earnest writer, one feels the beating of a human heart. One feels that
he is giving us personal impressions of life and its joys and sorrows;
that his imagination is powerful because it is genuinely his own; that
the flowers of his fancy spring spontaneously from the soil. Nor can I
regard it as aught but an added grace that the strings of his instrument
should vibrate so readily to what is beautiful and unselfish and delicate
in human feeling.
JOSE DE HEREDIA
de l'Academie Francaise.





A ROMANCE OF YOUTH



BOOK 1.


CHAPTER I

ON THE BALCONY

As far back as Amedee Violette can remember, he sees himself in an
infant's cap upon a fifth-floor balcony covered with convolvulus; the
child was very small, and the balcony seemed very large to him. Amedee
had received for a birthday present a box of water-colors, with which he
was sprawled out upon an old rug, earnestly intent upon his work of