y me, if you can bear it, and talk of your school-life, and your
studies. Your aunt Dorothy, Richie? She is well? I know not her like. I
could bear to hear of any misfortune but that she suffered pain.

My father smoked his cigar peacefully. He had laid a guitar on his knees,
and flipped a string, or chafed over all the strings, and plucked and
thrummed them as his mood varied. We chatted, and watched the going down
of the sun, and amused ourselves idly, fermenting as we were. Anything
that gave pleasure to us two boys pleased and at once occupied my father.
It was without aid from Temple's growing admiration of him that I
recovered my active belief and vivid delight in his presence. My younger
days sprang up beside me like brothers. No one talked, looked, flashed,
frowned, beamed, as he did! had such prompt liveliness as he! such
tenderness! No one was ever so versatile in playfulness. He took the
colour of the spirits of the people about him. His vivacious or sedate
man-of-the-world tone shifted to playfellow's fun in a twinkling. I used
as a little fellow to think him larger than he really was, but he was of
good size, inclined to be stout; his eyes were grey, rather prominent,
and his forehead sloped from arched eyebrows. So conversational were his
eyes and brows that he could persuade you to imagine he was carrying on a
dialogue without opening his mouth. His voice was charmingly clear; his
laughter confident, fresh, catching, the outburst of his very self, as
laughter should be. Other sounds of laughter were like echoes.

Strange to say, I lost the links of my familiarity with him when he left
us on a short visit to his trunks and portmanteaux, and had to lean on
Temple, who tickled but rejoiced me by saying: 'Richie, your father is
just the one I should like to be secretary to.'

We thought it a pity to have to leave this nice foreign place
immediately. I liked the scenery, and the wine, and what I supposed to be
the habit of the gentlemen here to dress in silks. On my father's return
to us I asked him if we could not stay till morning.

'Till morning, then,' he said: 'and to England with the first lark.'

His complexion was ruddier; his valet had been at work to restore it; he
was getting the sanguine hue which coloured my recollection of him.
Wearing a black velvet cap and a Spanish furred cloak, he led us over the
villa. In Sarkeld he resided at the palace, and generally at the
lake-palace on the removal of