“_Crois tu, ma chere, pas un de ces cochons la m’ont offert le sous!_” We made most of our own good times. One favorite game at Sirons was to go out, each one of us, and lean a sketch against a tree, retire to a hiding place, and watch. Of a lovely afternoon, myriads of carriages would come out from Fontainebleau, the occupants leisurely lying back and gazing from side to side. Some of them would spy the painting there on the ground. If they looked at it, it counted one point; if they examined it carefully, it was two; but if they carried it off with them it was a sign that the painter was one hundred per cent perfect and he had to pay for a bottle of wine for the crowd. I once had one of my sketches taken away and it cost me two bottles of fizz, but I was a very happy man. Some one had liked my work and had stolen it! And what was one sketch? It was so easy to make another. A man, perhaps not so well known as the Barbizon painters, but certainly much more interesting than the majority of them, was Professor Lainey. He looked an old man when I knew him, white haired and a chatterbox. For years he had taught drawing in the schools of Fontainebleau. In his youth Professor Lainey had hoped to become an actor and had joined a class to study for the stage. Among the pupils was a little Jewess, fourteen years old, plain looking and poorly dressed, and as it was his fate to take the same omnibus with her, politeness demanded that he escort her to her door. This he hated to do, as she was a most hopeless-looking creature and he was cad enough to be ashamed to be seen with her. One day in class, the teacher asked her to deliver a line of Racine, and said: “Shall I give it as I was told to, or as it should be rendered?” Very amused, he replied: “Mademoiselle will be good enough to give it first as she has been told to give it, and afterward the class will be delighted to hear her improvement.” She obeyed, and Professor Lainey added: “For the first time I understood Racine.” Continuing, he said: “I saw no more of her until I was an art student in Paris. One night I went to the Théâtre Français, and there upon the stage appeared the little Jewess of my class. She was none other then the divine Sarah!” Poor, plain, and of a despised race, even as a child her brain had begun to work. Like Christ, as a boy before the elders, she told _them_, not they her.