fully, that she had that "voice of the heart which alone
has power to reach the heart." Here, also, behind the skilful player on
language, the deft manipulator of rhyme and rhythm, the graceful and
earnest writer, one feels the beating of a human heart. One feels that
he is giving us personal impressions of life and its joys and sorrows;
that his imagination is powerful because it is genuinely his own; that
the flowers of his fancy spring spontaneously from the soil. Nor can I
regard it as aught but an added grace that the strings of his instrument
should vibrate so readily to what is beautiful and unselfish and delicate
in human feeling.

JOSE DE HEREDIA
de l'Academie Francaise.

A ROMANCE OF YOUTH

BOOK 1.

CHAPTER I

ON THE BALCONY

As far back as Amedee Violette can remember, he sees himself in an
infant's cap upon a fifth-floor balcony covered with convolvulus; the
child was very small, and the balcony seemed very large to him. Amedee
had received for a birthday present a box of water-colors, with which he
was sprawled out upon an old rug, earnestly intent upon his work of
coloring the woodcuts in an odd volume of the 'Magasin Pittoresque', and
wetting his brush from time to time in his mouth. The neighbors in the
next apartment had a right to one-half of the balcony. Some one in there
was playing upon the piano Marcailhou's Indiana Waltz, which was all the
rage at that time. Any man, born about the year 1845, who does not feel
the tears of homesickness rise to his eyes as he turns over the pages of
an old number of the 'Magasin Pittoresque', or who hears some one play
upon an old piano Marcailhou's Indiana Waltz, is not endowed with much
sensibility.

When the child was tired of putting the "flesh color" upon the faces of
all the persons in the engravings, he got up and went to peep through the
railings of the balustrade. He saw extending before him, from right to
left, with a graceful curve, the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, one of the
quietest streets in the Luxembourg quarter, then only half built up. The
branches of the trees spread over the wooden fences, which enclosed
gardens so silent and tranquil that passers by could hear the birds
singing in their cages.

It was a September afternoon, with a broad expanse of pure sky across
which large clouds, like mountains of silver, moved in majestic slowness.

Suddenly a soft voice called him:

"Amedee, your f