and. In the faded ink, on the yellow paper that may
have crossed and recrossed oceans, that has lain locked in chests for
years, and buried under piles of family archives, while your friends
have been dying and your head has grown white--who has not disinterred
mementos like these--from which the past smiles at you so sadly,
shimmering out of Hades an instant but to sink back again into the cold
shades, perhaps with a faint, faint sound as of a remembered tone--a
ghostly echo of a once familiar laughter? I was looking of late at a
wall in the Naples Museum, whereon a boy of Herculaneum eighteen hundred
years ago had scratched with a nail the figure of a soldier. I could
fancy the child turning round and smiling on me after having done his
etching. Which of us that is thirty years old has not had his Pompeii?
Deep under ashes lies the Life of Youth,--the careless Sport, the
Pleasure and Passion, the darling Joy. You open an old letter-box and
look at your own childish scrawls, or your mother's letters to you when
you were at school; and excavate your heart. Oh me, for the day when
the whole city shall be bare and the chambers unroofed--and every cranny
visible to the Light above, from the Forum to the Lupanar!

Ethel takes up the pen. "My dear uncle," she says, "while Clive is
sketching out of window, let me write you a line or two on his paper,
though I know you like to hear no one speak but him. I wish I could draw
him for you as he stands yonder, looking the picture of good health,
good spirits, and good humour. Everybody likes him. He is quite
unaffected; always gay; always pleased. He draws more and more
beautifully every day; and his affection for young Mr. Ridley, who is
really a most excellent and astonishing young man, and actually a better
artist than Clive himself, is most romantic, and does your son the
greatest credit. You will order Clive not to sell his pictures, won't
you? I know it is not wrong, but your son might look higher than to be
an artist. It is a rise for Mr. Ridley, but a fall for him. An artist,
an organist, a pianist, all these are very good people, but you know not
de notre monde, and Clive ought to belong to it.

"We met him at Bonn on our way to a great family gathering here; where,
I must tell you, we are assembled for what I call the Congress of Baden!
The chief of the house of Kew is here, and what time he does not devote
to skittles, to smoking cigars, to the jeu in the evenings, to Ma