
+
+Ankle-deep in snow, we walk to warm, well-lighted "Magna sed Apta," up
+the moonlit avenue. It is dream snow, and yet we feel it crunch beneath
+our feet; but if we turn to look, the tracks of our footsteps have
+disappeared--and we cast no shadows, though the moon is full!
+
+M. le Major goes by, and Yverdon the postman, and Père François, with
+his big sabots, and others, and their footprints remain--and their
+shadows are strong and sharp!
+
+They wish each other the compliments of the season as they meet and
+pass; they wish us nothing! We give them _la bonne année_ at the tops of
+our voices; they do not heed us in the least, though our voices are as
+resonant as theirs. We are wishing them a "Happy New Year," that dawned
+for good or evil nearly twenty years ago.
+
+Out comes Gogo from the Seraskiers', with Mimsey. He makes a snowball
+and throws it. It flies straight through me, and splashes itself on Père
+François's broad back. "Ah, ce polisson de Monsieur Gogo ... attendez un
+peu!" and Père François returns the compliment--straight through me
+again, as it seems; and I do not even feel it! Mary and I are as solid
+to each other as flesh and blood can make us. We cannot even touch these
+dream people without their melting away into thin air; we can only hear
+and see them, but that in perfection!
+
+There goes that little André Corbin, the poulterer's son, running along
+the slippery top of Madame Pelé's garden wall, which is nearly ten
+feet high.
+
+"Good heavens," cries Mary, "stop him! Don't you remember? When he gets
+to the corner he'll fall down and break both his legs!"
+
+I rush and bellow out to him--
+
+"Descends donc, malheureux; tu vas te casser les deux jambes! Saute!
+saute!" ... I cry, holding out my arms. He does not pay the slightest
+attention: he reaches the corner, followed low down by Gogo and Mimsey,
+who are beside themselves with generous envy and admiration. Stimulated
+by their applause, he becomes more foolhardy than ever, and even tries
+to be droll, and standing on one leg, sings a little song that begins--
+
+_"Maman m'a donné quat' sous Pour m'en aller à la foire, Non pas pour
+manger ni boire, Alais pour m'régaler d'joujoux!"_
+
+Then suddenly down he slips, poor boy, and breaks both his legs below
+the knee on an iron rail, whereby he becomes a cripple for life.
+
+All this sad little tragedy of a New-year's Eve plays itself anew. The
+sympathetic crowd collects; Mimsey and Gogo weep; the heart-broken
+parents arrive, and the good little doctor Larcher; and Mary and I look
+on like criminals, so impossible it seems not to feel that we might have
+prevented it all!
+
+We two alone are alive and substantial in all this strange world of
+shadows, who seem, as far as we can hear and see, no less substantial
+and alive than ourselves. They exist for us; we do not exist for them.
+We exist for each other only, waking or sleeping; for even the people
+among whom our waking life is spent know hardly more of us, and what our
+real existence is, than poor little André Corbin, who has just broken
+his legs for us over again!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+And so, back to "Magna sed Apta," both saddened by this deplorable
+misadventure, to muse and talk and marvel over these wonders; penetrated
+to the very heart's core by a dim sense of some vast, mysterious power,
+latent in the sub-consciousness of man--unheard of, undreamed of as yet,
+but linking him with the Infinite and the Eternal.
+
+And how many things we always had to talk about besides!
+
+Heaven knows, I am not a brilliant conversationalist, but she was the
+most easily amusable person in the world--interested in everything that
+interested me, and I disdamaged myself (to use one of her
+Anglo-Gallicisms) of the sulky silence of years.
+
+Of her as a companion it is not for me to speak. It would be
+impertinent, and even ludicrous, for a person in my position to dilate
+on the social gifts of the famous Duchess of Towers.
+
+Incredible as it may appear, however, most of our conversation was about
+very common and earthly topics--her homes and refuges, the difficulties
+of their management, her eternal want of money, her many schemes and
+plans and experiments and failures and disenchantments--in all of which
+I naturally took a very warm interest. And then my jail, and all that
+occurred there--in all of which I became interested myself because it
+interested her so passionately; she knew every corner of it that I knew,
+every detail of the life there--the name, appearance, and history of
+almost every inmate, and criticised its internal economy with a
+practical knowledge of affairs; a business-like sagacity at which I
+never ceased to marvel.
+
+One of my drollest recollections is of a visit she
+paid there _in the flesh_, by some famous philanthropists of both sexes.
+I was interviewed by them all as the model prisoner, who, for his
+unorthodoxy, was a credit to the institution. She listened demurely to
+my intelligent answers when I was questioned as to my bodily health,
+etc., and asked whether I had any complaints to make. Complaints! Never
+was jail-bird so thoroughly satisfied with his nest--so healthy, so
+happy, so well-behaved. She took notes all the time.
+
+[Illustration: MARY, DUCHESS OF TOWERS. From a photograph by
+Strlkzchuski, Warsaw.]
+
+Eight hours before we had been strolling hand in hand through the Uffizi
+Gallery in Florence; eight hours later we should be in each
+other's arms.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Strange to relate, this happiness of ours--so deep, so acute, so
+transcendent, so unmatched in all the history of human affection--was
+not always free of unreasonable longings and regrets. Man is never so
+blessed but what he would have his blessedness still greater.
+
+The reality of our close companionship, of our true possession of each
+other (during our allotted time), was absolute, complete, and thorough.
+No Darby that ever lived can ever have had sweeter, warmer, more tender
+memories of any Joan than I have now of Mary Seraskier! Although each
+was, in a way, but a seeming illusion of the other's brain, the illusion
+was no illusion for us. It was an illusion that showed the truth, as
+does the illusion of sight. Like twin kernels in one shell
+("Philipschen," as Mary called it), we touched at more points and were
+closer than the rest of mankind (with each of them a separate shell of
+his own). We tried and tested this in every way we could devise, and
+never found ourselves at fault, and never ceased to marvel at so great a
+wonder. For instance, I received letters from her in jail (and answered
+them) in an intricate cipher we had invented and perfected together
+entirely during sleep, and referring to things that had happened to us
+both when together.[A]
+
+[Footnote A: _Note_.--Several of these letters are in my possession.
+MADGE PLUNKET.]
+
+Our privileges were such as probably no human beings could have ever
+enjoyed before. Time and space were annihilated for us at the mere wish
+of either--we lived in a palace of delight; all conceivable luxuries
+were ours--and, better than all, and perennially, such freshness and
+elation as belong only to the morning of life--and such a love for each
+other (the result of circumstances not to be paralleled) as time could
+never slake or quench till death should come and part us. All this, and
+more, was our portion for eight hours out of twenty-four.
+
+So what must we do sometimes, but fret that the sixteen hours which
+remained did not belong to us well; that we must live two-thirds of our
+lives apart; that we could not share the toils and troubles of our
+work-a-day, waking existence, as we shared the blissful guerdon of our
+seeming sleep--the glories of our common dream.
+
+And then we would lament the lost years we had spent in mutual ignorance
+and separation--a deplorable waste of life; when life, sleeping or
+waking, was so short.
+
+How different things might have been with us had we but known!
+
+We need never have lost sight and touch of each other; we might have
+grown up, and learned and worked and struggled together from the
+first--boy and girl, brother and sister, lovers, man and wife--and yet
+have found our blessed dream-land and dwelt in it just the same.
+
+Children might have been born to us! Sweet children, _beaux comme le
+jour_, as in Madame Perrault's fairy tales; even beautiful and good as
+their mother.
+
+And as we talked of these imaginary little beings and tried to picture
+them, we felt in ourselves such a stupendous capacity for loving the
+same that we would fall to weeping on each other's shoulders. Full well
+I knew, even as if they had formed a part of my own personal experience,
+all the passion and tenderness, all the wasted anguish of her brief,
+ill-starred motherhood: the very ache of my jealousy that she should
+have borne a child to another man was forgotten in that keen and
+thorough comprehension! Ah, yes ... that hungry love, that woful pity,
+which not to know is hardly quite to have lived! Childless as I am
+(though old enough to be a grandfather) I have it all by heart!
+
+Never could we hope for son or daughter of our own. For us the blessed
+flower of love in rich, profuse, unfading bloom; but its blessed fruit
+of life, never, never, never!
+
+Our only children were Mimsey and Gogo, between whom and ourselves was
+an impassable gulf, and who were unconscious of our very existence,
+except for Mimsey's strange consciousness that a Fairy Tarapatapoum and
+a Prince Charming were watching over them.
+
+All this would always end, as it could not but end, in our realizing the
+more fully our utter dependence on each other for all that made life not
+only worth living, ingrates that we were, but a heaven on earth for us
+both; and, indeed, we could not but recognize that merely thus to love
+and be loved was in itself a thing so immense (without all the other
+blessings we had) that we were fain to tremble at our audacity in daring
+to wish for more.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thus sped three years, and would have sped all the rest, perhaps, but
+for an incident that made an epoch in our joint lives, and turned all
+our thoughts and energies in a new direction.
+
+
+
+
+Part Six
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Some petty annoyance to which I had been subjected by one of the prison
+authorities had kept me awake for a little while after I had gone to
+bed, so that when at last I awoke in "Magna sed Apta," and lay on my
+couch there (with that ever-fresh feeling of coming to life in heaven
+after my daily round of work in an earthly jail), I was conscious that
+Mary was there already, making coffee, the fragrance of which filled
+the room, and softly humming a tune as she did so--a quaint, original,
+but most beautiful tune, that thrilled me with indescribable emotion,
+for I had never heard it with the bodily ear before, and yet it was as
+familiar to me as "God save the Queen."
+
+As I listened with rapt ears and closed eyes, wonderful scenes passed
+before my mental vision: the beautiful white-haired lady of my childish
+dreams, leading a small _female_ child by the hand, and that child was
+myself; the pigeons and their tower, the stream and the water-mill; the
+white-haired young man with red heels to his shoes; a very fine lady,
+very tall, stout, and middle-aged, magnificently dressed in brocaded
+silk; a park with lawns and alleys and trees cut into trim formal
+shapes; a turreted castle--all kinds of charming scenes and people of
+another age and country.
+
+"What on earth is that wonderful tune, Mary?" I exclaimed, when she had
+finished it.
+
+"It's my favorite tune," she answered; "I seldom hum it for fear of
+wearing away its charm. I suppose that is why you have never heard it
+before. Isn't it lovely? I've been trying to lull you awake with it.
+
+"My grandfather, the violinist, used to play it with variations of his
+own, and made it famous in his time; but it was never published, and
+it's now forgotten.
+
+"It is called 'Le Chant du Triste Commensal,' and was composed by his
+grandmother, a beautiful French woman, who played the fiddle too; but
+not as a profession. He remembered her playing it when he was a child
+and she was quite an old lady, just as I remember _his_ playing it when
+I was a girl in Vienna, and he was a white-haired old man. She used to
+play holding her fiddle downward, on her knee, it seems; and always
+played in perfect tune, quite in the middle of the note, and with
+excellent taste and expression; it was her playing that decided his
+career. But she was like 'Single-speech Hamilton,' for this was the only
+thing she ever composed. She composed it under great grief and
+excitement, just after her husband had died from the bite of a wolf, and
+just before the birth of her twin-daughters--her only children--one of
+whom was my great-grandmother."
+
+"And what was this wonderful old lady's name?"
+
+"Gatienne Aubéry; she married a Breton squire called Budes, who was a
+_gentilhomme verrier_ near St. Prest, in Anjou--that is, he made
+glass--decanters, water-bottles, tumblers, and all that, I suppose--in
+spite of his nobility. It was not considered derogatory to do so;
+indeed, it was the only trade permitted to the _noblesse_, and one had
+to be at least a squire to engage in it.
+
+"She was a very notable woman, _la belle Verrière_, as she was called;
+and she managed the glass factory for many years after her husband's
+death, and made lots of money for her two daughters."
+
+"How strange!" I exclaimed; "Gatienne Aubéry! Dame du Brail--Budes--the
+names are quite familiar to me. Mathurin Budes, Seigneur de Monhoudéard
+et de Verny le Moustier."
+
+"Yes, that's it. How wonderful that you should know! One daughter,
+Jeanne, married my greatgrandfather, an officer in the Hungarian army;
+and Seraskier, the fiddler, was their only child. The other (so like her
+sister that only her mother could distinguish them) was called Anne, and
+married a Comte de Bois something."
+
+"Boismorinel. Why, all those names are in my family too. My father used
+to make me paint their arms and quarterings when I was a child, on
+Sunday mornings, to keep me quiet. Perhaps we are related by blood,
+you and I."
+
+"Oh, that would be too delightful!" said Mary. "I wonder how we could
+find out? Have you no family papers?"
+
+_I_. "There were lots of them, in a horse-hair trunk, but I don't know
+where they are now. What good would family papers have been to me?
+Ibbetson took charge of them when I changed my name. I suppose his
+lawyers have got them."
+
+_She_. "Happy thought; we will do without lawyers. Let us go round to
+your old house, and make Gogo paint the quarterings over again for us,
+and look over his shoulder."
+
+Happy thought, indeed! We drank our coffee and went straight to my old
+house, with the wish (immediate father to the deed) that Gogo should be
+there, once more engaged in his long forgotten accomplishment of
+painting coats of arms.
