And in the meantime let not Frank despair. When I see him on Saturday I will do my best to detach his nose from the grindstone and tune his unaccustomed lips to words that were once familiar to us both. Yours ever truly, J. W. COMYNS CARR.” In those earlier days he sometimes pretended that his wardrobe was unfitted for such places, but I think even this was but a shallow piece of mock modesty on his part, for he was well aware that he could shine if he liked in any environment. A letter to my sister, which I have just found, may illustrate this: 19, BLANDFORD SQUARE, N.W. “MY DEAR ALMA, Many thanks for the brushes. When my hair is gone--“which will be short,” as Pellegrini says--I can use them for sweeping a crossing. In the meantime they make a most excellent parting. Seriously they are beautiful. I have never before had brushes in a case--it seems to lift one’s social status. Hitherto my brushes have lain in my portmanteau cheek by jowl with my boots, or have mingled their tears with my sponge. Now all is changed; I feel I could stay at a country house and meet the footman on equal terms. Of course, I don’t mean that seriously--no man could hope to be the equal of a footman. I am a democrat but no revolutionist, and I have always felt that so long as liveried servants keep their supremacy the throne is safe. Compared with this the land question is a trifle. “Dieu et mon drawers” is the loyal but terrified sentiment with which I always awake on a visit, and see the footman turning my tattered underclothing inside out. But now my brushes will save me. Yours, JOE.” In the later years of his life, as his friends multiplied far and wide and his social gifts became famous, he was pressed into circles unknown to me, and our country-house visits together became fewer; so that personally I remember his talk oftener at some sea-side place where we had run down for a week-end, or on the verandah of some foreign hotel where he would be immediately surrounded by a delighted audience--in later years not by any means always composed of his own countrymen. Though his associations with French artists and men of letters over pictures for the New Gallery--and, more still, over his English editorship of _L’Art_--had taught him enough of their tongue for his business, he was not a finished French scholar; but he was never afraid to make a shot at expressing his thought, and consequently he improved enormously at the end of his life. I remember the astonished comment of two Armenian lads and a charming Finnish lady whom we met at a Swiss mountain resort: “_Mais c’est épatant! De faire des calembours comme cela dans une langue étrangère._”