all family. My sister (I
hasten to say this) has loved him as a brother ever since; and as
long as my parents lived, and wherever they made their home, that
home has ever been his--and he has been their son--almost their
eldest born, though he was younger than I by seven months.

Things have been reversed, however, for now thirty years and more;
and his has ever been the home for me, and his people have been my
people, and ever will be--and the God of his worship mine!

What children and grandchildren of my own could ever be to me as
these of Barty Josselin's?

"Ce sacre Josselin--il avait tous les talents!"

And the happiest of these gifts, and not the least important, was
the gift he had of imparting to his offspring all that was most
brilliant and amiable and attractive in himself, and leaving in them
unimpaired all that was strongest and best in the woman I loved as
well as he did, and have loved as long--and have grown to look upon
as belonging to the highest female type that can be; for doubtless
the Creator, in His infinite wisdom, might have created a better and
a nicer woman than Mrs. Barty Josselin that was to be, had He
thought fit to do so; but doubtless also He never did.

Alas! the worst of us is that the best of us are those that want the
longest knowing to find it out.

My kind-hearted but cold-mannered and undemonstrative Scotch father,
evangelical, a total abstainer, with a horror of tobacco--surely the
austerest dealer in French wines that ever was--a puritanical hater
of bar sinisters, and profligacy, and Rome, and rank, and the army,
and especially the stage--he always lumped them together more or
less--a despiser of all things French, except their wines, which he
never drank himself--remained devoted to Barty till the day of his
death; and so with my dear genial mother, whose heart yet always
yearned towards serious boys who worked hard at school and college,
and passed brilliant examinations, and got scholarships and
fellowships in England, and state sinecures in France, and married
early, and let their mothers choose their wives for them, and train
up their children in the way they should go. She had lived so long
in France that she was Frencher than the French themselves.

And they both loved good music--Mozart, Bach, Beethoven--and were
almost priggish in their contempt for anything of a lighter kind;
especially with a lightness English or French! It was only the
musical lightness of G