ed of an _abbess_ in her face!"

This was her first attempt at verse-making, and here's her last,
from the French of Sully-Prudhomme:

"If you but knew what tears, alas!
One weeps for kinship unbestowed,
In pity you would sometimes pass
My poor abode!

"If you but knew what balm, for all
Despond, lies in an angel's glance,
Your looks would on my window fall
As though by chance!

"If you but knew the heart's delight
To feel its fellow-heart is by,
You'd linger, as a sister might,
These gates anigh!

"If you but knew how oft I yearn
For one sweet voice, one presence dear,
Perhaps you'd even simply turn
And enter here!"

She was only just seventeen when she wrote them, and, upon my word,
I think they're almost as good as the original!

Her intimate friendship with Chucker-out, the huge St. Bernard,
lasted for nearly both their lives, alas! It began when they both
weighed exactly the same, and I could carry both in one arm. When he
died he turned the scale at sixteen stone, like me.

It has lately become the fashion to paint big dogs and little girls,
and engravings of these pictures are to be seen in all the
print-sellers' shops. It always touches me very much to look at
these works of art, although--and I hope it is not libellous to say
so--the big dog is always hopelessly inferior in beauty and dignity
and charm to Chucker-out, who was champion of his day. And as for
the little girls--_Ah, mon Dieu!_

Such pictures are not high art of course, and that is why I don't
possess one, as I've got an aesthetic character to keep up; but why they
shouldn't be I can't guess. Is it because no high artist--except Briton
Riviere--will stoop to so easily understood a subject?

A great master would not be above painting a small child or a big
dog separately--why should he be above putting them both in the same
picture? It would be too obvious, I suppose--like a melody by
Mozart, or Handel's "Harmonious Blacksmith," or Schubert's Serenade,
and other catchpenny tunes of the same description.

_I_ was also very intimate with Chucker-out, who made more of me
than he even did of his master.

One night I got very late to Marsfield by the last train, and,
letting myself in with my key, I found Chucker-out waiting for me in
the hall, and apparently in a very anxious frame of mind, and
extremely demonstrative, wanting