great sense that he understood and sympathised was preponderant, and his comprehension gave him wings—appeared to transport him to still wider fields of knowledge, still higher sensations. In other days, in London, he had thought again and again of his mother’s father, the revolutionary watchmaker who had known the ecstasy of the barricade and had paid for it with his life, and his reveries had not been sensibly chilled by the fact that he knew next to nothing about him. He figured him in his mind, this mystic ancestor, had a conviction that he was very short like himself and had curly hair, an immense talent for his work and an extraordinary natural eloquence, together with many of the most attractive qualities of the French character. But he was reckless and a little cracked, also probably immoral; he had difficulties and debts and irrepressible passions; his life had been an incurable fever and its tragic termination was a matter of course. None the less it would have been a charm to hear him talk, to feel the influence of a gaiety which even political madness could never quench; for his grandson had a theory that he spoke the French tongue of an earlier time, delightful and sociable in accent and phrase, exempt from the baseness of modern slang. This vague yet vivid personage became our young friend’s constant companion from the day of his arrival; he roamed about with Florentine’s boy hand in hand, sat opposite him at dinner, by the small table in the restaurant, finished the bottle with him, made the bill a little longer—treating him furthermore to innumerable revelations and counsels. He knew the lad’s secret without being told and looked at him across the diminutive tablecloth where the great cube of bread, pushed aside a little, left room for his elbows—it puzzled Hyacinth that the people of Paris should ever have had the fierceness of hunger when the loaves were so big; gazed at him with eyes of deep, kind, glowing comprehension and with lips which seemed to murmur that when one was to die to-morrow one must eat and drink, one must gratify all one’s poor senses all one could to-day. There was nothing venerable, no constraint of importance or disapproval, in this edifying and impalpable presence; the young man considered that Hyacinth Vivier was of his own time of life and could enter into his pleasures as well as his pains. Wondering repeatedly where the barricade on which his grandfather must have fallen had been erected he at last satisfied himself—though I am unable to trace the course of the induction—that it had bristled across the Rue Saint-Honoré very near to the Church of Saint-Roch. The pair had now roamed together through all the museums and gardens, through the principal churches—the republican martyr was very good-natured about this; through the passages and arcades, up and down the great avenues, across all the bridges and above all again and again along