He was coming to call for me in Brunswick Square. My sister introduced him to her friend, and he looked down at Leah with a surprised glance of delicate fatherly admiration he might have been fifty.

Then we left the young ladies and went off together citywards; my father was abroad.

66

'By Jove, what a stunner that girl is! I'm blest if I don't marry her some day—you see if I don't !"

"That's just what I mean to do," said I. And we had a good laugh at the idea of two such desperadoes, as we thought ourselves, talking like this about a little schoolgirl.

"We'll toss up," says Barty; and we did, and he

won.

This, I remember, was before his quarrel with Lord Archibald. She was then about fourteen, and her subtle and singular beauty was just beginning to make itself felt.

I never knew till long after how deep had been the impression produced by this glimpse of a mere child on a fast young man about town-or I should not have been amused. For there were times when I myself thought quite seriously of Leah Gibson, and what she might be in the long future! She looked a year or two older than she really was, being very tall and extremely sedate.

Also, both my father and mother had conceived such a liking for her that they constantly talked of the possibility of our falling in love with each other some day. Castles in Spain !

As for me, my admiration for the child was immense, and my respect for her character unbounded; and I felt myself such a base unworthy brute that I couldn't bear to think of myself in such a connection—until I had cleansed myself heart and soul (which would take time)!

And as for showing by my manner to her that such an idea had ever crossed my mind, the thought never entered my head.

She was just my dear sister's devoted friend; her petticoat hem was still some inches from the ground, and her hair in a plait all down her back. . . .

Girlish innocence and purity incarnate-that is what she seemed; and what she was. "La plus forte des forces est un cœur innocent," said Victor Hugo-and if you translate this literally into English, it comes to exactly the same, both in rhythm and sense.

When Barty sold out, he first thought he would like to go on the stage, but it turned out that he was too tall to play anything but serious footmen.

Then he thought he would be a singer. We used to go to the opera at Drury Lane, where they gave in English a different Italian opera every night;-and this was always followed by Acis and Galatea.

We got our seats in the stalls every evening for a couple of weeks, through the kindness of Mr. Hamilton Braham, whom Barty knew, and who played Polyphemus in Handel's famous serenata.

I remember our first night; they gave Masaniello, which I had never seen; and when the tenor sang, 66 Behold how brightly breaks the morning," it came on us both as a delicious surprise-it was such a favorite song at Brossard's 66 amis! la matinée est belle .. Indeed, it was one of the songs Barty sang on the boulevard for the poor woman, six or seven years back.

The tenor, Mr. Elliot Galer, had a lovely voice; and that was a moment never to be forgotten.

Then came Acis and Galatea, which was so odd and old-fashioned we could scarcely sit it out.

Next night, Lucia-charming; then again Acis and Galatea, because we had nowhere else to go.

"Tiens, tiens!" says Barty, as the lovers sang "the flocks shall leave the mountains"; "c'est diantrement joli, ça !-écoute !"

Next night, La Sonnambula--then again Acis and Galatea.

66

Mais, nom d'une pipe -- elle est divine, cette musique-là!" says Barty.

And the nights after we could scarcely sit out the Italian opera that preceded what we have looked upon ever since as among the divinest music in the world.

So one must not judge music at a first hearing; nor poetry; nor pictures at first sight; unless one be poet or painter or musician one's self-not even then! I may live to love thee yet, oh Tannhäuser!

Lucy Escott, Fanny Huddart, Elliot Galer, and Hamilton Braham that was the cast; I hear their voices

now...

One morning Hamilton Braham tried Barty's voice on the empty stage at St. James's Theatre-made him sing "When other lips.'

"Sing out, man-sing out!" said the big bass. And Barty shouted his loudest a method which did not suit him. I sat in the pit, with half a dozen Guardsmen, who were deeply interested in Barty's operatic aspirations.

It turned out that Barty was neither tenor nor barytone; and that his light voice, so charming in a room, would never do for the operatic stage; although his figure, in spite of his great height, would have suited heroic parts so admirably.

Besides, three or four years' training in Italy were needed a different production altogether.

So Barty gave up this idea and made up his mind to be an artist. He got permission to work in the British Museum, and drew the "Discobolus," and sent his drawing to the Royal Academy, in the hope of being admitted there as a student. He was not.

Then an immense overwhelming homesickness for Paris came over him, and he felt he must go and study art there, and succeed or perish.

My father talked to him like a father, my mother like a mother; we all hung about him and entreated. He was as obdurate as Tennyson's sailor-boy whom the mermaiden forewarned so fiercely!

He was even offered a handsome appointment in the London house of Vougeot-Conti & Co.

But his mind was made up, and to my sorrow, and the sorrow of all who knew him, he fixed the date of his departure for the 2d of May (1856),—this being the day after a party at the Gibsons'-a young dance in honor of Leah's fifteenth birthday, on the 1st-and to which my sister had procured him an invitation.

He had never been to the Gibsons' before. They belonged to a world so different to anything he had been accustomed to-indeed, to a class that he then so much disliked and despised (both as ex-Guardsman and as the descendant of French toilers of the sea, who hate and scorn the bourgeois)—that I was curious to see how he would bear himself there; and rather nervous, for it would have grieved me that he should look down on people of whom I was getting very fond. It was his theory that all successful business people were pompous and purse-proud and vulgar.

I admit that in the fifties we very often were.

There may perhaps be a few survivals of that period: old nouveaux riches, who are still modestly jocose on