seriously to
posing for himself and, as the world knows, the Young Sophocles was
finished in the course of time and a very fine statue it is said to be.
But even if he did desert our table he would still seem to me in memory
the centre of the little group gathered about it, had it not been for
Forepaugh.

Of course his name was not Forepaugh--though something very like it--but
Forepaugh answers my every purpose. For though I did know his name I did
not know then, and I do not know now, who he was and why he was. I do
not think anybody ever knew anything about him except that he was
Forepaugh, which meant, according to his own reckoning, the most
wonderful person on earth. He was one of the sort of men whose habit is
to turn up wherever you may happen to be, in whatever part of the world,
with no apparent reason for being there except to talk to you,--the last
time we met was in a remote corner of Kensington Gardens in London,
where he took up the talk just where we had left off at the _Nazionale_
in Rome--and as it is years since he has turned up anywhere to talk to
us, I fear he has joined the Philadelphia Architect and Donoghue where
he will talk no more.

In sheer physical power of speech he was without a rival and none
surpassed him in appreciation of his eloquence. His interest never
flagged so long as he held the floor, though when we wanted him to
listen to us, he did not attempt to conceal his indifference. We could
not tell him anything, for there was nothing about which he did not know
more than we could hope to. He, at any rate, had no doubt of his own
omniscience. Judging from the intimate details with which he regaled us,
he was equally in the confidence of the Vatican and the Quirinal,
equally at home with the Blacks and the Whites. The secrets of the Roman
aristocracy were his, he was the first to hear the scandals of the
foreign colony. The opera depended upon his patronage and balls
languished without him, though I could never understand how or why, so
rarely did he leave us to enjoy them. Every archaeologist, every scholar,
every historian in Rome appealed to him for help, and as for art, it was
folly for others to pretend to speak of it in his presence. He called
himself an artist and for a time he used to go with J. to Gigi's, the
life school where artists then in Rome often went of an afternoon to
draw from the model. But J. never saw him there with as much as a scrap
of paper or a pencil in his