on I have is thin and sterile, and
it grows thinner rapidly, until it dies away utterly, as it did in the
composition of my unfortunate "Roses of Midnight."

Men and women, oh the strength of the living faces! conversation, oh the
magic of it! It is a fabulous river of gold where the precious metal is
washed up without stint for all to take, to take as much as he can carry.
Two old ladies discussing the peerage? Much may be learned, it is gold;
poets and wits, then it is fountains whose spray solidifies into jewels,
and every herb and plant is begemmed with the sparkle of the diamond and
the glow of the ruby.

I did not go to either Oxford or Cambridge, but I went to the "Nouvelle
Athenes." What is the "Nouvelle Athenes"? He who would know anything of my
life must know something of the academy of the fine arts. Not the official
stupidity you read of in the daily papers, but the real French academy, the
_cafe_. The "Nouvelle Athenes" is a _cafe_ on the Place Pigale.
Ah! the morning idlenesses and the long evenings when life was but a summer
illusion, the grey moonlights on the Place where we used to stand on the
pavements, the shutters clanging up behind us, loath to separate, thinking
of what we had left said, and how much better we might have enforced our
arguments. Dead and scattered are all those who used to assemble there, and
those years and our home, for it was our home, live only in a few pictures
and a few pages of prose. The same old story, the vanquished only are
victorious; and though unacknowledged, though unknown, the influence of the
"Nouvelle Athenes" is inveterate in the artistic thought of the nineteenth
century.

How magnetic, intense, and vivid are these memories of youth. With what
strange, almost unnatural clearness do I see and hear,--see the white face
of that _cafe_, the white nose of that block of houses, stretching up
to the Place, between two streets. I can see down the incline of those two
streets, and I know what shops are there; I can hear the glass-door of the
_cafe_ grate on the sand as I open it. I can recall the smell of every
hour. In the morning that of eggs frizzling in butter, the pungent
cigarette, coffee and bad cognac; at five o'clock the fragrant odour of
absinthe; and soon after the steaming soup ascends from the kitchen; and as
the evening advances, the mingled smells of cigarettes, coffee, and weak
beer. A partition, rising a few feet or more over the hats, separates the
gl