"Yes, when she came to my house for her lesson last afternoon. I was very glad to hear it, because such singing as hers will improve yours. But I should like to tell your mother how she is connected with me." "How was it, sir?" "Oh! I shall make a long story for her; but enough for you that her father was very good to me when I was an orphan boy and begged my way through Germany. He taught me all that I now teach you; and when he died, he asked me to take care of his baby and his lessons. She was only born that he might see her, and die." "Oh, sir, how strange! Poor man! he must have been very sorry." "He was not sorry to go, for he loved his wife, and she went first." "Oh, that was Miss Benette's mamma?" "Yes, her lovely mamma." "Of course she was lovely. If you please, sir, tell me about her too." But Davy reserved his tale until we were at home. My mother fully expected him, it was evident; for upon the table, besides the plain but perfectly ordered meal we always enjoyed at about nine o'clock, stood the supernumerary illustrations--in honor of a guest--of boiled custards, puff pastry, and our choicest preserves. My mother, too, was sitting by the fire in a species of state, having her hands void of occupation and her pocket-handkerchief outspread. Millicent and Lydia wore their dahlia-colored poplin frocks,--quite a Sunday costume,--and Clo revealed herself in purple silk, singularly adapted for evening wear, as it looked black by candle-light! I never sat up to supper except on very select occasions. I knew this would be one, without being told so, and secured the next chair to my darling friend's. I would that I could recall, in his own expressive language, his exact relation of his own history as told to us that night. It struck us that he should so earnestly acquaint us with every incident,--at least, it surprised us then, but his after connection with ourselves explained it in that future. No fiction could be more fraught with fascinating personality than his actual life. I pass over his birth in England (and in London), in a dark room over a dull book-shop, in his father's house. That father, from pure breeding and constitutional exclusiveness, had avoided all intercourse with his class, and conserved his social caste by his marriage only. I linger not upon his remembrance of his mother, Sybilla Lenhart,--herself a Jewess, with the most exquisite musical ability,--nor upon her death in her only son's tenth year. His father's pining melancholy meantime deepened into an abstraction of misery on her loss. The world and its claims lost their hold, and he died insolvent when Lenhart was scarcely twelve.