+
+It was a beautiful Sunday morning, and we found Gogo hard at work at a
+small table by an open window. The floor was covered with old deeds and
+parchments and family papers; and le beau Pasquier, at another table,
+was deep in his own pedigree, making notes on the margin--an occupation
+in which he delighted--and unconsciously humming as he did so. The sunny
+room was filled with the penetrating soft sound of his voice, as a
+conservatory is filled with the scent of its flowers.
+
+By the strangest inconsistency my dear father, a genuine republican at
+heart (for all his fancied loyalty to the white lily of the Bourbons), a
+would-be scientist, who in reality was far more impressed by a clever
+and industrious French mechanic than by a prince (and would, I think,
+have preferred the former's friendship and society), yet took both a
+pleasure and a pride in his quaint old parchments and obscure
+quarterings. So would I, perhaps, if things had gone differently with
+me--for what true democrat, however intolerant of such weakness in
+others, ever thinks lightly of his own personal claims to aristocratic
+descent, shadowy as these may be!
+
+He was fond of such proverbs and aphorisms as "noblesse oblige," "bon
+sang ne sait mentir," "bon chien chasse de race," etc., and had even
+invented a little aphorism of his own, to comfort him when he was extra
+hard up, "bon gentilhomme n'a jamais honte de la misère." All of which
+sayings, to do him justice, he reserved for home consumption
+exclusively, and he would have been the first to laugh on hearing them
+in the mouth of any one else.
+
+Of his one great gift, the treasure in his throat, he thought absolutely
+nothing at all.
+
+"Ce que c'est que de nous!"
+
+Gogo was coloring the quarterings of the Pasquier family--_la maison
+de Pasquier_, as it was called--in a printed book (_Armorial Général du
+Maine et de l'Anjou_), according to the instructions that were given
+underneath. He used one of Madame Liard's three-sou boxes, and the tints
+left much to be desired.
+
+We looked over his shoulder and read the picturesque old jargon, which
+sounds even prettier and more comforting and more idiotic in French than
+in English. It ran thus--
+
+"Pasquier (branche des Seigneurs de la Marière et du Hirel), party de 4
+pièces et coupé de 2.
+
+"Au premier, de Hérault, qui est de écartelé de gueules et d'argent.
+
+"Au deux, de Budes, qui est d'or au pin de sinople.
+
+"Au trois, d'Aubéry--qui est d'azur à trois croissants d'argent.
+
+"Au quatre, de Busson qui est d'argent au lyon de sable armé couronné et
+lampassé d'or," And so on, through the other quarterings: Bigot, Epinay,
+Malestroit, Mathefelon. And finally, "Sur le tout, de Pasquier qui est
+d'or à trois lyons d'azur, au franc quartier écartelé des royames de
+Castille et de Léon."
+
+Presently my mother came home from the English chapel in the Rue
+Marboeuf, where she had been with Sarah, the English maid. Lunch was
+announced, and we were left alone with the family papers. With infinite
+precautions, for fear of blurring the dream, we were able to find what
+we wanted to find--namely, that we were the great-great-grandchildren
+and only possible living descendants of Gatienne, the fair glassmaker
+and composer of "Le Chant du Triste Commensal."
+
+Thus runs the descent--
+
+Jean Aubéry, Seigneur du Brail, married Anne Busson. His daughter,
+Gatienne Aubéry, Dame du Brail, married Mathurin Budes, Seigneur de
+Verny le Moustier et de Monhoudéard.
+
+ --------------------------^--------------------------
+/                                                     \
+
+
+Anne Budes, Dame de            Jeanne Budes, Dame du
+  Verny le Moustier, married     Brail et de Monhoudéard,
+  Guy Hérault, Comte             married Ulric
+  de Boismorinel.                Seraskier.
+
+Jeanne François Hérault de     Otto Seraskier, violinist,
+  Boismorinel married            married Teresa Pulci.
+  François Pasquier de la
+  Marière.
+
+
+Jean Pasquier de la Marière    Johann Seraskier, M.D.,
+  married Catherine              married Laura Desmond.
+  Ibbetson-Biddulph.
+
+Pierre Pasquier de la Marière  Mary Seraskier, Duchess of
+  (_alias_ Peter Ibbetson,  Towers.
+  convict).
+
+We walked back to "Magna sed Apta" in great joy, and there we celebrated
+our newly-discovered kinship by a simple repast, out of _my_ répertoire
+this time. It consisted of oysters from Rules's in Maiden Lane, when
+they were sixpence a dozen, and bottled stout (_l'eau m'en vient à la
+bouche_); and we spent the rest of the hours allotted to us that night
+in evolving such visions as we could from the old tune "Le Chant du
+Triste Commensal," with varying success; she humming it, accompanying
+herself on the piano in her masterly, musician-like way, with one hand,
+and seeing all that I saw by holding my hand with the other.
+
+By slow degrees the scenes and people evoked grew less dim, and whenever
+the splendid and important lady, whom we soon identified for certain as
+Gatienne, our common great-great-grandmother, appeared--"la belle
+verrière de Verny le Moustier"--she was more distinct than the others;
+no doubt, because we both had part and parcel in her individuality, and
+also because her individuality was so strongly marked.
+
+And before I was called away at the inexorable hour, we had the supreme
+satisfaction of seeing her play the fiddle to a shadowy company of
+patched and powdered and bewigged ladies and gentlemen, who seemed to
+take much sympathetic delight in her performance, and actually, even, of
+just hearing the thin, unearthly tones of that most original and
+exquisite melody, "Le Chant du Triste Commensal," to a quite inaudible
+accompaniment on the spinet by her daughter, evidently Anne Hérault,
+Comtesse de Boismorinel (_née_ Budes), while the small child Jeanne de
+Boismorinel (afterwards Dame Pasquier de la Marière) listened with
+dreamy rapture.
+
+And, just as Mary had said, she played her fiddle with its body
+downward, and resting on her knees, as though it had been an undersized
+'cello. I then vaguely remembered having dreamed of such a figure when a
+small child.
+
+Within twenty-four hours of this strange adventure the practical and
+business-like Mary had started, in the flesh and with her maid, for that
+part of France where these, my ancestors, had lived, and within a
+fortnight she had made herself mistress of all my French family history,
+and had visited such of the different houses of my kin as were still in
+existence.
+
+The turreted castle of my childish dreams, which, with the adjacent
+glass-factory, was still called Verny le Moustier, was one of these. She
+found it in the possession of a certain Count Hector du Chamorin, whose
+grandfather had purchased it at the beginning of the century.
+
+He had built an entirely new plant, and made it one of the first
+glass-factories in Western France. But the old turreted _corps de logis_
+still remained, and his foreman lived there with his wife and family.
+The _pigeonnier_ had been pulled down to make room for a shed with a
+steam-engine, and the whole aspect of the place was revolutionized; but
+the stream and water-mill (the latter a mere picturesque ruin) were
+still there; the stream was, however, little more than a ditch, some ten
+feet deep and twenty broad, with a fringe of gnarled and twisted willows
+and alders, many of them dead.
+
+It was called "Le Brail," and had given its name to my
+great-great-grandmother's property, whence it had issued thirty miles
+away (and many hundred years ago); but the old Château du Brail, the
+manor of the Aubérys, had become a farm-house.
+
+The Château de la Marière, in its walled park, and with its beautiful,
+tall, hexagonal tower, dated 1550, and visible for miles around, was now
+a prosperous cider brewery; it is still, and lies on the high-road from
+Angers to Le Mans.
+
+The old forest of Boismorinel, that had once belonged to the family of
+Hérault, was still in existence; charcoal-burners were to be found in
+its depths, and a stray roebuck or two; but no more wolves and
+wild-boars, as in the olden time. And where the old castle had been now
+stood the new railway station of Boismorinel et Saint Maixent.
+
+[Illustration: LA BELLE VERRIERE]
+
+Most of such Budes, Bussons, Héraults, Aubérys, and Pasquiers as were
+still to be found in the country, probably distant kinsmen of Mary's
+and mine, were lawyers, doctors, or priests, or had gone into trade and
+become respectably uninteresting; such as they were, they would scarcely
+have cared to claim kinship with such as I.
+
+But a hundred years ago and more these were names of importance in Maine
+and Anjou; their bearers were descended for the most part from younger
+branches of houses which in the Middle Ages had intermarried with all
+there was of the best in France; and although they were looked down upon
+by the _noblesse_ of the court and Versailles, as were all the
+provincial nobility, they held their own well in their own country;
+feasting, hunting, and shooting with each other; dancing and fiddling
+and making love and intermarrying; and blowing glass, and growing richer
+and richer, till the Revolution came and blew them and their glass into
+space, and with them many greater than themselves, but few better. And
+all record of them and of their doings, pleasant and genial people as
+they were, is lost, and can only be recalled by a dream.
+
+Verny le Moustier was not the least interesting of these old manors.
+
+It had been built three hundred years ago, on the site of a still older
+monastery (whence its name); the ruined walls of the old abbey were (and
+are) still extant in the house-garden, covered with apricot and pear and
+peach trees, which had been sown or planted by our common ancestress
+when she was a bride.
+
+Count Hector, who took a great pleasure in explaining all the past
+history of the place to Mary, had built himself a fine new house in
+what remained of the old park, and a quarter of a mile away from the
+old manor-house. Every room of the latter was shown to her; old wood
+panels still remained, prettily painted in a by-gone fashion; old
+documents, and parchment deeds, and leases concerning fish-ponds,
+farms, and the like, were brought out for her inspection, signed by
+my grandfather Pasquier, my great-grandfather Boismorinel, and our
+great-great-grandmother and her husband, Mathurin Budes, the lord of
+Verny le Moustier; and the tradition of Gatienne, _la belle Verrière_
+(also nicknamed _la reine de Hongrie_, it seems) still lingered in the
+county; and many old people still remembered, more or less correctly,
+"Le Chant du Triste Commensal," which a hundred years ago had been in
+everybody's mouth.
+
+She was said to have been the tallest and handsomest woman in Anjou, of
+an imperious will and very masculine character, but immensely popular
+among rich and poor alike; of indomitable energy, and with a finger in
+every pie; but always more for the good of others than her own--a
+typical, managing, business-like French woman, and an exquisite
+musician to boot.
+
+Such was our common ancestress, from whom, no doubt, we drew our love of
+music and our strange, almost hysterical susceptibility to the power of
+sound; from whom had issued those two born nightingales of our
+race--Seraskier, the violinist, and my father, the singer. And, strange
+to say, her eyebrows met at the bridge of her nose just like mine, and
+from under them beamed the luminous, black-fringed, gray-blue eyes of
+Mary, that suffered eclipse whenever their owners laughed or smiled!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+During this interesting journey of Mary's in the flesh, we met every
+night at "Magna sed Apta" in the spirit, as usual; and I was made to
+participate in every incident of it.
+
+We sat by the magic window, and had for our entertainment, now the
+Verrerie de Verny le Moustier in its present state, all full of modern
+life, color, and sound, steam and gas, as she had seen it a few hours
+before; now the old château as it was a hundred years ago; dim and
+indistinct, as though seen by nearsighted eyes at the close of a gray,
+misty afternoon in late autumn through a blurred window-pane, with busy
+but silent shadows moving about--silent, because at first we could not
+hear their speech; it was too thin for our mortal ears, even in this
+dream within our dream! Only Gatienne, the authoritative and commanding
+Gatienne, was faintly audible.
+
+Then we would go down and mix with them. Thus, at one moment, we would
+be in the midst of a charming old-fashioned French family group of
+shadows: Gatienne, with her lovely twin-daughters Jeanne and Anne, and
+her gardeners round her, all trailing young peach and apricot trees
+against what still remained of the ancient buttresses and walls of the
+Abbaye de Verny le Moustier--all this more than a hundred years ago--the
+pale sun of a long-past noon casting the fainter shadows of these faint
+shadows on the shadowy garden-path.
+
+Then, presto! Changing the scene as one changes a slide in a
+magic-lantern, we would skip a century, and behold!
+
+Another French family group, equally charming, on the self-same spot,
+but in the garb of to-day, and no longer shadowy or mute by any means.
+Little trees have grown big; big trees have disappeared to make place
+for industrious workshops and machinery; but the old abbey walls have
+been respected, and gay, genial father, and handsome mother, and lovely
+daughters, all pressing on "la belle Duchesse Anglaise" peaches and
+apricots of her great-great-grandmother's growing.
+
+For this amiable family of the Chamorin became devoted to Mary in a very
+short time--that is, the very moment they first saw her; and she never
+forgot their kindness, courtesy, and hospitality; they made her feel in
+five minutes as though she had known them for many years.
+
+I may as well state here that a few months later she received from
+Mademoiselle du Chamorin (with a charming letter) the identical violin
+that had once belonged to _la belle Verrière_, and which Count Hector
+had found in the possession of an old farmer--the great-grandson of
+Gatienne's coachman--and had purchased, that he might present it as a
+New-year's gift to her descendant, the Duchess of Towers.
+
+It is now mine, alas! I cannot play it; but it amuses and comforts me to
+hold in my hand, when broad and wide awake, an instrument that Mary and
+I have so often heard and seen in our dream, and which has so often rung
+in by-gone days with the strange melody that has had so great an
+influence on our lives. Its aspect, shape, and color, every mark and
+stain of it, were familiar to us before we had ever seen it with the
+bodily eye or handled it with the hand of flesh. It thus came straight
+to us out of the dim and distant past, heralded by the ghost of itself!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To return. Gradually, by practice and the concentration of our united
+will, the old-time figures grew to gain substance and color, and their
+voices became perceptible; till at length there arrived a day when we
+could move among them, and hear them and see them as distinctly as we
+could our own immediate progenitors close by--as Gogo and Mimsey, as
+Monsieur le Major, and the rest.
