patient, a model to me. Bagenhope drank drams: she allowanced him. He
had known my father's mother, and could talk of her in his cups: his
playing, and his aged tunes, my father said, were a certification to him
that he was at the bottom of the ladder. Why that should afford him
peculiar comfort, none of us could comprehend. 'He was the humble lover
of my mother, Richie,' I heard with some confusion, and that he adored
her memory. The statement was part of an entreaty to me to provide
liberally for Bagenhope's pension before we quitted England. 'I am not
seriously anxious for much else,' said my father. Yet was he fully
conscious of the defeat he had sustained and the catastrophe he had
brought down upon me: his touch of my hand told me that, and his desire
for darkness and sleep. He had nothing to look to, nothing to see
twinkling its radiance for him in the dim distance now; no propitiating
Government, no special Providence. But he never once put on a sorrowful
air to press for pathos, and I thanked him. He was a man endowed to
excite it in the most effective manner, to a degree fearful enough to win
English sympathies despite his un-English faults. He could have drawn
tears in floods, infinite pathetic commiseration, from our grangousier
public, whose taste is to have it as it may be had to the mixture of one-
third of nature in two-thirds of artifice. I believe he was expected to
go about with this beggar's petition for compassion, and it was a
disappointment to the generous, for which they punished him, that he
should have abstained. And moreover his simple quietude was really
touching to true-hearted people. The elements of pathos do not permit of
their being dispensed from a stout smoking bowl. I have to record no
pathetic field-day. My father was never insincere in emotion.

I spared his friends, chums, associates, excellent men of a kind, the
trial of their attachment by shunning them. His servants I dismissed
personally, from M. Alphonse down to the coachman Jeremy, whose speech to