st in Kolniyatschiana. But Mr. and Mrs.
Pegaway would be the first to admit that their renderings of the prose
and verse they love so well are a wretched substitute for the real
thing. I wanted to get the job myself, but they nipped in and got it
before me. Thank heaven, they cannot deprive me of the power to read
Kolniyatsch in the original Gibrisch and to crow over you who can't.

Of the man himself--for on several occasions I had the privilege and the
permit to visit him--I have the pleasantest, most sacred memories. His
was a wonderfully vivid and intense personality. The head was beautiful,
perfectly conic in form. The eyes were like two revolving lamps, set
very close together. The smile was haunting. There was a touch of
old-world courtesy in the repression of the evident impulse to spring at
one's throat. The voice had notes that recalled M. Mounet-Sully's in
the later and more important passages of Oedipe Roi. I remember that
he always spoke with the greatest contempt of Mr. and Mrs. Pegaway's
translations. He likened them to--but enough! His boom is not yet at the
full. A few weeks hence I shall be able to command an even higher price
than I could now for my 'Talks with Kolniyatsch.'

No. 2. THE PINES, 1914

[Early in the year 1914 Mr. Edmund Gosse told me he was asking certain
of his friends to write for him a few words apiece in description of
Swinburne as they had known or seen him at one time or another; and
he was so good as to wish to include in this gathering a few words by
myself. I found it hard to be brief without seeming irreverent. I
failed in the attempt to make of my subject a snapshot that was not a
grotesque. So I took refuge in an ampler scope. I wrote a reminiscential
essay. From that essay I made an extract, which I gave to Mr. Gosse.
From that extract he made a quotation in his enchanting biography. The
words quoted by him reappear here in the midst of the whole essay as
I wrote it. I dare not hope they are unashamed of their humble
surroundings.--M. B.]

In my youth the suburbs were rather looked down on--I never quite knew
why. It was held anomalous, and a matter for merriment, that Swinburne
lived in one of them. For my part, had I known as a fact that Catullus
was still alive, I should have been as ready to imagine him living in
Putney as elsewhere. The marvel would have been merely that he lived.
And Swinburne's survival struck as surely as could his have struck in me
the cho