r or later; indeed, it soon became evident that he was a
most exceptional little person.

In the first place, his beauty was absolutely angelic, as will be
readily believed by all who have known him since. The mere sight of
him as a boy made people pity his father and mother for being dead!

Then he had a charming gift of singing little French and English
ditties, comic or touching, with his delightful fresh young pipe, and
accompanying himself quite nicely on either piano or guitar without
really knowing a note of music. Then he could draw caricatures that
we boys thought inimitable, much funnier than Cham's or Bertall's or
Gavarni's, and collected and treasured up. I have dozens of them
now--they make me laugh still, and bring back memories of which the
charm is indescribable; and their pathos to me!

And then how funny he was himself, without effort, and with a fun that
never failed! He was a born buffoon of the graceful kind,--more whelp
or kitten than monkey--ever playing the fool, in and out of season,
but somehow always apropos; and French boys love a boy for that more
than anything else; or did in those days.

* * * * *

His constitution, inherited from a long line of frugal seafaring
Norman ancestors (not to mention another long line of well-fed,
well-bred Yorkshire squires), was magnificent. His spirits never
failed. He could see the satellites of Jupiter with the naked eye;
this was often tested by M. Dumollard, maitre de mathematiques (et de
cosmographie), who had a telescope, which, with a little good-will on
the gazer's part, made Jupiter look as big as the moon, and its moons
like stars of the first magnitude.

His sense of hearing was also exceptionally keen. He could hear a
watch tick in the next room, and perceive very high sounds to which
ordinary human ears are deaf (this was found out later); and when we
played blindman's buff on a rainy day, he could, blindfolded, tell
every boy he caught hold of--not by feeling him all over like the rest
of us, but by the mere smell of his hair, or his hands, or his blouse!
No wonder he was so much more alive than the rest of us! According to
the amiable, modest, polite, delicately humorous, and ever tolerant
and considerate Professor Max Nordau, this perfection of the olfactory
sense proclaims poor Barty a degenerate! I only wish there were a few
more like him, and that I were a little more like him myself!

By the way, how