undoubtedly have endured the mixed melody for a little time, though her
husband did not think she seriously wished him to do so. But if he did
not play the piano to the accompaniment of Pen's drums, he played piano
duets with him as soon as the boy was old enough to take part in them;
and devoted himself to his instruction in this, as in other and more
important branches of knowledge.

Peni had also his dumb companions, as his father had had before him.
Tortoises lived at one end of the famous balcony at Casa Guidi; and
when the family were at the Baths of Lucca, Mr. Browning would stow away
little snakes in his bosom, and produce them for the child's amusement.
As the child grew into a man, the love of animals which he had inherited
became conspicuous in him; and it gave rise to many amusing and some
pathetic little episodes of his artist life. The creatures which he
gathered about him were generally, I think, more highly organized than
those which elicited his father's peculiar tenderness; it was natural
that he should exact more pictorial or more companionable qualities from
them. But father and son concurred in the fondness for snakes, and in a
singular predilection for owls; and they had not been long established
in Warwick Crescent, when a bird of that family was domesticated there.
We shall hear of it in a letter from Mr. Browning.

Of his son's moral quality as quite a little child his father has told
me pretty and very distinctive stories, but they would be out of place
here.*

* I am induced, on second thoughts, to subjoin one of these,
for its testimony to the moral atmosphere into which the
child had been born. He was sometimes allowed to play with a
little boy not of his own class--perhaps the son of a