pleasures and an enjoyment of the intimacies of life. He stood very
much alone in the world, and from the age of eighteen he had in one
way or another supported himself, chiefly by work on illustrated
papers. His father, who belonged to what is called a good family,
began life in easy circumstances, and gained some reputation as a
connoisseur of art; imprudence and misfortune having obliged him to
sell his collection, Mr. Franks took to buying pictures and
bric-a-brac for profit, and during the last ten years of his life
was associated in that capacity with a London firm. Norbert,
motherless from infancy and an only child, received his early
education at expensive schools, but, showing little aptitude for
study and much for use of the pencil, was taken by his father at
twelve years old to Paris, and there set to work under a good
art-teacher. At sixteen he went to Italy, where he remained for a
couple of years. Then, on a journey in the East, the elder Franks
died. Norbert returned to England, learnt that a matter of fifty
pounds was all his heritage, and pluckily turned to the task of
keeping himself alive. Herein his foreign sketch-books proved
serviceable, but the struggle was long and hard before he could
house himself decently, and get to serious work as a painter. Later
on, he was wont to say that this poverty had been the best possible
thing for him, its enforced abstinences having come just at the time
when he had begun to "wallow"--his word for any sort of excess;
and "wallowing" was undoubtedly a peril to which Norbert's temper
particularly exposed him. Short commons made him, as they have made
many another youth, sober and chaste, at all events in practice; and
when he began to lift up his head, a little; when, at the age of
three-and-twenty, he earned what seemed to him at first the
luxurious income of a pound or so a week; when, in short, the
inclination to "wallow" might again have taken hold upon him, it was