What a pleasure it was to listen to that mellow voice, and to the low laugh with which he sometimes interrupted his own stories. Sohn was one of those exceptional, happily constituted beings, themselves so perfectly harmonious, that their presence seems to diffuse an atmosphere of peace and contentment, into which as each one enters he feels on better terms with himself and others. The world was full of beauty for him, as it is for few of us, and the joy he felt in every aspect of the beautiful--in Nature, in children, in the human form divine, and in pleasant companionship--was, like the whole nature of the man, at once ingenuous and profound. He had laid out for himself a little garden round his house in Düsseldorf, with so much skill, that the small space really looked like a miniature park. The effect was charming; but the proprietor seemed almost to find it necessary to apologise for such a display of luxury, saying deprecatingly,--“The beautiful is a necessary condition of existence to us poor artists! So indispensable is it to us, that we would willingly make every other sacrifice, just to be able to surround ourselves with things of beauty!” It was through his pupil, my great-uncle Charles, that we first became acquainted with Sohn. My uncle, who had been a musical dilettante for the first fifty years of his life, attaining I believe a certain proficiency on the French horn, had recently turned his attention to painting, in which art he was still a mere tyro at the time of my parents’ marriage. At first he was always sending for Sohn, to ask his criticism and advice, and by sheer hard work and perseverance he succeeded in the end in painting very good portraits. There was one of my mother, for which she declared she sat to him no less than seventy-five times. To beguile the tedium of those long sittings, she learned by heart the parts she was going to play in private theatricals, repeating the lines aloud without fear of disturbing the artist, who was quite absorbed in his work, and very hard of hearing into the bargain. But in the one play occurred a phrase so singularly appropriate, that she could not resist raising her voice for it to reach the ears of the deaf old man, who peeped out astonished from behind his easel and shook his finger at her, as she exclaimed:--“Dear Uncle! must I then really be bored to death!” And her subsequent assurance that this was only in her part only half mollified him. In spite of the long sittings, the portrait was not a success; it however brought Sohn to our house, and two admirable pictures of my mother by him represent her in all her youthful bloom at that period. The one is in a red velvet dress, her face framed in a mass of fair curls; the other in her riding-habit, just as he had seen her jump down from her horse, flushed with the exercise of a long ride.