g as they ought to have sung, and was deeply
moved and comforted--more than by any preachments in the world; and
just in the opposite gallery sat Leah with her mother; and I grew
fond of nice clean little boys and girls who sing pretty hymns in
unison; and afterwards I watched them eat their roast beef, small
mites of three and four or five, some of them, and thought how
touching it all was--I don't know why! Love or grief? or that touch
of nature that makes the whole world kin at about 1 P.M. on Sunday?

One would think that Barty had exerted a bad influence on me, since
he seems to have kept me out of all this that was so sweet and new
and fresh and wholesome!

He would have been just as susceptible to such impressions as I;
even more so, if the same chance had arisen for him--for he was
singularly fond of children, the smaller and the poorer the better,
even gutter children! and their poor mothers loved him, he was so
jolly and generous and kind.

Sometimes I got a letter from him in Blaze, my father's shorthand
cipher; it was always brief and bright and hopeful, and full of
jokes and funny sketches. And I answered him in Blaze that was long
and probably dull.

All that I will tell of him now is not taken from his Blaze letters,
but from what he has told me later, by word of mouth--for he was as
fond of talking of himself as I of listening--since he was droll and
sincere and without guile or vanity; and would have been just as
sympathetic a listener as I, if I had cared to talk about Mr. Robert
Maurice, of Barge Yard, Bucklersbury. Besides, I am good at hearing
between the words and reading between the lines, and all that--and
love to exercise this faculty.

* * * * *

Well, he reached Paris in due time, and took a small bedroom on a
third floor in the Rue du Faubourg Poissonniere--over a cheap
hatter's--opposite the Conservatoire de Musique.

On the first night he was awoke by a terrible invasion--such
malodorous swarms of all sizes, from a tiny brown speck to a
full-grown lentil, that they darkened his bed; and he slept on the
tiled floor after making an island of himself by pouring cold water
all round him as a kind of moat; and so he slept for a week of
nights, until he had managed to poison off most of these invaders
with _poudre insecticide_ ... "mort aux punaises!"

In the daytime he first of all went for a swim at the Passy
baths--an immense joy, full of the ghosts of