+
+The child who went about hand in hand with the white-haired lady (whose
+hair was only powdered) and fed the pigeons was my grandmother, Jeanne
+de Boismorinel (who married François Pasquier de la Marière). It was her
+father who wore red heels to his shoes, and made her believe she could
+manufacture little cocked-hats in colored glass; she had lived again in
+me whenever, as a child, I had dreamed that exquisite dream.
+
+I could now evoke her at will; and, with her, many buried memories were
+called out of nothingness into life.
+
+Among other wonderful things, I heard the red-heeled gentleman, M. de
+Boismorinel (my great-grandfather), sing beautiful old songs by Lulli
+and others to the spinet, which he played charmingly a rare
+accomplishment in those days. And lo! these tunes were tunes that had
+risen oft and unbidden in my consciousness, and I had fondly imagined
+that I had composed them myself--little impromptus of my own. And lo,
+again! His voice, thin, high, nasal, but very sympathetic and musical,
+was that never still small voice that has been singing unremittingly for
+more than half a century in the unswept, ungarnished corner of my brain
+where all the cobwebs are.
+
+[Illustration: "THAT NEVER STILL SMALL VOICE."]
+
+And these cobwebs?
+
+Well, I soon became aware, by deeply diving into my inner consciousness
+when awake and at my daily prison toil (which left the mind singularly
+clear and free), that I was full, quite full, of slight elusive
+reminiscences which were neither of my waking life nor of my dream-life
+with Mary: reminiscences of sub-dreams during sleep, and belonging to
+the period of my childhood and early youth; sub-dreams which no doubt
+had been forgotten when I woke, at which time I could only remember the
+surface dreams that had just preceded my waking.
+
+Ponds, rivers, bridges, roads, and streams, avenues of trees, arbors,
+windmills and water-mills, corridors and rooms, church functions,
+village fairs, festivities, men and women and animals, all of another
+time and of a country where I had never set my foot, were familiar to my
+remembrance. I had but to dive deep enough into myself, and there they
+were; and when night came, and sleep, and "Magna sed Apta," I could
+re-evoke them all, and make them real and complete for Mary and myself.
+
+That these subtle reminiscences were true antenatal memories was soon
+proved by my excursions with Mary into the past; and her experience of
+such reminiscences, and their corroboration, were just as my own. We
+have heard and seen her grandfather play the "Chant du Triste Commensal"
+to crowded concert-rooms, applauded to the echo by men and women long
+dead and buried and forgotten!
+
+Now, I believe such reminiscences to form part of the sub-consciousness
+of others, as well as Mary's and mine, and that by perseverance in
+self-research many will succeed in reaching them--perhaps even more
+easily and completely than we have done.
+
+It is something like listening for the overtones of a musical note; we
+do not hear them at first, though they are there, clamoring for
+recognition; and when at last we hear them, we wonder at our former
+obtuseness, so distinct are they.
+
+Let a man with an average ear, however uncultivated, strike the C low
+down on a good piano-forte, keeping his foot on the loud pedal. At first
+he will hear nothing but the rich fundamental note C.
+
+But let him become _expectant_ of certain other notes; for instance, of
+the C in the octave immediately above, then the G immediately above
+that, then the E higher still; he will hear them all in time as clearly
+as the note originally struck; and, finally, a shrill little ghostly and
+quite importunate B flat in the treble will pulsate so loudly in his ear
+that he will never cease to hear it whenever that low C is sounded.
+
+By just such a process, only with infinitely more pains (and in the end
+with what pleasure and surprise), will he grow aware in time of a dim,
+latent, antenatal experience that underlies his own personal experience
+of this life.
+
+We also found that we were able not only to assist as mere spectators at
+such past scenes as I have described (and they were endless), but also
+to identify ourselves occasionally with the actors, and cease for the
+moment to be Mary Seraskier and Peter Ibbetson. Notably was this the
+case with Gatienne. We could each be Gatienne for a space (though never
+both of us together), and when we resumed our own personality again we
+carried back with it a portion of hers, never to be lost again--a
+strange phenomenon, if the reader will but think of it, and
+constituting the germ of a comparative personal immortality on earth.
+
+At my work in prison, even, I could distinctly remember having been
+Gatienne; so that for the time being, Gatienne, a provincial French
+woman who lived a hundred years ago, was contentedly undergoing penal
+servitude in an English jail during the latter half of the
+nineteenth century.
+
+A questionable privilege, perhaps.
+
+But to make up for it, when she was not alive in me she could be brought
+to life in Mary (only in one at a time, it seemed), and travel by rail
+and steamer, and know the uses of gas and electricity, and read the
+telegrams of "our special correspondents" in the _Times_, and taste her
+nineteenth century under more favorable conditions.
+
+Thus we took _la belle Verrière_ by turns, and she saw and heard things
+she little dreamed of a hundred years ago. Besides, she was made to
+share in the glories of "Magna sed Apta."
+
+And the better we knew her the more we loved her; she was a very nice
+person to descend from, and Mary and I were well agreed that we could
+not have chosen a better great-great-grandmother, and wondered what each
+of our seven others was like, for we had fifteen of these between us,
+and as many great-great-grandfathers.
+
+Thirty great-great-grandfathers and great-great-grandmothers had made us
+what we were; it was no good fighting against them and the millions at
+their backs.
+
+Which of them all, strong, but gentle and shy, and hating the very
+sight of blood, yet saw scarlet when he was roused, and thirsted for the
+blood of his foe?
+
+Which of them all, passionate and tender, but proud, high-minded, and
+chaste, and with the world at her feet, was yet ready to "throw her cap
+over the windmills," and give up all for love, deeming the world
+well lost?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That we could have thus identified ourselves, only more easily and
+thoroughly, with our own more immediate progenitors, we felt certain
+enough. But after mature thought we resolved to desist from any further
+attempt at such transfusion of identity, for sacred reasons of
+discretion which the reader will appreciate.
+
+But that this will be done some day (now the way has been made clear),
+and also that the inconveniences and possible abuses of such a faculty
+will be obviated or minimized by the ever-active ingenuity of mankind,
+is to my mind a foregone conclusion.
+
+It is too valuable a faculty to be left in abeyance, and I leave the
+probable and possible consequences of its culture to the reader's
+imagination--merely pointing out to him (as an inducement to cultivate
+that faculty in himself) that if anything can keep us well within the
+thorny path that leads to happiness and virtue, it is the certainty that
+those who come after us will remember having been ourselves, if only in
+a dream--even as the newly-hatched chicken has remembered in its egg the
+use of eyes and ears and the rest, out of the fulness of its long
+antenatal experience; and more fortunate than the helpless human infant
+in this respect, can enter on the business and pleasures of its brief,
+irresponsible existence at once!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Wherefore, oh reader, if you be but sound in mind and body, it most
+seriously behooves you (not only for the sake of those who come after
+you, but your own) to go forth and multiply exceedingly, to marry early
+and much and often, and to select the very best of your kind in the
+opposite sex for this most precious, excellent, and blessed purpose;
+that all your future reincarnations (and hers), however brief, may be
+many; and bring you not only joy and peace and pleasurable wonderment
+and recreation, but the priceless guerdon of well-earned self-approval!
+
+For whoever remembers having once been you, wakes you for the nonce out
+of--nirvana, shall we say? His strength, his beauty, and his wit are
+yours; and the felicity he derives from them in this earthly life is for
+you to share, whenever this subtle remembrance of you stirs in his
+consciousness; and you can never quite sink back again into--nirvana,
+till all your future wakers shall cease to be!
+
+It is like a little old-fashioned French game we used to play at Passy,
+and which is not bad for a dark, rainy afternoon: people sit all round
+in a circle, and each hands on to his neighbor a spill or a
+lucifer-match just blown out, but in which a little live spark still
+lingers; saying, as he does so--
+
+_"Petit bonhomme vit encore!"_
+
+And he, in whose hand the spark becomes extinct, has to pay forfeit and
+retire--"Hélas! petit bonhomme n'est plus! ... Pauv' petit bonhomme!"
+
+Ever thus may a little live spark of your own individual consciousness,
+when the full, quick flame of your actual life here below is
+extinguished, be handed down mildly incandescent to your remotest
+posterity. May it never quite go out--it need not! May you ever be able
+to say of yourself, from generation to generation, "Petit bonhomme vit
+encore!" and still keep one finger at least in the pleasant earthly pie!
+
+And, reader, remember so to order your life on earth that the memory of
+you (like that of Gatienne, la belle Verrière de Verny le Moustier) may
+smell sweet and blossom in the dust--a memory pleasant to recall--to
+this end that its recallings and its recallers may be as numerous as
+filial love and ancestral pride can make them....
+
+And oh! looking _backward_ (as _we_ did), be tender to the failings of
+your forbears, who little guessed when alive that the secrets of their
+long buried hearts should one day be revealed to _you_! Their faults are
+really your own, like the faults of your innocent, ignorant childhood,
+so to say, when you did not know better, as you do now; or will
+soon, thanks to
+
+_"Le Chant du Triste Commensal!"_
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Wherefore, also, beware and be warned in time, ye tenth transmitters of
+a foolish face, ye reckless begetters of diseased or puny bodies, with
+hearts and brains to match! Far down the corridors of time shall
+club-footed retribution follow in your footsteps, and overtake you at
+every turn! Most remorselessly, most vindictively, will you be aroused,
+in sleepless hours of unbearable misery (future-waking nightmares), from
+your false, uneasy dream of death; to participate in an inheritance of
+woe still worse than yours--worse with all the accumulated interest of
+long years and centuries of iniquitous self-indulgence, and poisoned by
+the sting of a self-reproach that shall never cease till the last of
+your tainted progeny dies out, and finds his true nirvana, and yours, in
+the dim, forgetful depths of interstellar space!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And here let me most conscientiously affirm that, partly from my keen
+sense of the solemnity of such an appeal, and the grave responsibility I
+take upon myself in making it; but more especially in order to impress
+you, oh reader, with the full significance of this apocalyptic and
+somewhat minatory utterance (that it may haunt your finer sense during
+your midnight hours of introspective self-communion), I have done my
+best, my very best, to couch it in the obscurest and most unintelligible
+phraseology I could invent. If I have failed to do this, if I have
+unintentionally made any part of my meaning clear, if I have once
+deviated by mistake into what might almost appear like sense--mere
+common-sense--it is the fault of my half-French and wholly imperfect
+education. I am but a poor scribe!
+
+Thus roughly have I tried to give an account of this, the most
+important of our joint discoveries in the strange new world revealed to
+us by chance. More than twenty years of our united lives have been
+devoted to the following out of this slender clew--with what surprising
+results will, I trust, be seen in subsequent volumes.
+
+We have not had time to attempt the unravelling of our English ancestry
+as well--the Crays, and the Desmonds, the Ibbetsons, and Biddulphs,
+etc.--which connects us with the past history of England. The farther we
+got back into France, the more fascinating it became, and the
+easier--and the more difficult to leave.
+
+What an unexampled experience has been ours! To think that we have
+seen--actually seen--_de nos propres yeux vu_--Napoleon Bonaparte
+himself, the arch-arbiter of the world, on the very pinnacle of his
+pride and power; in his little cocked hat and gray double-breasted
+overcoat, astride his white charger, with all his staff around him, just
+as he has been so often painted! Surely the most impressive,
+unforgettable, ineffaceable little figure in all modern history, and
+clothed in the most cunningly imagined make-up that ever theatrical
+costumier devised to catch the public eye and haunt the public memory
+for ages and ages yet to come!
+
+It is a singularly new, piquant, and exciting sensation to stare in
+person, and as in the present, at bygone actualities, and be able to
+foretell the past and remember the future all in one!
+
+To think that we have even beheld him before he was first consul--slim
+and pale, his lank hair dangling down his neck and cheeks, if possible
+more impressive still as innocent as a child of all that lay before him!
+Europe at his feet--the throne--Waterloo-St. Helena--the Iron English
+Duke--the pinnacle turned into a pillory so soon!
+
+_"O corse à cheveux plats, que la France était belle Au soleil de
+Messidor!"_
+
+And Mirabeau and Robespierre, and Danton and Marat and Charlotte Corday!
+we have seen them too; and Marie Antoinette and the fish-wives, and "the
+beautiful head of Lamballe" (on its pike!) ... and watched the tumbrils
+go by to the Place du Carrousel, and gazed at the guillotine by
+moonlight--silent and terror-stricken, our very hearts in our mouths....
+
+And in the midst of it all, ridiculous stray memories of Madame Tussaud
+would come stealing into our ghastly dream of blood and retribution,
+mixing up past and present and future in a manner not to be described,
+and making us smile through our tears!
+
+Then we were present (several times!) at the taking of the Bastille, and
+indeed witnessed most of the stormy scenes of that stormy time, with our
+Carlyle in our hands; and often have we thought, and with many a hearty
+laugh, what fun it must be to write immortal histories, with never an
+eye-witness to contradict you!
