of tenderness at which the man will smile later, finding so far different from him in all his tastes, him whom he desired to have for a brother.  It happens, however, in certain natures of a sensibility particularly precocious and faithful at the same time, that the awakening of effective life is so strong, so encroaching, that the impassioned friendship persists, first through the other awakening, that of sensuality, so fatal to all the senses of delicacy, then through the first tumult of social experience, not less fatal to our ideal of youth.

That was the case with Florent Chapron, whether his character, at once somewhat wild and yet submissive, rendered him more qualified for that renunciation of his personality than friendship demands, whether, far from his father and his sister and not having any mother, his loving heart had need of attaching itself to some one who could fill the place of his relatives, or whether Maitland exercised over him a special prestige by his opposite qualities.  Fragile and somewhat delicate, was he seduced by the strength and dexterity which his friend exhibited in all his exercises?  Timid and naturally taciturn, was he governed by the assurance of that athlete with the loud laugh, with the invincible energy?  Did the surprising tendency toward art which the other one showed conquer him, as well as sympathy for the misfortunes which were confided to him and which touched him more than they touched him who experienced them?

Gordon Maitland, Lincoln’s father, of an excellent family of New York, had been killed at the battle of Chancellorsville, during the same war which had ruined Florent’s father in part.  Mrs. Maitland, the poor daughter of a small rector of a Presbyterian church at Newport, and who had only married her husband for his money, had but one idea, when once a widow—­to go abroad.  Whither?  To Europe, vague and fascinating spot, where she fancied she would be distinguished by her intelligence and her beauty.  She was pretty, vain and silly, and that voyage in pursuit of a part to play in the Old World caused her to pass two years first in one hotel and then in another, after which she married the second son of a poor Irish peer, with the new chimera of entering that Olympus of British aristocracy of which she had dreamed so much.  She became a Catholic, and her son with her, to obtain the result which cost her dear, for not only was the lord who had given her his name brutal, a drunkard and cruel, but he added to all those faults that of being one of the greatest gamblers in the entire United Kingdom.  He kept his stepson away from home, beat his wife, and died toward 1880, after dissipating the poor creature’s fortune and almost all of Lincoln’s.  At that time the latter, whom his stepfather had naturally left to develop in his own way, and who, since leaving Beaumont, had studied painting at Venice, Rome and Paris, was in the latter city and one of the first pupils in Bonnat’s studio.  Seeing his mother