thout regard for this representative of the highest personages
of fiction, condemned him to three days' imprisonment.

It was as if they had imprisoned saltpetre in company with a bunch of
matches--but he restrained his rebellious feelings; he would not give
his judges the satisfaction of knowing his torment. He soon thought only
of procuring consolation: he summoned his friends, who visited him in
throngs. Then he made the acquaintance of his companions in misfortune.
There was one especially, who, alone, would have made up to him for all
the inconveniences of his forced arrest.

The first time that this prisoner entered the room where the other
prisoners were assembled, he looked at them with the most solemn air,
put his hand to his forehead, made a military salute, and in grave
tones, as if beginning a harangue, he uttered these words:

"Captives--I salute you!"

It was strangely pertinent. Delsarte was not behindhand in comic
gravity. This little scene enlivened him.

Another compensation fell to the lot of our _captive_. One of the
prisoners sang him a song, one stanza of which lingered in his memory. I
transcribe it:

"I was born in Finisterre,
At Quimperlay I saw the light.
The sweetest air is my native air,
My parish church is painted white!
Oh! so I sang, I sighed, I said,--
How I love my native air,
And parish church so bright!"

These lines, written by some Breton minstrel, inspired one of those
sweet, plaintive airs which the drawling voice of the drovers sing as
they return at nightfall; one of those airs which seem to follow the
brook down the valleys, and which repeat the echoes of the mountains, in
the far distance.

Oh! how Delsarte used to murmur it; it made one homesick for Brittany!

Chapter XIV.

Delsarte's Scholars.

To get one's bearings in that floating population (where persistency and
fidelity are rare qualities) which haunts a singing-school, it is well
to make classifications. In Delsarte's case, the novelty of his
processes, his extraordinary reputation among the art-loving public, the
length of time which he insisted was necessary for complete education,
all combined to produce an incessant ebb and flow of pupils.

Therefore, I must distinguish.

First, there were those, brought by Delsarte's generosity, whose only
resource was a vocation more or less favored by natural gifts. He would
say: "Come one, come all." But, of course, many w