258 Written Sketches

Still, I admitted that I liked him better than I did Michael
Angelo.

Whatever we touched upon the same fatality attended us.
Fortunately neither evolution nor politics came under dis-
cussion, nor yet, happily, music, or they would have praised
Beethoven and very likely Mendelssohn too. They did begin
to run Nuremberg and it was on the tip of my tongue to say,
" Yes, but there's the flavour of Faust and Goethe " ; however,
I did not. In course of time the seance ended, though not
till nearly ten o'clock, and we all went to bed.

Next morning we saw them at breakfast and they were
quite tame. As Gogin said afterwards:

" They came and sat on our fingers and ate crumbs out of
our hands." [1887.]

At Montreuil-sur-Mer

Jones and I lunched at the Hotel de France where we found
everything very good. As we were going out, the landlady,
getting on towards eighty, with a hookish nose, pale blue eyes
and a Giovanni Bellini's Loredano Loredani kind of expression,
came up to us and said, in sweetly apologetic accents :—

" Avez-vous done dejeune &, peu pres selon vos id6es,
Messieurs ? "

It would have been too much for her to suppose that she
had been able to give us a repast that had fully realised our
ideals, still she hoped that these had been, at any rate, adum-
brated in the luncheon she had provided. Dear old thing:
of course they had and a great deal more than adumbrated.
[26 December, 1901.]