beautiful, perfectly conic in form. The eyes were like two revolving
lamps, set very close together. The smile was haunting. There was a
touch of old-world courtesy in the repression of the evident impulse
to spring at one's throat. The voice had notes that recalled M.
Mounet-Sully's in the later and more important passages of Oedipe Roi.
I remember that he always spoke with the greatest contempt of Mr. and
Mrs. Pegaway's translations. He likened them to--but enough! His boom
is not yet at the full. A few weeks hence I shall be able to command
an even higher price than I could now for my `Talks with Kolniyatsch.'



No. 2. THE PINES

[Early in the year 1914 Mr. Edmund Gosse told me he was asking certain
of his friends to write for him a few words apiece in description of
Swinburne as they had known or seen him at one time or another; and he
was so good as to wish to include in this gathering a few words by
myself. Ifound it hard to be brief without seeming irreverent. I
failed in the attempt to make of my subject a snapshot that was not a
grotesque. So I took refuge in an ampler scope. I wrote a
reminiscential essay. From that essay I made an extract, which I gave
to Mr. Gosse. From that extract he made a quotation in his enchanting
biography. The words quoted by him reappear here in the midst of the
whole essay as I wrote it. I dare not hope they are unashamed of their
humble surroundings.--M. B.]

In my youth the suburbs were rather looked down on--I never quite knew
why. It was held anomalous, and a matter for merriment, that Swinburne
lived in one of them. For my part, had I known as a fact that Catullus