the avenue with great people in them come to make visits of state. His
little life was full of fair pictures and fair stories of them. When
the house was filled with brilliant company he liked nothing so much as
to sit on Mistress Halsell's knee or in his chair by her side and ask
her questions about the guests he caught glimpses of as they passed to
and fro. He was a child of strong imagination and with a great liking
for the romantic and poetic. He would have told to him again and again
any rumour of adventure connected with those he had beheld. He was
greatly pleased by the foreign ladies and gentlemen who were among the
guests--he liked to hear of the Court of King Louis the Fourteenth, and
to have pointed out to him those visitors who were personages connected
with it. He was attracted by the sound of foreign tongues, and would
inquire to which country a gentleman or lady belonged, and would thrust
his head out of the window when they sauntered on the terraces below
that he might hear them speak their language. As was natural, he heard
much interesting gossip from his attendants when they were not aware
that he was observing, they feeling secure in his extreme youth. He
could not himself exactly have explained how his conception of the
difference between the French and English Courts arose, but at seven
years old, he in some way knew that King Louis was a finer gentleman
than King Charles, that his Court was more elegant, and that the
beauties who ruled it were not merry orange wenches, or romping card
house-building maids of honour, or splendid viragoes who raved and
stamped and poured forth oaths as fishwives do. How did he know it--and
many other things also? He knew it as children always know things their
elders do not suspect them of remarking, but which, falling upon their
little ears sink deep into their tiny minds, and lying there like seeds
in rich earth, put forth shoots and press upwards until they pierce
through the darkness and flower and bear fruit in the light of day. He
knew that a certain great Duchess of Portsmouth had been sent over from