+
+And going further back we have haunted Versailles in the days of its
+splendor, and drunk our fill of all the glories of the court of
+Louis XIV!
+
+What imposing ceremonials, what stupendous royal functions have we not
+attended--where all the beauty, wit, and chivalry of France, prostrate
+with reverence and awe (as in the very presence of a god), did loyal
+homage to the greatest monarch this world has ever seen--while we sat
+by, on the very steps of his throne, as he solemnly gave out his royal
+command! and laughed aloud under his very nose--the shallow, silly,
+pompous little snob--and longed to pull it! and tried to disinfect his
+greasy, civet-scented, full-bottomed wig with wholesome whiffs from a
+nineteenth-century regalia!
+
+Nothing of that foolish but fascinating period escaped us. Town, hamlet,
+river, forest, and field; royal palace, princely castle, and starving
+peasants' hut; pulpit, stage, and salon; port, camp, and marketplace;
+tribunal and university; factory, shop, studio, smithy; tavern and
+gambling-hell and den of thieves; convent and jail, torture-chamber and
+gibbet-close, and what not all!
+
+And at every successive step our once desponding, over-anxious,
+over-burdened latter-day souls have swelled with joy and pride and hope
+at the triumphs of our own day all along the line! Yea, even though we
+have heard the illustrious Bossuet preach, and applauded Molière in one
+of his own plays, and gazed at and listened to (and almost forgiven)
+Racine and Corneille, and Boileau and Fénélon, and the good
+Lafontaine--those five ruthless persecutors of our own innocent French
+childhood!
+
+And still ascending the stream of time, we have hobnobbed with Montaigne
+and Rabelais, and been personally bored by Malherbe, and sat at
+Ronsard's feet, and ridden by Froissart's side, and slummed with
+François Villon--in what enchanted slums! ...
+
+François Villon! Think of that, ye fond British bards and bardlets
+of to-day--ye would-be translators and imitators of that
+never-to-be-translated, never-to-be-imitated lament, the immortal
+_Ballade des Dames du Temps jadis_!
+
+And while I speak of it, I may as well mention that we have seen them
+too, or some of them--those fair ladies _he_ had never seen, and who had
+already melted away before his coming, like the snows of yester year,
+_les neiges d'antan!_ Bertha, with the big feet; Joan of Arc, the good
+Lorrainer (what would she think of her native province now!); the very
+learned Héloïse, for love of whom one Peter Esbaillart, or Abélard (a
+more luckless Peter than even I!), suffered such cruel indignities at
+monkish hands; and that haughty, naughty queen, in her Tower of Nesle,
+
+_"Qui commanda que Buridan Fut jecté en ung Sac en Seine...."_
+
+Yes, we have seen them with the eye, and heard them speak and sing, and
+scold and jest, and laugh and weep, and even pray! And I have sketched
+them, as you shall see some day, good reader! And let me tell you that
+their beauty was by no means maddening: the standard of female
+loveliness has gone up, even in France! Even _la très sage Héloïs_ was
+scarcely worth such a sacrifice as--but there! Possess your soul in
+patience; all that, and it is all but endless, will appear in due time,
+with such descriptions and illustrations as I flatter myself the world
+has never bargained for, and will value as it has never valued any
+historical records yet!
+
+Day after day, for more than twenty years, Mary has kept a voluminous
+diary (in a cipher known to us both); it is now my property, and in it
+every detail of our long journey into the past has been set down.
+
+Contemporaneously, day by day (during the leisure accorded to me by the
+kindness of Governor----) I have drawn over again from memory the
+sketches of people and places I was able to make straight from nature
+during those wonderful nights at "Magna sed Apta." I can guarantee the
+correctness of them, and the fidelity of their likenesses; no doubt
+their execution leaves much to be desired.
+
+Both her task and mine (to the future publication of which this
+autobiography is but an introduction) have been performed with the
+minutest care and conscientiousness; no time or trouble have been
+spared. For instance, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew alone, which we
+were able to study from seventeen different points of view, cost us no
+less than two months' unremitting labor.
+
+As we reached further and further back through the stream of time, the
+task became easier in a way; but we have had to generalize more, and
+often, for want of time and space, to use types in lieu of individuals.
+For with every successive generation the number of our progenitors
+increased in geometrical progression (as in the problem of the nails in
+the horseshoe) until a limit of numbers was reached--namely, the sum of
+the inhabitants of the terrestrial globe. In the seventh century there
+was not a person living in France (not to mention Europe) who was not in
+the line of our direct ancestry, excepting, of course, those who had
+died without issue and were mere collaterals.
+
+[Illustration: "THE MAMMOTH."]
+
+We have even just been able to see, as in a glass darkly, the faint
+shadows of the Mammoth and the cave bear, and of the man who hunted and
+killed and ate them, that he might live and prevail.
+
+The Mammoth!
+
+We have walked round him and under him as he browsed, and even _through_
+him where he lay and rested, as one walks through the dun mist in a
+little hollow on a still, damp morning; and turning round to look (at
+the proper distance) there was the unmistakable shape again, just thick
+enough to blot out the lines of the dim primeval landscape beyond, and
+make a hole in the blank sky. A dread silhouette, thrilling our hearts
+with awe--blurred and indistinct like a composite photograph--merely the
+_type_, as it had been seen generally by all who had ever seen it at
+all, every one of whom _(exceptis excipiendis)_ was necessarily an
+ancestor of ours, and of every man now living.
+
+There it stood or reclined, the monster, like the phantom of an
+overgrown hairy elephant; we could almost see, or fancy we saw, the
+expression of his dull, cold, antediluvian eye--almost perceive a
+suggestion of russet-brown in his fell.
+
+Mary firmly believed that we should have got in time to our hairy
+ancestor with pointed ears and a tail, and have been able to ascertain
+whether he was arboreal in his habits or not. With what passionate
+interest she would have followed and studied and described him! And I!
+With what eager joy, and yet with what filial reverence, I would have
+sketched his likeness--with what conscientious fidelity as far as my poor
+powers would allow! (For all we know to the contrary he may have been
+the most attractive and engaging little beast that ever was, and far
+less humiliating to descend from than many a titled yahoo of the
+present day.)
+
+Fate, alas, has willed that it should be otherwise, and on others, duly
+trained, must devolve the delightful task of following up the clew we
+have been so fortunate as to discover.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now the time has come for me to tell as quickly as I may the story
+of my bereavement--a bereavement so immense that no man, living or dead,
+can ever have experienced the like; and to explain how it is that I have
+not only survived it and kept my wits (which some people seem to doubt),
+but am here calmly and cheerfully writing my reminiscences, just as if I
+were a famous Academician, actor, novelist, statesman, or general
+diner-out--blandly garrulous and well-satisfied with myself and
+the world.
+
+During the latter years of our joint existence Mary and I engrossed by
+our fascinating journey through the centuries, had seen little or
+nothing of each other's outer lives, or rather I had seen nothing of
+hers (for she still came back sometimes with me to my jail); I only saw
+her as she chose to appear in our dream.
+
+Perhaps at the bottom of this there may have been a feminine dislike on
+her part to be seen growing older, for at "Magna sed Apta" we were
+always twenty-eight or thereabouts--at our very best. We had truly
+discovered the fountain of perennial youth, and had drunk thereof! And
+in our dream we always felt even younger than we looked; we had the
+buoyancy of children and their freshness.
+
+Often had we talked of death and separation and the mystery beyond, but
+only as people do for whom such contingencies are remote; yet in reality
+time flew as rapidly for us as for others, although we were less
+sensible of its flight.
+
+There came a day when Mary's exuberant vitality, so constantly
+overtaxed, broke down, and she was ill for a while; although that did
+not prevent our meeting as usual, and there was no perceptible
+difference in her when we met. But I am certain that in reality she was
+never quite the same again as she had been, and the dread possibility of
+parting any day would come up oftener in our talk; in our minds, only
+too often, and our minds were as one.
+
+She knew that if I died first, everything I had brought into "Magna sed
+Apta" (and little it was) would be there no more; even to my body, ever
+lying supine on the couch by the enchanted window, it she had woke by
+chance to our common life before I had, or remained after I had been
+summoned away to my jail.
+
+And I knew that, if she died, not only her body on the adjacent couch,
+but all "Magna sed Apta" itself would melt away, and be as if it had
+never been, with its endless galleries and gardens and magic windows,
+and all the wonders it contained.
+
+Sometimes I felt a hideous nervous dread, on sinking into sleep, lest I
+should find it was so, and the ever-heavenly delight of waking there,
+and finding all as usual, was but the keener. I would kneel by her
+inanimate body, and gaze at her with a passion of love that seemed made
+up of all the different kinds of love a human being can feel; even the
+love of a dog for his mistress was in it, and that of a wild beast for
+its young.
+
+With eager, tremulous anxiety and aching suspense I would watch for the
+first light breath from her lips, the first faint tinge of carmine in
+her cheek, that always heralded her coming back to life. And when she
+opened her eyes and smiled, and stretched her long young limbs in the
+joy of waking, what transports of gratitude and relief!
+
+[Illustration: "WAITING"]
+
+Ah me! the recollection!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At last a terrible unforgettable night arrived when my presentiment was
+fulfilled.
+
+I awoke in the little lumber-room of "Parva sed Apta," where the door
+had always been that led to and from our palace of delight; but there
+was no door any longer--nothing but a blank wall....
+
+I woke back at once in my cell, in such a state as it is impossible to
+describe. I felt there must be some mistake, and after much time and
+effort was able to sink into sleep again, but with the same result: the
+blank wall, the certainty that "Magna sed Apta" was closed forever, that
+Mary was dead; and then the terrible jump back into my prison
+life again.
+
+This happened several times during the night, and when the morning
+dawned I was a raving madman. I took the warder who first came
+(attracted by my cries of "Mary!") for Colonel Ibbetson, and tried to
+kill him, and should have done so, but that he was a very big man,
+almost as powerful as myself and only half my age.
+
+Other warders came to the rescue, and I took them all for Ibbetsons, and
+fought like the maniac I was.
+
+When I came to myself, after long horrors and brain-fever and what not,
+I was removed from the jail infirmary to another place, where I am now.
+
+I had suddenly recovered my reason, and woke to mental agony such as I,
+who had stood in the dock and been condemned to a shameful death, had
+never even dreamed of.
+
+I soon had the knowledge of my loss confirmed, and heard (it had been
+common talk for more than nine days) that the famous Mary, Duchess of
+Towers, had met her death at the ------ station of the Metropolitan
+Railway.
+
+A woman, carrying a child, had been jostled by a tipsy man just as a
+train was entering the station, and dropped her child onto the metals.
+She tried to jump after it but was held back, and Mary, who had just
+come up, jumped in her stead, and by a miracle of strength and agility
+was just able to clutch the child and get onto the six-foot way as the
+engine came by.
+
+She was able to carry the child to the end of the train, and was helped
+onto the platform. It was her train, and she got into a carriage, but
+she was dead before it reached the next station. Her heart, (which, it
+seems, had been diseased for some time) had stopped, and all was over.
+
+So died Mary Seraskier, at fifty-three.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I lay for many weeks convalescent in body, but in a state of dumb, dry
+tearless, despair, to which there never came a moment's relief, except
+in the dreamless sleep I got from chloral, which was given to me in
+large quantities--and then, the _waking_!
+
+I never spoke nor answered a question, and hardly ever stirred. I had
+one fixed idea--that of self-destruction; and after two unsuccessful
+attempts, I was so closely bound and watched night and day that any
+further attempt was impossible. They would not trust me with a toothpick
+or a button or a piece of common packthread.
+
+I tried to starve myself to death and refused all solid food: but an
+intolerable thirst (perhaps artificially brought on) made it impossible
+for me to refuse any liquid that was offered, and I was tempted with
+milk, beef-tea, port, and sherry, and these kept me alive....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I had lost all wish to dream.
+
+At length, one afternoon, a strange, inexplicable, overwhelming
+nostalgic desire came over me to see once more the Mare d'Auteuil--only
+once; to walk thither for the last time through the Chaussée de la
+Muette, and by the fortifications.
+
+It grew upon me till it became a torture to wait for bedtime, so frantic
+was my impatience.
+
+When the long-wished-for hour arrived at last, I laid myself down once
+more (as nearly as I could for my bonds) in the old position I had not
+tried for so long; my will intent upon the Porte de la Muette, an old
+stone gate-way that separated the Grande Rue de Passy from the entrance
+to the Bois de Boulogne--a kind of Temple Bar.
+
+It was pulled down forty-five years ago.
+
+I soon found myself there, just where the Grande Rue meets the Rue de la
+Pompe, and went through the arch and looked towards the Bois.
+
+It was a dull, leaden day in autumn; few people were about, but a gay
+_repas de noces_ was being held at a little restaurant on my right-hand
+side. It was to celebrate the wedding of Achille Grigoux, the
+green-grocer, with Félicité Lenormand, who had been the Seraskiers'
+house-maid. I suddenly remembered all this, and that Mimsey and Gogo
+were of the party--the latter, indeed, being _premier garçon d'honneur_,
+on whom would soon devolve the duty of stealing the bride's garter, and
+cutting it up into little bits to adorn the button-holes of the male
+guests before the ball began.
