hance of declaring myself; through the medium of
the music I could tell her all my lips refused to utter. She must be
moved, she surely would understand.

Whether she did or not, I never had the bliss of knowing. Shortly after
that memorable day, my parents removed from the country to Paris. The
thought of seeing her no more nearly broke my heart, and when the
stage-coach reached the top of the last hill from which the town could
be seen, my pent-up feelings gave way and a flood of tears came to my
relief.

The last time I visited those haunts of my childhood, I heard that
"little Marie" was the mamma of eight children. God bless that mamma
and her dear little brood!

* * * * *

At fifteen I was passionately fond of music, and declared to my father
that I had made up my mind to be an artiste.

My father was a man of great common sense and few words: he
administered to me a sound thrashing, which had the desired effect of
restoring my attentions to Cicero and Thucydides.

It did not, however, altogether cure me of a certain yearning after
literary glory.

For many months I devoted the leisure, left me by Greek version and
Latin verse, to the production of a drama in five acts and twelve
tableaux.

For that matter I was no exception to the rule. Every French school-boy
has written, is writing, or will write a play.

* * * * *

My drama was a highly moral one of the sensational class.
Blood-curdling, horrible, terrible, savage, weird, human, fiendish,
fascinating, irresistible--it was all that. I showed how, even in this
world, crime, treachery, and falsehood, though triumphant for a time,
must in the long run have their day of reckoning. Never did a modern
Drury Lane audience see virtue more triumphant and vice more utterly
confounded than the Parisians would have in my play, if only the
theatrical directors had not been so stupid as to refuse my
_chef-d'oeuvre_.

For it was refused, inconceivable as it seemed to me at the time.

The directors of French theatres are accustomed to send criticisms of
the plays which "they regret to be unable to accept."

The criticism I received from the director of the Ambigu Theatre was, I
thought, highly encouraging.

"My play," it appeared, "showed no experience of the stage; but it was
full of well-conceived scenes and happy _mots_, and was written in
excellent French. Horrors, however,