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TRILBY.

Little Billee would look up from his work, as she was sitting to Taffy or the Laird, and find her gray eyes fixed on him with an all-enfolding gaze, so piercingly, penetratingly, unutterably sweet and kind and tender, such a brooding, dove-like look of soft and warm solicitude, that he would feel a flutter at his heart, and his hand would shake so that he could not paint; and in a waking dream he would remember that his mother had often looked at him like that when he was a small boy, and she a beautiful young woman untouched by care or sorrow; and the tear that always lay in readiness so close to the corner of Little Billee's eye would find it very difficult to keep itself in its proper place—unshed.—Trilby.

EARLY MEMORIES.

And this leads me to apologize for the egotism of this Memoir, which is but an introduction to another and longer one that I hope to publish later. To write a story of paramount importance to mankind, it is true, but all about one's outer and one's inner self, to do this without seeming somewhat egotistical, requires something akin to genius-and I am but a poor scribe.

"Combien j'ai donce souvenance

Du joli lieu de ma naissance!"

These quaint lines have been running in my head at intervals through nearly all my outer life, like an oftrecurring burden in an endless ballad-sadly monotonous, alas! the ballad, which is mine; sweetly monotonous the burden, which is by Chauteâubriand.

sometimes think that, to feel the full significance of this refrain, one must have passed one's childhood in sunny France, where it was written, and the remainder of one's existence in mere London-or worse than mere London-as has been the case with me. If I had spent all my life from infancy upward in Bloomsbury, or Clerkenwell, or Whitechapel, my early days would be

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