+
+In an archway on my left some forlorn, worn-out old rips, broken-kneed
+and broken-winded, were patiently waiting, ready saddled and bridled, to
+be hired--Chloris, Murat, Rigolette, and others: I knew and had ridden
+them all nearly half a century ago. Poor old shadows of the long-dead
+past, so life-like and real and pathetic--it "split me the heart" to
+see them!
+
+A handsome young blue-coated, silver-buttoned courier of the name of
+Lami came trotting along from St. Cloud on a roan horse, with a great
+jingling of his horse's bells and clacking of his short-handled whip. He
+stopped at the restaurant and called for a glass of white wine, and
+rising in his stirrups, shouted gayly for Monsieur et Madame Grigoux.
+They appeared at the first-floor window, looking very happy, and he
+drank their health, and they his. I could see Gogo and Mimsey in the
+crowd behind them, and mildly wondered again, as I had so often wondered
+before, how I came to see it all from the outside--from another point of
+view than Gogo's.
+
+Then the courier bowed gallantly, and said, _"Bonne chance!"_ and went
+trotting down the Grande Rue on his way to the Tuileries, and the
+wedding guests began to sing: they sang a song beginning--
+
+_"Il était un petit navire, Qui n'avait jamais navigué_...."
+
+I had quite forgotten it, and listened till the end, and thought it very
+pretty; and was interested in a dull, mechanical way at discovering
+that it must be the original of Thackeray's famous ballad of "Little
+Billee," which I did not hear till many years after. When they came to
+the last verse--
+
+"_Si cette histoire vous embête, Nous allons la recommencer_,"
+
+I went on my way. This was my last walk in dreamland, perhaps, and
+dream-hours are uncertain, and I would make the most of them, and
+look about me.
+
+I walked towards Ranelagh, a kind of casino, where they used to give
+balls and theatrical performances on Sunday and Thursday nights (and
+where afterwards Rossini spent the latter years of his life; then it was
+pulled down, I am told, to make room for many smart little villas).
+
+In the meadow opposite M. Erard's park, Saindou's school-boys were
+playing rounders--_la balle au camp_--from which I concluded it was a
+Thursday afternoon, a half-holiday; if they had had clean shirts on
+(which they had not) it would have been Sunday, and the holiday a
+whole one.
+
+I knew them all, and the two _pions_, or ushers, M. Lartigue and _le
+petit Cazal_; but no longer cared for them or found them amusing or
+interesting in the least.
+
+Opposite the Ranelagh a few old hackney-coach men were pacifically
+killing time by a game of _bouchon_--knocking sous off a cork with other
+sous--great fat sous and double sous long gone out of fashion. It is a
+very good game, and I watched it for a while and envied the
+long-dead players.
+
+Close by was a small wooden shed, or _baraque_, prettily painted and
+glazed, and ornamented at the top with little tricolor flags; it
+belonged to a couple of old ladies, Mère Manette and Grandmère
+Manette-the two oldest women ever seen. They were very keen about
+business, and would not give credit for a centime--not even to English
+boys. They were said to be immensely rich and quite alone in the world.
+How very dead they must be now! I thought. And I gazed at them and
+wondered at their liveliness and the pleasure they took in living. They
+sold many things: nougat, _pain d'èpices_, mirlitons, hoops, drums,
+noisy battledoors and shuttlecocks; and little ten-sou hand-mirrors,
+neatly bound in zinc, that could open and shut.
+
+I looked at myself in one of these that was hanging outside; I was old
+and worn and gray-my face badly shaven--my hair almost white. I had
+never been old in a dream before.
+
+I walked through the gate in the fortifications on to the outer Talus
+(which was quite bare in those days), in the direction of the Mare
+d'Auteuil. The place seemed very deserted and dull for a Thursday. It
+was a sad and sober walk; my melancholy was not to be borne--my heart
+was utterly broken, and my body so tired I could scarcely drag myself
+along. Never before had I known in a dream what it was to be tired.
+
+I gazed at the famous fortifications in all their brand-new pinkness,
+the scaffoldings barely removed--some of them still lying in the dry
+ditch between--and smiled to think how these little brick and granite
+walls would avail to keep the Germans out of Paris thirty years later
+(twenty years ago). I tried to throw a stone across the narrow part, and
+found I could no longer throw stones; so I sat down and rested. How thin
+my legs were! and how miserably clad--in old prison trousers, greasy,
+stained, and frayed, and ignobly kneed--and what boots!
+
+[Illustration: "I sat down and rested."]
+
+Never had I been shabby in a dream before.
+
+Why could not I, once for all, walk round to the other side and take a
+header _à la hussarde_ off those lofty bulwarks, and kill myself for
+good and all? Alas! I should only blur the dream, and perhaps even wake
+in my miserable strait-waistcoat. And I wanted to see the _mare_ once
+more, very badly.
+
+This set me thinking. I would fill my pockets with stones, and throw
+myself into the Mare d'Auteuil after I had taken a last good look at it,
+and around. Perhaps the shock of emotion, in my present state of
+weakness, might really kill me in my sleep. Who knows? it was worth
+trying, anyhow.
+
+I got up and dragged myself to the _mare_. It was deserted but for one
+solitary female figure, soberly clad in black and gray, that sat
+motionless on the bench by the old willow.
+
+I walked slowly round in her direction, picking up stones and putting
+them into my pockets, and saw that she was gray-haired and middle-aged,
+with very dark eyebrows, and extremely tall, and that her magnificent
+eyes were following me.
+
+Then, as I drew nearer, she smiled and showed gleaming white teeth, and
+her eyes crinkled and nearly closed up as she did so.
+
+"Oh, my God!" I shrieked; "it is Mary Seraskier!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I ran to her--I threw myself at her feet, and buried my face in her lap,
+and there I sobbed like a hysterical child, while she tried to soothe me
+as one soothes a child.
+
+After a while I looked up into her face. It was old and worn and gray,
+and her hair nearly white, like mine. I had never seen her like that
+before; she had always been eight-and-twenty. But age became her
+well--she looked so benignly beautiful and calm and grand that I was
+awed--and quick, chill waves went down my backbone.
+
+Her dress and bonnet were old and shabby, her gloves had been
+mended--old kid gloves with fur about the wrists. She drew them off, and
+took my hands and made me sit beside her, and looked at me for a while
+with all her might in silence.
+
+At length she said: "Gogo mio, I know all you have been through by the
+touch of your hands. Does the touch of mine tell you nothing?"
+
+It told me nothing but her huge love for me, which was all I cared for,
+and I said so.
+
+She sighed, and said: "I was afraid it would be like this. The old
+circuit is broken, and can't be restored--not yet!"
+
+We tried again hard; but it was useless.
+
+She looked round and about and up at the tree-tops, everywhere; and then
+at me again, with great wistfulness, and shivered, and finally began to
+speak, with hesitation at first, and in a manner foreign to her. But
+soon she became apparently herself, and found her old swift smile and
+laugh, her happy slight shrugs and gestures, and quaint polyglot
+colloquialisms (which I omit, as I cannot always spell them); her
+homely, simple ways of speech, her fluent, magnetic energy, the winning
+and sympathetic modulations of her voice, its quick humorous changes
+from grave to gay--all that made everything she said so suggestive of
+all she wanted to say besides.
+
+"Gogo, I knew you would come. I _wished_ it! How dreadfully you have
+suffered! How thin you are! It shocks me to see you! But that will not
+be any more; we are going to change all that.
+
+"Gogo, you have no idea how difficult it has been for me to come back,
+even for a few short hours, for I can't hold on very long. It is like
+hanging on to the window-sill by one's wrists. This time it is Hero
+swimming to Leander, or Juliet climbing up to Romeo.
+
+"Nobody has ever come back before.
+
+"I am but a poor husk of my former self, put together at great pains for
+you to know me by. I could not make myself again what I have always been
+to you. I had to be content with this, and so must you. These are the
+clothes I died in. But you knew me directly, dear Gogo.
+
+"I have come a long way--such a long way--to have an _abboccamento_ with
+you. I had so many things to say. And now we are both here, hand in hand
+as we used to be, I can't even understand what they were; and if I
+could, I couldn't make _you_ understand. But you will know some day, and
+there is no hurry whatever.
+
+"Every thought you have had since I died, I know already; _your_ share
+of the circuit is unbroken at least. I know now why you picked up those
+stones and put them in your pockets. You must never think of _that_
+again--you never will. Besides, it would be of no use, poor Gogo!"
+
+Then she looked up at the sky and all round her again, and smiled in her
+old happy manner, and rubbed her eyes with the backs of her hands, and
+seemed to settle herself for a good long talk--an _abboccamento!_
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Of all she said I can only give a few fragments--whatever I can recall
+and understand when awake. Wherever I have forgotten I will put a line
+of little dots. Only when I sleep and dream can I recall and understand
+the rest. It seems all very simple then. I often say to myself, "I will
+fix it well in my mind, and put it into well-chosen words--_her_
+words--and learn them by heart; and then wake cautiously and remember
+them, and write them all down in a book, so that they shall do for
+others all they have done for me, and turn doubt into happy certainty,
+and despair into patience and hope and high elation."
+
+[Illustration: "IT IS MARY SERASKIER!"]
+
+But the bell rings and I wake, and my memory plays me false. Nothing
+remains but the knowledge _that all will be well for us all, and of such
+a kind that those who do not sigh for the moon will be well content_.
+
+Alas, this knowledge: I cannot impart it to others. Like many who have
+lived before me, I cannot prove--I can only affirm....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"How odd and old-fashioned it feels," she began, "to have eyes and ears
+again, and all that--little open windows on to what is near us. They are
+very clumsy contrivances! I had already forgotten them."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Look, there goes our old friend, the water-rat, under the bank--the old
+fat father--_le bon gros père_--as we used to call him. He is only a
+little flat picture moving upsidedown in the opposite direction across
+the backs of our eyes, and the farther he goes the smaller he seems. A
+couple of hundred yards off we shouldn't see him at all. As it is, we
+can only see the outside of him, and that only on one side at a time;
+and yet he is full of important and wonderful things that have taken
+millions of years to make--like us! And to see him at all we have to
+look straight at him--and then we can't see what's behind us or
+around--and if it was dark we couldn't see anything whatever.
+
+Poor eyes! Little bags full of water, with a little magnifying-glass
+inside, and a nasturtium leaf behind--to catch the light and feel it!
+
+A celebrated German oculist once told papa that if his instrument-maker
+were to send him such an ill-made machine as a human eye, he would send
+it back and refuse to pay the bill. I can understand that now; and yet
+on earth where should we be without eyes? And afterwards where should we
+be if some of us hadn't once had them on earth?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I can hear your dear voice, Gogo, with both ears. Why two ears? Why
+only two? What you want, or think, or feel, you try to tell me in sounds
+that you have been taught--English, French. If I didn't know English and
+French, it would be no good whatever. Language is a poor thing. You fill
+your lungs with wind and shake a little slit in your throat, and make
+mouths, and that shakes the air; and the air shakes a pair of little
+drums in my head--a very complicated arrangement, with lots of bones
+behind--and my brain seizes your meaning in the rough. What a roundabout
+way, and what a waste of time!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And so with all the rest. We can't even smell straight! A dog would
+laugh at us--not that even a dog knows much!
+
+And feeling! We can feel too hot or too cold, and it sometimes makes us
+ill, or even kills us. But we can't feel the coming storm, or which is
+north and south, or where the new moon is, or the sun at midnight, or
+the stars at noon, or even what o'clock it is by our own measurement. We
+cannot even find our way home blindfolded--not even a pigeon can do
+that, nor a swallow, nor an owl! Only a mole, or a blind man, perhaps,
+feebly groping with a stick, if he has already been that way before.
+
+And taste! It is well said there is no accounting for it.
+
+And then, to keep all this going, we have to eat, and drink, and sleep,
+and all the rest. What a burden!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And you and I are the only mortals that I know of who ever found a way
+to each other's inner being by the touch of the hands. And then we had
+to go to sleep first. Our bodies were miles apart; not that _that_ would
+have made any difference, for we could never have done it waking--never;
+not if we hugged each other to extinction!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Gogo, I cannot find any words to tell you _how_, for there are none in
+any language that _I_ ever knew to tell it; but where I am it is all ear
+and eye and the rest in _one_, and there is, oh, how much more besides!
+Things a homing-pigeon has known, and an ant, and a mole, and a
+water-beetle, and an earthworm, and a leaf, and a root, and a
+magnet--even a lump of chalk, and more. One can see and smell and touch
+and taste a sound, as well as hear it, and _vice versâ_. It is very
+simple, though it may not seem so to you now.
+
+And the sounds! Ah, what sounds! The thick atmosphere of earth is no
+conductor for such as _they_, and earthly ear-drums no receiver. Sound
+is everything. Sound and light are one.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And what does it all mean?
+
+I knew what it meant when I was there--part of it, at least--and should
+know again in a few hours. But this poor old earth-brain of mine, which
+I have had to put on once more as an old woman puts on a nightcap, is
+like my eyes and ears. It can now only understand what is of the
+earth--what _you_ can understand, Gogo, who are still of the earth. I
+forget, as one forgets an ordinary dream, as one sometimes forgets the
+answer to a riddle, or the last verse of a song. It is on the tip of the
+tongue; but there it sticks, and won't come any farther.
+
+Remember, it is only in your brain I am living now--your earthly brain,
+that has been my only home for so many happy years, as mine has
+been yours.
