my
trained ear for a perfect accent in singing foreign languages.

I think no one ever studied more unrelentingly than I, during that first
year of hot enthusiasm. I began early in the morning, and the only
reason that I did not burn the midnight oil was that I found it cost me
too much in kerosene and firing. I could keep warm in bed for nothing,
and _boulets_ were my pet economy. Coming from a country where a warm
room was taken for granted, and where the furnaces in hotels and
boarding houses might have been supplied by Elijah's ravens for all I
knew about it, I just couldn't bear to see my money burning away bit by
bit in a grate; and many a time I have put on my fur-lined coat rather
than add fuel to the dying heap of dreadfully expensive ashes in the
_grille_.

CHAPTER IV

PENSION PERSONALITIES

At first I had no companionship and very little recreation, beyond the
ever fresh wonder and delight of the Paris streets as I saw them in my
daily constitutional. One day I went with a girl friend to visit her
_atelier_. I wrote to my mother:

"We spent a long time in the life-class room--nude, (not us but the
model). It was a mixed class. A large oblong room, filled with I should
think over a hundred students, mostly men. They sat in a circle facing
the model throne. The floor is not raised, but the effect of an
amphitheatre is produced by rush bottom stools of different heights.
They rest their pads or drawing portfolios on a railing in front of
them. The room is intolerably hot because of the model. What struck us
most was the intense silence and atmosphere of earnestness; no one
speaks and there is only the gentle rub-rub of the charcoal, crayon, or
pencil against the paper. The students look quickly up and down and
never move their glance except from their sketch to the model and back
again. She was a very pretty young girl and took graceful half-hour
poses. The one interruption was a quiet voice at the end of a half-hour,
'_C'est l'heure_'; and they stopped for a few minutes' rest. We went
into another room, where a picturesque old wretch with long black curls,
red velvet waist-coat, long blue cape, well thrown back, black, grimy
hands clasped around his knee, and clumsy, rusty boots stuck out in
front of him, was seated."

Later one of these old models used to come to my brother. He had a card
on which was printed the list of poses he was prepared to take.--"The
twelve Apostles," "The Eternal Fathe