another supported himself, chiefly by work on illustrated papers.
His father, who belonged to what is called a good family, began life in
easy circumstances, and gained some reputation as a connoisseur of art;
imprudence and misfortune having obliged him to sell his collection,
Mr. Franks took to buying pictures and bric-a-brac for profit, and
during the last ten years of his life was associated in that capacity
with a London firm. Norbert, motherless from infancy and an only child,
received his early education at expensive schools, but, showing little
aptitude for study and much for use of the pencil, was taken by his
father at twelve years old to Paris, and there set to work under a good
art-teacher. At sixteen he went to Italy, where he remained for a
couple of years. Then, on a journey in the East, the elder Franks died.
Norbert returned to England, learnt that a matter of fifty pounds was
all his heritage, and pluckily turned to the task of keeping himself
alive. Herein his foreign sketch-books proved serviceable, but the
struggle was long and hard before he could house himself decently, and
get to serious work as a painter. Later on, he was wont to say that
this poverty had been the best possible thing for him, its enforced
abstinences having come just at the time when he had begun to
"wallow"--his word for any sort of excess; and "wallowing" was
undoubtedly a peril to which Norbert's temper particularly exposed him.
Short commons made him, as they have made many another youth, sober and
chaste, at all events in practice; and when he began to lift up his
head, a little; when, at the age of three-and-twenty, he earned what
seemed to him at first the luxurious income of a pound or so a week;
when, in short, the inclination to "wallow" might again have taken hold
upon him, it was his chance to fall in love so seriously and hopefully
that all the better features of his character were drawn out,
emphasized, and, as it seemed, for good and all established in
predominance.

Not long after his first meeting with Warburton, he one day received,
through the publishers of a book he had illustrated, a letter signed
"Ralph Pomfret," the writer of which asked whether "Norbert Franks" was
the son of an old friend of whom he had lost sight for many years. By
way of answer, Franks called upon his correspondent, who lived in a
pleasant little house at Ashtead, in Surrey; he found a man of
something less than sixty, with a touch of