Page:Letters of Life.djvu/82

70 months, we applied ourselves to drawing and painting, also to embroidery of historical scenes, filigree, and other finger-works accounted accomplishments in those days. Side by side, inseparable, we pursued with a double strength what often failed to interest us, sustained each other's spirits under the privation of separation from our beloved parents, and participated in the unutterable rapture of return.

Another summoned form glides over the tablet of memory—tall, slightly bent, and with locks like snow—my old French teacher.

Courteous was he, and formally ceremonious, as belonging to the ancient regime. Titles and fortune had been his in his native land before the Buonaparte dynasty; but he bore their loss with admirable philosophy, obtaining a subsistence in this New World when past threescore and ten, as an instructor in dancing and modern languages. Exacting was he, yet patient, and eminently strenuous in his Parisian pronunciation. His drill in the difficult sound of the letter u, was particularly uncompromising.

"You will never get that u. No—because you will not put out your lips the way I tell you. Put them out even with your nose—so, so. Now say u, u."

Good, honest man! He is described by the graphic pen of a fellow student, the Hon. S. G. Goodrich (Peter Parley), at the sixty-first page of his second volume of "Recollections of a Lifetime."