+
+How we have nestled!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But this I know: one must have had them all once--brains, ears, eyes,
+and the rest--on earth. 'Il faut avoir passé par là!' or no
+after-existence for man or beast would be possible or even conceivable.
+
+One cannot teach a born deaf-mute how to understand a musical score,
+nor a born blind man how to feel color. To Beethoven, who had once heard
+with the ear, his deafness made no difference, nor their blindness to
+Homer and Milton.
+
+Can you make out my little parable?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Sound and light and heat, and electricity and motion, and will and
+thought and remembrance, and love and hate and pity, and the desire to
+be born and to live, and the longing of all things alive and dead to get
+near each other, or to fly apart--and lots of other things besides! All
+that comes to the same--'C'est comme qui dirait bonnet blanc et blanc
+bonnet,' as Monsieur le Major used to say. 'C'est simple comme bonjour!'
+
+Where I am, Gogo, I can hear the sun shining on the earth and making
+the flowers blow, and the birds sing, and the bells peal for birth and
+marriage and death--happy, happy death, if you only knew--'C'est la clef
+des champs!'
+
+It shines on moons and planets, and I can hear it, and hear the echo
+they give back again. The very stars are singing; rather a long way off!
+but it is well worth their while with such an audience as lies between
+us and them; and they can't help it....
+
+I can't hear it here--not a bit--now that I've got my ears on; besides,
+the winds of the earth are too loud....
+
+Ah, that _is_ music, if you like; but men and women are stone-deaf to
+it--their ears are in the way! ...
+
+Those poor unseen flat fish that live in the darkness and mud at the
+bottom of deep seas can't catch the music men and women make upon the
+earth--such poor music as it is! But if ever so faint a murmur, borne on
+the wings and fins of a sunbeam, reaches them for a few minutes at
+mid-day, and they have a speck of marrow in their spines to feel it, and
+no ears or eyes to come between, they are better off than any man, Gogo.
+Their dull existence is more blessed than his.
+
+But alas for them, as yet! They haven't got the memory of the eye and
+ear, and without that no speck of spinal marrow will avail; they must be
+content to wait, like you.
+
+The blind and deaf?
+
+Oh yes; _là bas_, it is all right for the poor deaf-mutes and born
+blind of the earth; they can remember with the past eyes and ears of all
+the rest. Besides, it is no longer _they_. There is no _they_! That is
+only a detail.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+You must try and realize that it is just as though all space between us
+and the sun and stars were full of little specks of spinal marrow, much
+too small to be seen in any microscope--smaller than anything in the
+world. All space is full of them, shoulder to shoulder--almost as close
+as sardines in a box--and there is still room for more! Yet a single
+drop of water would hold them all, and not be the less transparent. They
+all remember having been alive on earth or elsewhere, in some form or
+other, and each knows all the others remember. I can only compare it
+to that.
+
+Once all that space was only full of stones, rushing, whirling,
+meeting, and crushing together, and melting and steaming in the
+white-heat of their own hurry. But now there's a crop of something
+better than stones, I can promise you! It goes on gathering, and being
+garnered and mingled and sifted and winnowed--the precious,
+indestructible harvest of how many millions of years of life!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And this I know: the longer and more strenuously and completely one
+lives one's life on earth the better for all. It is the foundation of
+everything. Though if men could guess what is in store for them when
+they die, without also knowing _that_, they would not have the patience
+to live--they wouldn't wait! For who would fardels bear? They would just
+put stones in their pockets, as you did, and make for the nearest pond.
+
+They mustn't!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Nothing is lost--nothing! From the ineffable, high, fleeting thought a
+Shakespeare can't find words to express, to the slightest sensation of
+an earthworm--nothing! Not a leaf's feeling of the light, not a
+loadstone's sense of the pole, not a single volcanic or electric thrill
+of the mother earth.
+
+All knowledge must begin on earth for _us_. It is the most favored
+planet in this poor system of ours just now, and for a few short
+millions of years to come. There are just a couple of others, perhaps
+three; but they are not of great consequence. 'Il y fait trop chaud--ou
+pas assez!' They are failures.
+
+The sun, the father sun, _le bon gros père_, rains life on to the
+mother earth. A poor little life it was at first, as you know--grasses
+and moss, and little wriggling, transparent things--all stomach; it is
+quite true! That is what we come from--Shakespeare, and you, and I!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After each individual death the earth retains each individual clay to
+be used again and again; and, as far as I can see, it rains back each
+individual essence to the sun--or somewhere near it--like a precious
+water-drop returned to the sea, where it mingles, after having been
+about and seen something of the world, and learned the use of five small
+wits--and remembering all! Yes, like that poor little exiled wandering
+water-drop in the pretty song your father used to sing, and which always
+manages to find its home at last--
+
+     _'Va passaggier' in fiume,
+     Va prigionier' in fonte,
+       Ma sempre ritorn' al mar.'_
+
+Or else it is as if little grains of salt were being showered into the
+Mare d'Auteuil, to melt and mingle with the water and each other till
+the Mare d'Auteuil itself was as salt as salt can be.
+
+Not till that Mare d'Auteuil of the sun is saturated with the salt of
+the earth, of earthly life and knowledge, will the purpose be complete,
+and then old mother earth may well dry up into a cinder like the moon;
+its occupation will be gone, like hers--'adieu, panier, les vendanges
+sont faites!'
+
+And, as for the sun and its surrounding ocean of life--ah, that is
+beyond _me_! but the sun will dry up, too, and its ocean of life no
+doubt be drawn to other greater suns. For everything seems to go on more
+or less in the same way, only crescendo, everywhere and forever.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+You must understand that it is not a bit like an ocean, nor a bit like
+water-drops, or grains of salt, or specks of spinal marrow; but it is
+only by such poor metaphors that I can give you a glimpse of what I
+mean, since you can no longer understand me, as you used to do on
+earthly things, by the mere touch of our hands.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Gogo, I am the only little water-drop, the one grain of salt that has
+not yet been able to dissolve and melt away in that universal sea; I am
+the exception.
+
+It is as though a long, invisible chain bound me still to the earth,
+and I were hung at the other end of it in a little transparent locket, a
+kind of cage, which lets me see and hear things all round, but keeps me
+from melting away.
+
+And soon I found that this locket was made of that half of you that is
+still in me, so that I couldn't dissolve, because half of me wasn't dead
+at all; for the chain linked me to that half of myself I had left in
+you, so that half of me actually wasn't there to be dissolved.... I am
+getting rather mixed!
+
+But oh, my heart's true love, how I hugged my chain, with you at the
+other end of it!
+
+With such pain and effort as you cannot conceive, I have crept along it
+back to you, like a spider on an endless thread of its own spinning.
+Such love as mine is stronger then death indeed!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have come to tell you that we are inseparable forever, you and I, one
+double speck of spinal marrow--'Philipschen!'--one little grain of salt,
+one drop. There is to be no parting for _us_--I can see that; but such
+extraordinary luck seems reserved for you and me alone up to now; and it
+is all our own doing.
+
+But not till you join me shall you and I be complete, and free to melt
+away in that universal ocean, and take our part, as One, in all is
+to be.
+
+That moment--you must not hasten it by a moment. Time is nothing. I'm
+even beginning to believe there's no such thing; there is so little
+difference, _là-bas_, between a year and a day. And as for space--dear
+me, an inch is as as an ell!
+
+Things cannot be measured like that.
+
+A midge's life is as long as a man's, for it has time to learn its
+business, and do all the harm it can, and fight, and make love, and
+marry, and reproduce its kind, and grow disenchanted and bored and sick
+and content to die--all in a summer afternoon. An average man can live
+to seventy years without doing much more.
+
+And then there are tall midges, and clever and good-looking ones, and
+midges of great personal strength and cunning, who can fly a little
+faster and a little farther than the rest, and live an hour longer to
+drink a whole drop more of some other creature's blood; but it does not
+make a very great difference!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+No, time and space mean just the same as 'nothing.'
+
+But for you they mean much, as you have much to do. Our joint life must
+be revealed--that long, sweet life of make-believe, that has been so
+much more real than reality. Ah! where and what were time or space to
+us then?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And you must tell all we have found out, and how; the way must be shown
+to others with better brains and better training than _we_ had. The
+value to mankind--to mankind here and hereafter--may be incalculable.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For some day, when all is found out that can be found out on earth, and
+made the common property of all (or even before that), the great man
+will perhaps arise and make the great guess that is to set us all free,
+here and hereafter. Who knows?
+
+I feel this splendid guesser will be some inspired musician of the
+future, as simple as a little child in all things but his knowledge of
+the power of sound; but even little children will have learned much in
+those days. He will want new notes and find them--new notes between the
+black and white keys. He will go blind like Milton and Homer, and deaf
+like Beethoven; and then, all in the stillness and the dark, all in the
+depths of his forlorn and lonely soul, he will make his best music, and
+out of the endless mazes of its counterpoint he will evolve a secret, as
+we did from the "Chant du Triste Commensal," but it will be a greater
+secret than ours. Others will have been very near this hidden treasure;
+but he will happen right _on_ it, and unearth it, and bring it to light.
+
+I think I see him sitting at the key-board, so familiar of old to the
+feel of his consummate fingers; painfully dictating his score to some
+most patient and devoted friend--mother, sister, daughter, wife--that
+score that he will never see or hear.
+
+What a stammerer! Not only blind and deaf, but _mad_--mad in the
+world's eyes, for fifty, a hundred, a thousand years. Time is nothing;
+but that score will survive....
+
+He will die of it, of course; and when he dies and comes to us, there
+will be joy from here to Sirius, and beyond.
+
+And one day they will find out on earth that he was only deaf and
+blind--not mad at all. They will hear and _understand_--they will know
+that he saw and heard as none had ever heard or seen before!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For 'as we sow we reap'; that is a true saying, and all the sowing is
+done here on earth, and the reaping beyond. Man is a grub; his dead
+clay, as he lies coffined in his grave, is the left-off cocoon he has
+spun for himself during his earthly life, to burst open and soar from
+with all his memories about him, even his lost ones. Like the
+dragon-fly, the butterfly, the moth ... and when _they_ die it is the
+same, and the same with a blade of grass. We are all, _tous tant que
+nous sommes_, little bags of remembrance that never dies; that's what
+we're _for_. But we can only bring with us to the common stock what
+we've got. As Père François used to say, 'La plus belle fille au monde
+ne peut donner que ce qu'elle a.'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Besides all this I am your earthly wife, Gogo--your loving, faithful,
+devoted wife, and I wish it to be known.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And then at last, in the fulness of time--a very few years--ah,
+then----
+
+"Once more shall Neuha lead her Torquil by the hand."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Oh, Mary!" I cried, "shall we be transcendently happy again? As happy
+as we were--_happier_ even?"
+
+Ah, Gogo, is a man happier than a mouse, or a mouse than a turnip, or
+a turnip than a lump of chalk? But what man would be a mouse or a
+turnip, or _vice versâ_? What turnip would be a lump--of anything but
+itself? Are two people happier than one? You and I, yes; because we
+_are_ one; but who else? It is one and all. Happiness is like time
+and space--we make and measure it ourselves; it is a fancy--as big, as
+little, as you please; just a thing of contrasts and comparisons, like
+health or strength or beauty or any other good--that wouldn't even be
+noticed but for sad personal experience of its opposite!--or
+its greater!
+
+"I have forgotten all I know but this, which is for you and me: we are
+inseparable forever. Be sure we shall not want to go back again for
+a moment."
+
+"And is there no punishment or reward?"
+
+Oh, there again! What a detail! Poor little naughty perverse
+midges--who were _born_ so--and _can't_ keep straight! poor little
+exemplary midges who couldn't go wrong if they tried! Is it worth while?
+Isn't it enough for either punishment or reward that the secrets of all
+midges' hearts shall be revealed, and for all other midges to see?
+Think of it!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There are battles to be fought and races to be won, but no longer
+against '_each other_.' And strength and swiftness to win them; but no
+longer any strong and swift. There is weakness and cowardice, but no
+longer any cowards or weaklings. The good and the bad and the worst and
+the best--it is all mixed up. But the good comes to the top; the bad
+goes to the bottom--it is precipitated, as papa used to say. It is not
+an agreeable sediment, with its once useful cruelty at the lowest bottom
+of all--out of sight, out of mind--all but forgotten. _C'est déjà
+le ciel_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"And the goal? The cause, the whither, and the why of it all? Ah!
+Gogo--as inscrutable, as unthinkable as ever, till the great guesser
+comes! At least so it seems to me, speaking as a fool, out of the depths
+of my poor ignorance; for I am a new arrival, and a complete outsider,
+with my chain and locket, waiting for you.
+
+"I have only picked up a few grains of sand on the shore of that sea--a
+few little shells, and I can't even show you what they are like. I see
+that it is no good even talking of it, alas! And I had promised myself
+_so_ much.
+
+"Oh! how my earthly education was neglected, and yours! and how I feel
+it now, with so much to say in words, mere words! Why, to tell you in
+words the little I can see, the very little--so that you could
+understand--would require that each of us should be the greatest poet
+and the greatest mathematician that ever were, rolled into one! How I
+pity you, Gogo--with your untrained, unskilled, innocent pen, poor
+scribe! having to write all this down--for you _must_--and do your poor
+little best, as I have done mine in telling you! You must let the heart
+speak, and not mind style or manner! Write _any_ how! write for the
+greatest need and the greatest number.
