d hasty
silver-point studies of her head and face--mere sketches--which,
being full of obvious faults, became so quickly famous among
aesthetic and exclusive people who had long given up Barty as a
writer on account of his scandalous popularity.

Alas! even those silver-points have become popular now, and their
photogravures are in the shop-windows of sea-side resorts and in the
back parlors of the lower middle-class; so that the aesthetic
exclusives who are up to date have had to give up Barty altogether.
No one is sacred in those days--not even Shakespeare and Michael
Angelo.

We shall be hearing Schumann and Wagner on the piano-organ, and
"_nous autres_" of the cultured classes will have to fall back on
Balfe and Byron and Landseer.

In a few months little Marty became famous for this extra beauty all
over Henley and Maidenhead.

She soon grew to be the idol of her father's heart, and her
mother's, and Ida's. But I really think that if there was one person
who idolized her more than all the rest, it was I, Bob Maurice.

She was extremely delicate, and gave us much anxiety and many
alarms, and Dr. Knight was a very constant visitor at Marsfield
Lodge. It was fortunate, for her sake, that the Josselins had left
Campden Hill and made their home in Marsfield.

Nine of these children--including one not yet born then--developed
there into the finest and completest human beings, take them for all
in all, that I have ever known; nine--a good number!

"Numero Deus impare gaudet."

Or, as poor Rapaud translated this (and was pinched black and blue
by Pere Brossard in consequence):

"Le numero deux se rejouit d'etre impair!" (Number two takes a
pleasure in being odd!)

The three sons--one of them now in the army, as becomes a Rohan; and
one a sailor, as becomes a Josselin; and one a famous actor, the
true Josselin of all--are the very types of what I should like for
the fathers of my grandchildren, if I had marriageable daughters of
my own.

And as for Barty's daughters, they are all--but one--so well known
in society and the world--so famous, I may say--that I need hardly
mention them here; all but Marty, my sweet little "maid of Dove."

When Barty took Marsfield he and I had entered what I have ever
since considered the happiest decade of a successful and healthy
man's life--the forties.

"Wait till you get to _forty year_!"

So sang Thackeray, but with a very different experience to mine. He
seemed to lo