Then there was Monsieur Bonzig, and Mlle. Marceline, and others--and three or four boys with whom both Barty and I were on terms of warm and intimate friendship. None of these boys that I know of have risen to any world-wide fame; and, oddly enough, none of them have ever given sign of life to Barty Josselin, who is just as famous in France for his French literary work as on this side of the Channel for all he has done in English. He towers just as much there as here; and this double eminence now dominates the entire globe, and we are beginning at last to realize everywhere that this bright luminary in our firmament is no planet, like Mars or Jupiter, but, like Sirius, a sun. Yet never a line from an old comrade in that school where he lived for four years and was so strangely popular--and which he so filled with his extraordinary personality! * * * * * So much for Barty Josselin's school life and mine. I fear I may have dwelt on them at too great a length. No period of time has ever been for me so bright and happy as those seven years I spent at the Institution F. Brossard--especially the four years I spent there with Barty Josselin. The older I get, the more I love to recall the trivial little incidents that made for us both the sum of existence in those happy days. La chasse aux souvenirs d'enfance! what better sport can there be, or more bloodless, at my time of life? And all the lonely pathetic pains and pleasures of it, now that _he_ is gone! The winter twilight has just set in--"betwixt dog and wolf." I wander alone (but for Barty's old mastiff, who follows me willy-nilly) in the woods and lanes that surround Marsfield on the Thames, the picturesque abode of the Josselins. Darker and darker it grows. I no longer make out the familiar trees and hedges, and forget how cold it is and how dreary. "Je marcherai les yeux fixés sur mes pensées, Sans rien voir au dehors, sans entendre aucun bruit-- Seul, inconnu, le dos courbé, les mains croisées: Triste--et le jour pour moi sera comme la nuit." (This is Victor Hugo, not Barty Josselin.) It's really far away I am--across the sea; across the years, O Posthumus! in a sunny play-ground that has been built over long ago, or overgrown with lawns and flower-beds and costly shrubs. Up rises some vague little rudiment of a hint of a ghost of a sunny, funny old French remembrance long forgotten--a brand-new old remembrance--a kind of will-o'-the-wisp. Chut! my soul stalks it on tiptoe, while these earthly legs bear this poor old body of clay, by mere reflex action, straight home to the beautiful Elisabethan house on the hill; through the great warm hall, up the broad oak stairs, into the big cheerful music-room like a studio--ruddy and bright with the huge log-fire opposite the large window. All is on an ample scale at Marsfield, people and things! and I! sixteen stone, good Lord!