+
+"But do just try and see this, dearest, and make the best of it you can:
+as far as _I_ can make it out, everything everywhere seems to be an
+ever-deepening, ever-broadening stream that makes with inconceivable
+velocity for its own proper level, WHERE PERFECTION IS! ... and ever
+gets nearer and nearer, and never finds it, and fortunately never will!
+
+"Only that, unlike an earthly stream, and more like a fresh flowing tide
+up an endless, boundless, shoreless creek (if you can imagine that), the
+level it seeks is immeasurably higher than its source. And everywhere in
+it is Life, Life, Life! ever renewing and doubling itself, and ever
+swelling that mighty river which has no banks!
+
+"And everywhere in it like begets like, _plus_ a little better or a
+little worse; and the little worse finds its way into some backwater and
+sticks there, and finally goes to the bottom, and nobody cares. And the
+little better goes on bettering and bettering--not all man's folly or
+perverseness can hinder _that_, nor make that headlong torrent stay, or
+ebb, or roll backward for a moment--_c'est plus fort que nous_! ... The
+record goes on beating itself, the high-water-mark gets higher and
+higher till the highest on earth is reached that can be--and then, I
+suppose, the earth grows cold and the sun goes out--to be broken up into
+bits, and used all over again, perhaps! And betterness flies to warmer
+climes and higher systems, to better itself still! And so on, from
+better to better, from higher to higher, from warmer to warmer, and
+bigger to bigger--for ever and ever and ever!
+
+"But the final superlative of all, absolute all--goodness and
+all-highness, absolute all-wisdom, absolute omnipotence, beyond which
+there neither is nor can be anything more, will never be reached at
+all--since there are no such things; they are abstractions; besides
+which, attainment means rest, and rest stagnation, and stagnation an end
+of all! And there is no end, and never can be--no end to Time and all
+the things that are done in it--no end to Space and all the things that
+fill it, or all would come together in a heap and smash up in the
+middle--and there _is_ no middle!--no end, no beginning, no middle! _no
+middle_, Gogo! think of _that_! it is the most inconceivable thing
+of all!!!
+
+"So who shall say where Shakespeare and you and I come in--tiny links in
+an endless chain, so tiny that even Shakespeare is no bigger than we!
+And just a little way behind us, those little wriggling transparent
+things, all stomach, that we descend from; and far ahead of ourselves,
+but in the direct line of a long descent from _us_, an ever-growing
+conscious Power, so strong, so glad, so simple, so wise, so mild, and so
+beneficent, that what can we do, even now, but fall on our knees with
+our foreheads in the dust, and our hearts brimful of wonder, hope, and
+love, and tender shivering awe; and worship as a yet unborn, barely
+conceived, and scarce begotten _Child_--that which we have always been
+taught to worship as a _Father_--That which is not now, but _is_ to
+be--That which we shall all share in and be part and parcel of in the
+dim future--That which is slowly, surely, painfully weaving Itself out
+of us and the likes of us all through the limitless Universe, and Whose
+coming we can but faintly foretell by the casting of its shadow on our
+own slowly, surely, painfully awakening souls!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Then she went on to speak of earthly things, and ask questions in her
+old practical way. First of my bodily health, with the tenderest
+solicitude and the wisest advice--as a mother to a son. She even
+insisted on listening to my heart, like a doctor.
+
+Then she spoke at great length of the charities in which she had been
+interested, and gave me many directions which I was to write, as coming
+from myself, to certain people whose names and addresses she impressed
+upon me with great care.
+
+I have done as she wished, and most of these directions have been
+followed to the letter, with no little wonder on the world's part (as
+the world well knows) that such sagacious and useful reforms should have
+originated with the inmate of a criminal lunatic asylum.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At last the time came for us to part. She foresaw that I should have to
+wake in a few minutes, and said, rising----
+
+"And now, Gogo, the best beloved that ever was on earth, take me once
+more in your dear arms, and kiss me good-bye for a little while--_auf
+wiedersehen_. Come here to rest and think and remember when your body
+sleeps. My spirit will always be here with you. I may even be able to
+come back again myself--just this poor husk of me--hardly more to look
+at than a bundle of old clothes; but yet a world made up of love for
+_you_. Good-bye, good-bye, dearest and best. Time is nothing, but I
+shall count the hours. Good-bye...."
+
+Even as she strained me to her breast I awoke.
+
+[Illustration: "GOOD-BYE"]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I awoke, and knew that the dread black shadow of melancholia had passed
+away from me like a hideous nightmare--like a long and horrible winter.
+My heart was full of the sunshine of spring--the gladness of awaking to
+a new life.
+
+I smiled at my night attendant, who stared back at me in astonishment,
+and exclaimed----
+
+"Why, sir, blest if you ain't a new man altogether. There, now!"
+
+I wrung his hand, and thanked him for all his past patience, kindness,
+and forbearance with such effusion that his eyes had tears in them. I
+had not spoken for weeks, and he heard my voice for the first time.
+
+That day, also, without any preamble or explanation, I gave the doctor
+and the chaplain and the governor my word of honor that I would not
+attempt my life again, or any one else's, and was believed and trusted
+on the spot; and they unstrapped me.
+
+I was never so touched in my life.
+
+In a week I recovered much of my strength; but I was an old man. That
+was a great change.
+
+Most people age gradually and imperceptibly. To me old age had come of a
+sudden--in a night, as it were; but with it, and suddenly also, the
+resigned and cheerful acquiescence, the mild serenity, that are its
+compensation and more.
+
+My hope, my certainty to be one with Mary some day--that is my haven, my
+heaven--a consummation of completeness beyond which there is nothing to
+wish for or imagine. Come what else may, that is safe, and that is all I
+care for. She was able to care for me, and for many other things
+besides, and I love her all the more for it; but I can only care
+for _her_.
+
+Sooner or later--a year--ten years; it does not matter much. I also am
+beginning to disbelieve in the existence of time.
+
+That waking was the gladdest in my life--gladder even than the waking
+in my condemned cell the morning after my sentence of death, when
+another black shadow passed away--that of the scaffold.
+
+Oh, Mary! What has she not done for me--what clouds has she not
+dispelled!
+
+When night came round again I made once more, step by step, the journey
+from the Porte de la Muette to the Mare d'Auteuil, with everything the
+same--the gay wedding-feast, the blue and silver courier, the merry
+guests singing
+
+     _"Il était un petit navire."_
+
+Nothing was altered, even to the dull gray weather. But, oh, the
+difference to me!
+
+I longed to play at _bouchon_ with the hackney coachmen, or at _la balle
+au camp_ with my old schoolfellows. I could have even waltzed with
+"Monsieur Lartigue" and "le petit Cazal."
+
+I looked in Mère Manette's little mirror and saw my worn, gray, haggard,
+old face again; and liked it, and thought it quite good-looking. I sat
+down and rested by the fortifications as I had done the night before,
+for I was still tired, but with a most delicious fatigue; my very
+shabbiness was agreeable to me--_pauvre, mais honnête_. A convict, a
+madman, but a prince among men--still the beloved of Mary!
+
+And when at last I reached the spot I had always loved the best on earth
+ever since I first saw it as a child, I fell on my knees and wept for
+sheer excess of joy. It was mine indeed; it belonged to me as no land or
+water had ever belonged to any man before.
+
+Mary was not there, of course; I did not expect her.
+
+But, strange and incomprehensible as it seems, she had forgotten her
+gloves; she had left them behind her. One was on the bench, one was on
+the ground; poor old gloves that had been mended, with the well-known
+shape of her dear hand in them; every fold and crease preserved as in a
+mould--the very cast of her finger-nails; and the scent of sandal-wood
+she and her mother had so loved.
+
+I laid them side by side, palms upward, on the bench where we had sat
+the night before. No dream-wind has blown them away; no dream-thief has
+stolen them; there they lie still, and will lie till the great change
+comes over me, and I am one with their owner.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I am there every night--in the lovely spring or autumn
+sunshine--meditating, remembering, taking notes--dream-notes to be
+learned by heard, and used next day for a real purpose.
+
+I walk round and round, or sit on the benches, or lie in the grass by
+the brink, and smoke cigarettes without end, and watch the old
+amphibious life I found so charming half a century ago, and find it
+charming still.
+
+Sometimes I dive into the forest (which has now been razed to the
+ground. Ever since 1870 there is an open space all round the Mare
+d'Auteuil. I had seen it since then in a dream with Mary, who went to
+Paris after the war, and mad pilgrimages by day to all the places so
+dear to our hearts, and so changed; and again, when the night came,
+with me for a fellow-pilgrim. It was a sad disenchantment for us both).
+
+_My_ Mare d'Auteuil, where I spend so many hours, is the Mare d'Auteuil
+of Louis Philippe, unchangeable except for such slight changes as _will_
+occur, now and then, between the years 1839 and 1846: a broken bench
+mended, a new barrier put up by the high-road, a small wooden dike
+where the brink is giving way.
+
+[Illustration: "I AM THERE EVERY NIGHT."]
+
+And the thicket beside and behind it is dark and dense for miles, with
+many tall trees and a rich, tangled undergrowth.
+
+There is a giant oak which it is difficult to find in that labyrinth (it
+now stands, for the world, alone in the open; an ornament to the Auteuil
+race-course) I have often climbed it as a boy, with Mimsey and the
+rest; I cannot climb it now, but I love to lie on the grass in its
+shade, and dream in my dream there, shut in on all sides by fragrant,
+impenetrable verdure; with birds and bees and butterflies and
+dragon-flies and strange beetles and little field-mice with bright eyes,
+and lithe spotted snakes and lively brown squirrels and beautiful green
+lizards for my company. Now and then a gentle roebuck comes and feeds
+close by me without fear, and the mole throws up his little mound of
+earth and takes an airing.
+
+It is a very charming solitude.
+
+It amuses me to think by day, when broad awake in my sad English prison,
+and among my crazy peers, how this nightly umbrageous French solitude of
+mine, so many miles and years away, is now but a common, bare, wide
+grassy plain, overlooked by a gaudy, beflagged grand-stand. It is
+Sunday, let us say--and for all I know a great race may be going on--all
+Paris is there, rich and poor. Little red-legged soldiers, big
+blue-legged gendarmes, keep the course clear; the sun shines, the
+tricolour waves, the gay, familiar language makes the summer breeze
+musical. I dare say it is all very bright and animated, but the whole
+place rings with the vulgar din of the bookmakers, and the air is full
+of dust and foul with the scent of rank tobacco, the reek of struggling
+French humanity; and the gaunt Eiffel Tower looks down upon it all from
+the sky over Paris (so, at least, I am told) like a skeleton at a feast.
+
+Then twilight comes, and the crowds have departed; on foot, on
+horseback, on bicycles and tricycles, in every kind of vehicle; many by
+the _chemin de fer de ceinture_, the Auteuil station of which is close
+by ... all is quiet and bare and dull.
+
+Then down drops the silent night like a curtain, and beneath its
+friendly cover the strange transformation effects itself quickly, and
+all is made ready for _me_. The grand-stand evaporates, the railway
+station melts away into thin air; there is no more Eiffel Tower with its
+electric light! The sweet forest of fifty years ago rises suddenly out
+of the ground, and all the wild live things that once lived in it wake
+to their merry life again.
+
+A quiet deep old pond in a past French forest, hallowed by such
+memories! What _can_ be more enchanting? Oh, soft and sweet nostalgia,
+so soon to be relieved!
+
+Up springs the mellow sun, the light of other days, to its appointed
+place in the heavens--zenith, or east or west, according to order. A
+light wind blows from the south--everything is properly disinfected, and
+made warm and bright and comfortable--and lo! old Peter Ibbetson appears
+upon the scene, absolute monarch of all he surveys for the next eight
+hours--one whose right there are literally none to dispute.
+
+I do not encourage noisy gatherings there as a rule, nor by the pond; I
+like to keep the sweet place pretty much to myself; there is no
+selfishness in this, for I am really depriving nobody. Whoever comes
+there now, comes there nearly fifty years ago and does not know it; they
+must have all died long since.
+
+Sometimes it is a _garde champêtre_ in Louis Philippe's blue and silver,
+with his black pipe, his gaiters, his old flint gun, and his
+embroidered game-bag. He does well in the landscape.
+
+Sometimes it is a pair of lovers, if they are good-looking and
+well-behaved, or else the boys from Saindou's school to play fly the
+garter--_la raie_.
+
+Sometimes it is Monsieur le Curé, peacefully conning his "Hours," as
+with slow and thoughtful step he paces round and round. I can now read
+his calm, benevolent face by the light of half a century's experience of
+life, and have learned to love that still, black, meditative aspect
+which I found so antipathetic as a small boy--_he_ is no burner alive of
+little heretics! This world is big enough for us both--and so is the
+world to come! And he knows it. Now, at all events!
+
+[Illustration: "THIS WORLD IS BIG ENOUGH FOR US BOTH"]
+
+Sometimes even a couple of Prendergasts are admitted, or even three;
+they are not so bad, after all; they have the qualities of their faults,
+although you might not think it.
+
+But very often the old beloved shades arrive with their fishing-nets,
+and their high spirits, and their ringing Anglo-French--Charlie, and
+Alfred, and Madge, and the rest, and the grinning, barking, gyrating
+Médor, who dives after stones.
