f, knew her while she was yet in the middle bloom of life.

Dr. and Mrs. Malkin's sons were my brother's school and college mates.
They were all men of ability, and good scholars, as became their
father's sons. Sir Benjamin, the eldest, achieved eminence as a lawyer,
and became an Indian judge; and the others would undoubtedly have risen
to distinction but for the early death that carried off Frederick and
Charles, and the hesitation of speech which closed almost all public
careers to their brother Arthur.

He was a prominent and able contributor to the "Library of Useful
Knowledge," and furnished a great part of the first of a whole
generation of delightful publications, Murray's "Hand-Book" for
Switzerland.

One of the earliest of Alpine explorers, Arthur Malkin mounted to those
icy battlements which have since been scaled by a whole army of
besiegers, and planted the banner of English courage and enterprise on
"peaks, passes, and glaciers" which, when he first climbed the shining
summits of the Alps, were all but _terra incognita_ to his countrymen.

There is nothing more familiar to the traveling and reading British
public nowadays than Alpine adventures and their records; but when my
friend first conquered the passes between Evolena and Zermatt (still one
of the least overrun mountain regions of Switzerland), their sublime
solitudes were awful with the mystery of unexplored loneliness. Now
professors climb up them, and artists slide down them, and they are
photographed with "members" straddling over their dire crevasses, or
cutting capers on their scornful summits, or turning somersaults down
their infinite precipices. The air of the high Alps was inhaled by few
Englishmen before Arthur Malkin; one can not help thinking that now,
even on the top of the Matterhorn and Monte Rosa, it must have lost some
of its freshness.

I have said that all Dr. Malkin's sons were men of more than average
ability; but one, who never lived to be a man, "died a most rare boy" of
about six years, fully justifying by his extraordinary precocity and
singular endowments the tribute which his bereaved father paid his
memory in a modest and touching record of his brief and remarkable
existence.

My Parisian education appeared, at this time, to have failed signally in
the one especial result that might have been expected from it: all my
French dancing lessons had not given me a good deportment, nor taught me
to hold myself upright. I