Twice or three times that week British tourists and travelers Landed at the quai by the Place Verte from _The Baron Osy_--and this landing was Barty's delight. The sight of fair, fresh English girls, with huge crinolines, and their hair done up in chenille nets, made him long for England again, and the sound of their voices went nigh to weakening his resolve. But he stood firm to the last, and saw me off by _The Baron_. I felt a strange "serrement de coeur" as I left him standing there, so firm, as if he had been put "au piquet" by M. Dumollard! and so thin and tall and slender--and his boyish face so grave. Good heavens! How much alone he seemed, who was so little built to live alone! It is really not too much to say that I would have given up to him everything I possessed in the world--every blessed thing! Except Leah--and Leah was not mine to give! Now and again Barty's face would take on a look so ineffably, pathetically, angelically simple and childlike that it moved one to the very depths, and made one feel like father and mother to him in one! It was the true revelation of his innermost soul, which in many ways remained that of a child even in his middle age and till he died. All his life he never quite put away childish things! I really believe that in bygone ages he would have moved the world with that look, and been another Peter the Hermit! He became a pupil at the academy under De Keyser and Van Lerius, and worked harder than ever. He took a room nearly all window on a second floor in the Marché aux oeufs, just under the shadow of the gigantic spire which rings a fragment of melody every seven minutes and a half--and the whole tune at midnight, fortissimo. He laid in a stock of cigars at less than a centime apiece, and dried them in the sun; they left as he smoked them a firm white ash two inches long; and he grew so fond of them that he cared to smoke nothing else. He rose before the dawn, and went for a swim more than a mile away--got to the academy at six--worked till eight--breakfasted on a little roll called a pistolet, and a cup of coffee; then the academy again from nine till twelve--when dinner, the cheapest he had ever known, but not the worst. Then work again all the afternoon, copying old masters at the Gallery. Then a cheap supper, a long walk along the quais or ramparts or outside--a game of dominoes, and a glass or two of "Malines" or "Louvain"--then bed, without invading hordes; the Flemish are as clean as the Dutch; and there he would soon smoke and read himself to sleep in spite of chimes--which lull you, when once you get "achimatized," as he called it, meaning of course to be funny: a villainous kind of fun--caught, I fear, in Barge Yard, Bucklersbury. It used to rain puns in the City--especially in the Stock Exchange, which is close to Barge Yard.