fell to the ground at once. The crash
was heavy. Jorian DeWitt said truly that what a man hates in adversity
is to see 'faces'; meaning that the humanity has gone out of them in
their curious observation of you under misfortune. You see neither
friends nor enemies. You are too sensitive for friends, and are blunted
against enemies. You see but the mask of faces: my father was sheltered
from that. Julia consulted his wishes in everything; she set traps to
catch his whims, and treated them as birds of paradise; she could submit
to have the toppling crumpled figure of a man, Bagenhope, his pensioner
and singular comforter, in her house. The little creature was fetched
out of his haunts in London purposely to soothe my father with
performances on his ancient clarionet, a most querulous plaintive
instrument in his discoursing, almost the length of himself; and she
endured the nightly sound of it in the guest's blue bedroom, heroically
patient, a model to me. Bagenhope drank drams: she allowanced him. He
had known my father's mother, and could talk of her in his cups: his
playing, and his aged tunes, my father said, were a certification to
him that he was at the bottom of the ladder. Why that should afford him
peculiar comfort, none of us could comprehend. 'He was the humble lover
of my mother, Richie,' I heard with some confusion, and that he adored
her memory. The statement was part of an entreaty to me to provide
liberally for Bagenhope's pension before we quitted England. 'I am
not seriously anxious for much else,' said my father. Yet was he fully
conscious of the defeat he had sustained and the catastrophe he had
brought down upon me: his touch of my hand told me that, and his desire
for darkness and sleep. He had nothing to look to, nothing to see
twinkling its radiance for him in the dim distance now; no propitiating
Government, no special Providence. But he never once put on a sorrowful
air to press for pathos, and I thanked him. He was a man endowed to
excite it in the most effective manner, to a degree fearful enough to
win English sympathies despite his un-English faults. He could have
drawn tears in floods, infinite pathetic commiseration, from our
grangousier public, whose taste is to have it as it may be had to the
mixture of one-third of nature in two-thirds of artifice. I believe he
was expected to go about with this beggar's petition for compassion, and
it was a disappointment to the generous, for which they pu