lly 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 the Court thither. The margravine had
placed the villa, which was her own property, at his disposal, the
better to work out their conspiracy.

'It would have been mine!' said my father, bending suddenly to my ear,
and humming his philosophical 'heigho,' as he stepped on in minuet
fashion. We went through apartments rich with gilded oak and pine
panellings: in one was a rough pattern of a wooden horse opposite a
mirror; by no means a figure of a horse, but apparently a number of
pieces contributed by a carpenter's workshop, having a rueful seat in
the middle. My father had practised the attitude of Prince Albrecht
Wohlgemuth on it. 'She timed me five and twenty minutes there only
yesterday,' he said; and he now supposed he had sat the bronze horse as
a statue in public view exactly thirty-seven minutes and a quarter. Tubs
full of colouring liquid to soak the garments of the prince, pots
of paint, and paint and plaster brushes, hinted the magnitude of the
preparations.

'Here,' said my father in another apartment, 'I was this morning
apparelled at seven o'clock: and I would have staked