id not play at making calls nor chase
the old fur hat around the room; they were more sensible, and the old
furniture had a little rest. And it was time, for all the chairs were
lame, two of the larger ones had lost an arm each, and the Empire
sofa had lost the greater part of its hair through the rents in its
dark-green velvet covering. The unfortunate square piano had had no pity
shown it; more out of tune and asthmatic than ever, it was now always
open, and one could read above the yellow and worn-out keyboard a once
famous name-"Sebastian Erard, Manufacturer of Pianos and Harps for
S.A.R. Madame la Duchesse de Berri." Not only Louise, the eldest of the
Gerards--a large girl now, having been to her first communion, dressing
her hair in bands, and wearing white waists--not only Louise, who had
become a good musician, had made the piano submit to long tortures, but
her sister Maria, and Amedee also, already played the 'Bouquet de Bal'
or 'Papa, les p'tits bateaux'. Rosine, too, in her character of street
urchin, knew all the popular songs, and spent entire hours in picking
out the airs with one finger upon the old instrument.

Ah! the songs of those days, the last of romanticism, the make-believe
'Orientales'; 'Odes' and 'Ballads', by the dozen; 'Comes d'Espagne
et d'Italie', with their pages, turrets, chatelaines; bull-fighters,
Spanish ladies; vivandieres, beguiled away from their homes under
the pale of the church, "near a stream of running water, by a gay and
handsome chevalier," and many other such silly things--Amedee will
remember them always! They bring back to him, clearly and strongly,
certain happy hours in his childhood! They make him smell again at times
even the odor that pervaded the Gerards' house. A mule-driver's song
will bring up before his vision the engraver working at his plate before
the curtainless window on a winter's day. It snows in the streets, and
large white flakes are slowly falling behind the glass; but the room,
ornamented with pictures and busts, is lighted and heated by a bright
coke fire. Amedee can see himself seated in a corner by the fire,
learning by heart a page of the "Epitome" which he must recite the next
morning at M. Batifol's. Maria and Rosine are crouched at his feet, with
a box of glass beads, which they are stringing into a necklace. It was
comfortable; the whole apartment smelled of the engraver's pipe, and
in the dining-room, whose door is half opened, Louise is at the