smoked cigarettes of caporal, and even colored
pipes, and was sick without fear of detection (_piquait son renard
sans crainte d'etre colle_).

Finally, behind Pere Brossard's Ciceronian Villa, on the south, was
a handsome garden (we called it Tusculum); a green flowery
pleasaunce reserved for the head master's married daughter (Madame
Germain) and her family--good people with whom we had nothing to do.

Would I could subjoin a ground-plan of the Institution F. Brossard,
where Barty Josselin spent four such happy years, and was so
universally and singularly popular!

Why should I take such pains about all this, and dwell so
laboriously on all these minute details?

Firstly, because it all concerns Josselin and the story of his
life--and I am so proud and happy to be the biographer of such a
man, at his own often expressed desire, that I hardly know where to
leave off and what to leave out. Also, this is quite a new trade for
me, who have only dealt hitherto in foreign wines, and British party
politics, and bimetallism--and can only write in telegraphese!

Secondly, because I find it such a keen personal joy to evoke and
follow out, and realize to myself by means of pen and pencil, all
these personal reminiscences; and with such a capital excuse for
prolixity!

At the top of every page I have to pull myself together to remind
myself that it is not of the Right Honorable Sir Robert Maurice,
Bart., M.P., that I am telling the tale--any one can do that--but of
a certain Englishman who wrote _Sardonyx_, to the everlasting joy
and pride of the land of his _fathers_--and of a certain Frenchman
who wrote _Berthe aux grands pieds_, and moved his _mother_-country
to such delight of tears and tender laughter as it had never known
before.

Dear me! the boys who lived and learnt at Brossard's school fifty
years ago, and the masters who taught there (peace to their ashes!),
are far more to my taste than the actual human beings among whom my
dull existence of business and politics and society is mostly spent
in these days. The school must have broken up somewhere about the
early fifties. The stuccoed Doric dwelling was long since replaced
by an important stone mansion, in a very different style of
architecture--the abode of a wealthy banker--and this again, later,
by a palace many stories high. The two school-houses in red brick
are no more; the play-ground grew into a luxuriant garden, where a
dozen very tall trees overtopp