heard Rachel recite the 'MARSEILLAISE' at the Francais, the
tricolour in her arms. What is still more strange, he had been up
to then invincibly indifferent to music, insomuch that he could not
distinguish 'God save the Queen' from 'Bonnie Dundee'; and now, to
the chanting of the mob, he amazed his family by learning and
singing 'MOURIR POUR LA PATRIE.' But the letters, though they
prepare the mind for no such revolution in the boy's tastes and
feelings, are yet full of entertaining traits. Let the reader note
Fleeming's eagerness to influence his friend Frank, an incipient
Tory (no less) as further history displayed; his unconscious
indifference to his father and devotion to his mother, betrayed in
so many significant expressions and omissions; the sense of dignity
of this diminutive 'person resident on the spot,' who was so happy
as to escape insult; and the strange picture of the household -
father, mother, son, and even poor Aunt Anna - all day in the
streets in the thick of this rough business, and the boy packed off
alone to school in a distant quarter on the very morrow of the
massacre.

They had all the gift of enjoying life's texture as it comes; they
were all born optimists. The name of liberty was honoured in that
family, its spirit also, but within stringent limits; and some of
the foreign friends of Mrs. Jenkin were, as I have said, men
distinguished on the Liberal side. Like Wordsworth, they beheld


France standing on the top of golden hours
And human nature seeming born again.