furrowed with wrinkles like the seams and gashes upon
the North Cape; the nervous hand, integrally a part of the mechanism of
his flighter; and above all, the wonderful lambent eyes turned to the
zenith.

"Master," I would cry as I moved respectfully beneath him, "what is it
you seek to-day?" and always the answer, clear and without doubt, from
above: "The old secret, my son!"

The immense egotism of youth forced me on my own path, but (cry of the
human always!) had I known--if I had known--I would many times have
bartered my poor laurels for the privilege, such as Tinsley and Herrera
possess, of having aided him in his monumental researches.

It is to the filial piety of Victor Lavalle that we owe the two volumes
consecrated to the ground-life of his father, so full of the holy
intimacies of the domestic hearth. Once returned from the abysms of the
utter North to that little house upon the outskirts of Meudon, it was
not the philosopher, the daring observer, the man of iron energy that
imposed himself on his family, but a fat and even plaintive jester, a
farceur incarnate and kindly, the co-equal of his children, and, it must
be written, not seldom the comic despair of Madame Lavalle, who, as she
writes five years after the marriage, to her venerable mother, found "in
this unequalled intellect whose name I bear the abandon of a large and
very untidy boy." Here is her letter:

"Xavier returned from I do not know where at midnight, absorbed in
calculations on the eternal question of his Aurora--_la belle Aurore_,
whom I begin to hate. Instead of anchoring--I had set out the
guide-light above our roof, so he had but to descend and fasten the
plane--he wandered, profoundly distracted, above the town with his
anchor down! Figure to yourself, dear mother, it is the roof of the
mayor's house that the grapnel first engages! That I do not regret, for
the mayor's wife and I are not sympathetic; but when Xavier uproots my
pet araucaria and bears it across the garden into the conservatory I
protest at the top of my voice. Little Victor in his night-clothes runs
to the window, enormously amused at the parabolic flight without reason,
for it is too dark to see the grapnel, of my prized tree. The Mayor of
Meudon thunders at our door in the name of the Law, demanding, I
suppose, my husband's head. Here is the conversation through the
megaphone--Xavier is two hundred feet above us.

"'Mons. Lavalle, descend and make reparation fo