Sometimes we went into a dark place, where there was a fiery furnace with many holes, and many people working and moving about--among them a man with white hair and a young face, like the lady, and beautiful red heels to his shoes. And under his guidance I would contrive to make in the furnace a charming little cocked hat of colored glass--a treasure! And the sheer joy thereof would wake me. Sometimes the white-haired lady and I would sit together at a square box from which she made lovely music, and she would sing my favorite song--a song that I adored. But I always woke before this song came to an end, on account of the too insupportably intense bliss I felt on hearing it; and all I could remember when awake were the words "triste--comment--sale." The air, which I knew so well in my dream, I could not recall. It seemed as though some innermost core of my being, some childish holy of holies, secreted a source of supersubtle reminiscence, which, under some stimulus that now and again became active during sleep, exhaled itself in this singular dream--shadowy and slight, but invariably accompanied by a sense of felicity so measureless and so penetrating that I would always wake in a mystic flutter of ecstasy, the bare remembrance of which was enough to bless and make happy many a succeeding hour. * * * * * Besides this happy family of three, close by (in the Street of the Tower) lived my grandmother Mrs. Biddulph, and my Aunt Plunket, a widow, with her two sons, Alfred and Charlie, and her daughter Madge. They also were fair to look at--extremely so--of the gold-haired, white-skinned, well-grown Anglo-Saxon type, with frank, open, jolly manners, and no beastly British pride. So that physically, at least, we reflected much credit on the English name, which was not in good odor just then at Passy-les-Paris, where Waterloo was unforgotten. In time, however, our nationality was condoned on account of our good looks--"non Angli sed angeli!" as M. Saindou was gallantly pleased to exclaim when he called (with a prospectus of his school) and found us all gathered together under the big apple-tree on our lawn. But English beauty in Passy was soon to receive a memorable addition to its ranks in the person of a certain Madame Seraskier, who came with an invalid little daughter to live in the house so modestly described in gold as "Parva sed Apta." She was the English, or rather the Irish, wife of a Hungarian patriot and man of science, Dr. Seraskier (son of the famous violinist); an extremely tall, thin man, almost gigantic, with a grave, benevolent face, and a head like a prophet's; who was, like my father, very much away from his family--conspiring perhaps--or perhaps only inventing (like my father), and looking out "for his ship to come home!" [Illustration: "SHE TOPPED MY TALL MOTHER."]