to fountains, and all kinds of beautiful wild myths of antique Greece--far
more beautiful and far more wild than all the tales of gnomes and witches
in my book of Hartz legends.

At other times, when the weather was cold or rainy, he would take down his
"Musee Napoleon," a noble work in eight or ten volumes, and show me
engravings after pictures by great masters in the Louvre, explaining them
to me as we went along, painting in words the glow and glory of the absent
colour, and steeping my childish imagination in golden dreams of Raphael
and Titian, and Paulo Veronese.

And sometimes, too, as the dusk came on and the firelight brightened in the
gathering gloom, he would take up his guitar, and to the accompaniment of a
few slight chords sing me a quaint old French chanson of the feudal times;
or an Arab chant picked up in the tent or the Nile boat; or a Spanish
ballad, half love-song, half litany, learned from the lips of a muleteer on
the Pyrenean border.

For Monsieur Maurice, whatever his present adversities, had travelled far
and wide at some foregone period of his life--in Syria, and Persia; in
northernmost Tartary and the Siberian steppes; in Egypt and the Nubian
desert, and among the perilous wilds of central Arabia. He spoke and wrote
with facility some ten or twelve languages. He drew admirably, and had a
profound knowledge of the Italian schools of art; and his memory was a rich
storehouse of adventure and anecdote, legend and song.

I am an old woman now, and Monsieur Maurice must have passed away many a
year ago upon his last long journey; but even at this distance of time, my
eyes are dimmed with tears when I remember how he used to unlock that
storehouse for my pleasure, and ransack his memory for stories either of