Page:Early Reminiscences.djvu/249

 195 To return to my mother's letter. " This week Sabine is to be tailed and stuck up ! I expect I shall scarcely recognize my son. Indeed he is altered greatly in face ever since his picture was taken at Pau. He has a curiously young face on a man's body, and often makes me laugh; from his shoulders down he is so like Marchadlier. You know how he walks with his feet turned out, and his hands in his pockets —just such is Sabine with his back turned to you. His friend, Ninian Hill, is gone off to Paris to study medicine. The friendship has greatly cooled, Ninian being too sentimental to please Sabine's taste, for the rust and dust of antiquity find no sympathy in Ninian, and Sabine himself owns—I blush to say it considering he is my own son, and that we feel so dissimilarly on ;he subject— that he gives up his friends very soon, and that, as soon as they cease to entertain him, he would like to change." My brother in his diary noticed the growth of my tails and the rise of my collars. They seem to have tried his temper severely. There lived, on the farther side of the river, a Scottish family named Frazer ; the eldest daughter was married and was named Mrs. Ellis. The three younger were not even engaged, and vastly pretty girls they were—Margaret, Ellen and Constance. If I make quotations from my brother William's diary, I allow myself to correct the spelling, which is not always right, when boys have not grown their tails. On New Year's Day, 1851, he wrote : " At eight o'clock went to a party at the English Consul's (Mr. Graham). It passed off very well. There was dancing the whole evening. The prettiest young ladies there were the Misses Frazer and Miss Graham. My sister Margaret was in great request." On the 16th January, we gave a ball at Chateau St. Aulaire. My brother wrote : " It went off very well : plenty of dancing, and plenty of flirtation. I flirted with Constance. We had kept up our Christmas decorations of holly. This puzzled the French officers. ' W7hy hollies ? ' they asked. * They show only prickles and drops of blood. But laurel—that signifies la Gloire. C'est bien autre chose.' " Monday, 20th January. After dinner, the Misses Frazer came to see our sister Margaret, at all events they pretended that