+
+Oh, how it does my heart good to see and hear them!
+
+They make me feel like a grandfather. Even Monsieur le Major is younger
+than I--his mustache less white than mine. He only comes to my chin; but
+I look up to him still, and love and revere him as when I was a
+little child.
+
+And Dr. Seraskier! I place myself between him and what he is looking at,
+so that he seems to be looking straight at me; but with a far-away look
+in his eyes, as is only natural. Presently something amuses him, and he
+smiles, and his eyes crinkle up as his daughter's used to do when she
+was a woman, and his majestic face becomes as that of an angel,
+like hers.
+
+_L'ange du sourire!_
+
+And my gay, young, light-hearted father, with his vivacity and
+rollicking laugh and eternal good-humor! He is just like a boy to me
+now, le beau Pasquier! He has got a new sling of his own invention; he
+pulls it out of his pocket, and slings stones high over the tree-tops
+and far away out of sight--to the joy of himself and everybody else--and
+does not trouble much as to where they will fall.
+
+My mother is young enough now to be my daughter; it is as a daughter, a
+sweet, kind, lovely daughter, that I love her now--a happily-married
+daughter with a tall, handsome husband who yodles divinely and slings
+stones, and who has presented me with a grandson--_beau comme le
+jour_--for whatever Peter Ibbetson may have been in his time, there is
+no gainsaying the singular comeliness of little Gogo Pasquier.
+
+And Mimsey is just a child angel! Monsieur le Major is infallible.
+
+"Elle a toutes les intelligences de la tête et du coeur! Vous verrez un
+jour, quand ça ira mieux; vous verrez!"
+
+That day has long come and gone; it is easy to see all that now--to have
+the eyes of Monsieur le Major.
+
+Ah, poor little Mimsey, with her cropped head and her pale face, and
+long, thin arms and legs, and grave, kind, luminous eyes, that have not
+yet learned to smile. What she is to _me!!!!_
+
+And Madame Seraskier, in all the youthful bloom and splendor of her
+sacred beauty! A chosen lily among women--the mother of Mary!
+
+She sits on the old bench by the willow, close to her daughter's gloves.
+Sometimes (a trivial and almost comic detail!) she actually seems to sit
+_upon_ them, to my momentary distress; but when she goes away, there
+they are still, not flattened a bit--the precious mould of those
+beautiful, generous hands to which I owe everything here and hereafter.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have not been again to my old home. I dread the sight of the avenue. I
+cannot face "Parva sed Apta."
+
+But I have seen Mary again--seven times.
+
+And every time she comes she brings a book with her, gilt-edged and
+bound in green morocco like the Byron we read when we were children, or
+in red morocco like the _Elegant Extracts_ out of which we used to
+translate Gray's "Elegy," and the "Battle of Hohenlinden," and
+Cunningham's "Pastorals" into French.
+
+Such is her fancy!
+
+But inside these books are very different. They are printed in cipher,
+and in a language I can only understand in my dream. Nothing that I, or
+any one else, has ever read in any living book can approach, for
+interest and importance, what I read in these. There are seven of them.
+
+I say to myself when I read them: it is perhaps well that I shall not
+remember this when I wake, after all!
+
+For I might be indiscreet and injudicious, and either say too much or
+not enough; and the world might come to a stand-still, all through me.
+For who would fardels bear, as Mary said! No! The world must be content
+to wait for the great guesser!
+
+Thus my lips are sealed.
+
+All I know is this: _that all will be well for us all, and of such a
+kind that all who do not sigh for the moon will be well content_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In such wise have I striven, with the best of my ability, to give some
+account of my two lives and Mary's. We have lived three lives between
+us--three lives in one.
+
+It has been a happy task, however poorly performed, and all the
+conditions of its performance have been singularly happy also.
+
+A cell in a criminal lunatic asylum! That does not sound like a bower in
+the Elysian Fields! It is, and has been for me.
+
+Besides the sun that lights and warms my inner life, I have been treated
+with a kindness and sympathy and consideration by everybody here, from
+the governor downward, that fills me with unspeakable gratitude.
+
+Most especially do I feel grateful to my good friends, the doctor, the
+chaplain, and the priest--best and kindest of men--each of whom has made
+up his mind about everything in heaven and earth and below, and each in
+a contrary sense to the two others!
+
+There is but one thing they are neither of them quite cocksure about,
+and that is whether I am mad or sane.
+
+And there is one thing--the only one on which they are agreed; namely,
+that, mad or sane, I am a great undiscovered genius!
+
+My little sketches, plain or colored, fill them with admiration and
+ecstasy. Such boldness and facility and execution, such an overwhelming
+fertility in the choice of subjects, such singular realism in the
+conception and rendering of past scenes, historical and otherwise, such
+astounding knowledge of architecture, character, costume, and what not,
+such local color--it is all as if I had really been there to see!
+
+I have the greatest difficulty in keeping my fame from spreading beyond
+the walls of the asylum. My modesty is as great as my talent!
+
+No, I do not wish this great genius to be discovered just yet. It must
+all go to help and illustrate and adorn the work of a much greater
+genius, from which it has drawn every inspiration it ever had.
+
+It is a splendid and delightful task I have before me: to unravel and
+translate and put in order these voluminous and hastily-penned
+reminiscences of Mary's, all of them written in the cipher we invented
+together in our dream--a very transparent cipher when once you have
+got the key!
+
+It will take five years at least, and I think that, without presumption,
+I can count on that, strong and active as I feel, and still so far from
+the age of the Psalmist.
+
+First of all, I intend
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Note_.--Here ends my poor cousin's memoir. He was found dead from
+effusion of blood on the brain, with his pen still in his hand, and his
+head bowed down on his unfinished manuscript, on the margin of which he
+had just sketched a small boy wheeling a toy wheelbarrow full of stones
+from one open door to another. One door is labelled _Passé_, the
+other _Avenir_.
+
+I arrived in England, after a long life spent abroad, at the time his
+death occurred, but too late to see him alive. I heard much about him
+and his latter days. All those whose duties brought them into contact
+with him seemed to have regarded him with a respect that bordered on
+veneration.
+
+I had the melancholy satisfaction of seeing him in his coffin. I had
+not seen him since he was twelve years old.
+
+As he lay there, in his still length and breadth, he appeared
+gigantic--the most magnificent human being I ever beheld; and the
+splendor of his dead face will haunt my memory till I die.
+
+MADGE PLUNKET.
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, PETER IBBETSON ***
+
+This file should be named 8pibb10.txt or 8pibb10.zip
+Corrected EDITIONS of our eBooks get a new NUMBER, 8pibb11.txt
+VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, 8pibb10a.txt
+
+Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we usually do not
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+We are now trying to release all our eBooks one year in advance
+of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
+Please be encouraged to tell us about any error or corrections,
+even years after the official publication date.
+
+Please note neither this listing nor its contents are final til
+midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
+The official release date of all Project Gutenberg eBooks is at
+Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
+preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
+and editing by those who wish to do so.
+
+Most people start at our Web sites at:
+http://gutenberg.net or
+http://promo.net/pg
+
+These Web sites include award-winning information about Project
+Gutenberg, including how to donate, how to help produce our new
+eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter (free!).
+
+
+Those of you who want to download any eBook before announcement
+can get to them as follows, and just download by date.  This is
+also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the
+indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an
+announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter.
+
+http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext05 or
+ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext05
+
+Or /etext04, 03, 02, 01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92,
+91 or 90
+
+Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want,
+as it appears in our Newsletters.
+
+
+Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
+
+We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
+time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
+to get any eBook selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
+searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.   Our
+projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If the value
+per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
+million dollars per hour in 2002 as we release over 100 new text
+files per month:  1240 more eBooks in 2001 for a total of 4000+
+We are already on our way to trying for 2000 more eBooks in 2002
+If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total
+will reach over half a trillion eBooks given away by year's end.
+
+The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away 1 Trillion eBooks!
+This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
+which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users.
+
+Here is the briefest record of our progress (* means estimated):
+
+eBooks Year Month
+
+    1  1971 July
+   10  1991 January
+  100  1994 January
+ 1000  1997 August
+ 1500  1998 October
+ 2000  1999 December
+ 2500  2000 December
+ 3000  2001 November
+ 4000  2001 October/November
+ 6000  2002 December*
+ 9000  2003 November*
+10000  2004 January*
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created
+to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+As of February, 2002, contributions are being solicited from people
+and organizations in: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut,
+Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois,
+Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts,
+Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New
+Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio,
+Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South
+Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West
+Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
+
+We have filed in all 50 states now, but these are the only ones
+that have responded.
+
+As the requirements for other states are met, additions to this list
+will be made and fund raising will begin in the additional states.
+Please feel free to ask to check the status of your state.
+
+In answer to various questions we have received on this:
+
+We are constantly working on finishing the paperwork to legally
+request donations in all 50 states.  If your state is not listed and
+you would like to know if we have added it since the list you have,
+just ask.
+
+While we cannot solicit donations from people in states where we are
+not yet registered, we know of no prohibition against accepting
+donations from donors in these states who approach us with an offer to
+donate.
+
+International donations are accepted, but we don't know ANYTHING about
+how to make them tax-deductible, or even if they CAN be made
+deductible, and don't have the staff to handle it even if there are
+ways.
+
+Donations by check or money order may be sent to:
+
+ PROJECT GUTENBERG LITERARY ARCHIVE FOUNDATION
+ 809 North 1500 West
+ Salt Lake City, UT 84116
+
+Contact us if you want to arrange for a wire transfer or payment
+method other than by check or money order.
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been approved by
+the US Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) organization with EIN
+[Employee Identification Number] 64-622154.  Donations are
+tax-deductible to the maximum extent permitted by law.  As fund-raising
+requirements for other states are met, additions to this list will be
+made and fund-raising will begin in the additional states.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+You can get up to date donation information online at:
+
+http://www.gutenberg.net/donation.html
+
+
+***
+
+If you can't reach Project Gutenberg,
+you can always email directly to:
+
+Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>
+
+Prof. Hart will answer or forward your message.
+
+We would prefer to send you information by email.
+
+
+**The Legal Small Print**
+
+
+(Three Pages)
+
+***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS**START***
+Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers.
+They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
+your copy of this eBook, even if you got it for free from
+someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
+fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
+disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how
+you may distribute copies of this eBook if you want to.
+
+*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS EBOOK
+By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+eBook, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
+this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive
+a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this eBook by
+sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
+you got it from. If you received this eBook on a physical
+medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
+
+ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM EBOOKS
+This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBooks,
+is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart
+through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project").
+Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
+on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
+distribute it in the United States without permission and
+without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth
+below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this eBook
+under the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
+
+Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market
+any commercial products without permission.
+
+To create these eBooks, the Project expends considerable
+efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
+works. Despite these efforts, the Project's eBooks and any
+medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other
+things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
+disk or other eBook medium, a computer virus, or computer
+codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
+[1] Michael Hart and the Foundation (and any other party you may
+receive this eBook from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook) disclaims
+all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
+legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
+UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
+INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
+OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
+POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+If you discover a Defect in this eBook within 90 days of
+receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
+you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
+time to the person you received it from. If you received it
+on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
+such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
+copy. If you received it electronically, such person may
+choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
+receive it electronically.
+
+THIS EBOOK IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
+TO THE EBOOK OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
+the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
+above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
+may have other legal rights.
+
+INDEMNITY
+You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation,
+and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated
+with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including
+legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the
+following that you do or cause:  [1] distribution of this eBook,
+[2] alteration, modification, or addition to the eBook,
+or [3] any Defect.
+
+DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
+You may distribute copies of this eBook electronically, or by
+disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
+"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
+or:
+
+[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
+     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
+     eBook or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
+     if you wish, distribute this eBook in machine readable
+     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
+     including any form resulting from conversion by word
+     processing or hypertext software, but only so long as
+     *EITHER*:
+
+     [*]  The eBook, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
+          does *not* contain characters other than those
+          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
+          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
+          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
+          author, and additional characters may be used to
+          indicate hypertext links; OR
+
+     [*]  The eBook may be readily converted by the reader at
+          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
+          form by the program that displays the eBook (as is
+          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
+          OR
+
+     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
+          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
+          eBook in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
+          or other equivalent proprietary form).
+
+[2]  Honor the eBook refund and replacement provisions of this
+     "Small Print!" statement.
+
+[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Foundation of 20% of the
+     gross profits you derive calculated using the method you
+     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
+     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
+     payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation"
+     the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were
+     legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
+     periodic) tax return.  Please contact us beforehand to
+     let us know your plans and to work out the details.
+
+WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
+Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of
+public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed
+in machine readable form.
+
+The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time,
+public domain materials, or royalty free copyright licenses.
+Money should be paid to the:
+"Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or
+software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at:
+hart@pobox.com
+
+[Portions of this eBook's header and trailer may be reprinted only
+when distributed free of all fees.  Copyright (C) 2001, 2002 by
+Michael S. Hart.  Project Gutenberg is a TradeMark and may not be
+used in any sales of Project Gutenberg eBooks or other materials be
+they hardware or software or any other related product without
+express permission.]
+
+*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS*Ver.02/11/02*END*
+
diff --git a/old/8pibb10.zip b/old/8pibb10.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..35c60bf
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/8pibb10.zip