e. "And
now, Socrates," said I at parting, "we go on our several ways, you to
steal tomatoes, I to filch ideas from other people; for the rest--which
of these two roads will be the better going, our father which is in
heaven knows, but we know not."

I have never seen Mendelssohn, but there is a fresco of him on the
terrace, or open-air dining-room, of an inn at Chiavenna. He is not
called Mendelssohn, but I knew him by his legs. He is in the costume of
a dandy of some five-and-forty years ago, is smoking a cigar, and appears
to be making an offer of marriage to his cook. Beethoven both my friend
Mr. H. Festing Jones and I have had the good fortune to meet; he is an
engineer now, and does not know one note from another; he has quite lost
his deafness, is married, and is, of course, a little squat man with the
same refractory hair that he always had. It was very interesting to
watch him, and Jones remarked that before the end of dinner he had become
positively posthumous. One morning I was told the Beethovens were going
away, and before long I met their two heavy boxes being carried down the
stairs. The boxes were so squab and like their owners, that I half
thought for a moment that they were inside, and should hardly have been
surprised to see them spring up like a couple of Jacks-in-the-box. "Sono
indentro?" said I, with a frown of wonder, pointing to the boxes. The
porters knew what I meant, and laughed. But there is no end to the list
of people whom I have been able to recognise, and before I had got
through it myself, I found I had walked some distance, and had
involuntarily paused in front of a second-hand bookstall.

I do not like books. I believe I have the smallest library of any
literary man in London, and I have no wish to increase it. I keep my
books at the British Museum and at Mudie's, and it makes me very angry if
any one gives me one for my private library. I once heard two ladies
disputing in a railway carriage as to whether one of them had or had not
been wasting money. "I spent it in books," said the accused, "and it's
not wasting money to buy books." "Indeed, my dear, I think it is," was
the rejoinder, and in practice I agree with it. Webster's Dictionary,
Whitaker's Almanack, and Bradshaw's Railway Guide should be sufficient
for any ordinary library; it will be time enough to go beyond these when
the mass of useful and entertaining matter which they provide has been
mastered. Nevert