I say twenty years ago. But twenty years ago he was already pretty well forgotten. I imagine the moment of his utmost notoriety would have fallen somewhere in the fifties or the sixties, somewhere between ’55 and ’68. And if my sudden recognition of him in the Casino made my heart give a jump, there was sufficient cause. During the greater part of my childhood, Augustus Ambrose lived with us, was virtually a member of our family. Then I saw a good deal of him again, when I was eighteen, nineteen; and still again, when I was four- or five-and-twenty. He lived with us, indeed, from the time when I was scarcely more than a baby till I was ten or eleven; so that in my very farthest memories he is a personage—looking backwards, I see him in the earliest, palest dawn: a tall man, dressed in black, with long hair and a long beard, who was always in our house, and who used to be frightfully severe; who would turn upon me with a most terrifying frown if I misconducted myself in his presence, who would loom up unexpectedly from behind closed doors, and utter a soul-piercing hist-hist, if I was making a noise: a sort of domesticated Croquemitaine, whom we had always with us. Always? Not quite always, though; for, when I stop to think, I remember there would be breathing spells: periods during which he would disappear—during which you could move about the room, and ask questions, and even (at a pinch) upset things, without being frowned at; during which you could shout lustily at your play, unoppressed by the fear of a black figure suddenly opening the door and freezing you with a hist-hist; during which, in fine, you could forget the humiliating circumstance that children are called into existence to be seen and not heard, with its irksome moral that they should never speak unless they are spoken to. Then, one morning, I would wake up, and find that he was in the house again. He had returned during the night. That was his habit, to return at night. But on one occasion, at least, he returned in the daytime. I remember driving with my father and mother, in our big open carriage, to the railway station, and then driving back home with Mr. Ambrose added to our party. Why I—a child of six or seven, between whom and our guest surely no love was lost—why I was taken upon this excursion, I can’t at all conjecture; I suppose my people had their reasons. Anyhow, I recollect the drive home with particular distinctness. Two things impressed me. First, Mr. Ambrose, who always dressed in black, wore a brown overcoat; I remember gazing at it with bemused eyes, and reflecting that it was exactly the colour of gravy. And secondly, I gathered from his conversation that he had been in prison! Yes. I gathered that he had been in Rome (we were living in Florence), and that one day he had been taken up by the policemen, and put in prison!