Page:Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin. Records of a family of engineers.pdf/79

 chaps,' and preferred the Piedmontese before the Genoese; but I suspect he mixed not very freely with either. Not only were his days filled with university work, but his spare hours were fully dedicated to the arts under the eye of a beloved task-mistress. He worked hard and well in the art school, where he obtained a silver medal 'for a couple of legs the size of life drawn from one of Raphael's cartoons.' His holidays were spent in sketching; his evenings, when they were free, at the theatre. Here at the opera he discovered besides a taste for a new art, the art of music; and ft was, he wrote, 'as if he had found out a heaven on earth.' 'I am so anxious that whatever he professes to know, he should really perfectly possess,' his mother wrote, 'that I spare no pains'; neither to him nor to myself, she might have added, And so when he begged to be allowed to learn the piano, she started him with characteristic barbarity on the scales; and heard in consequence 'heart-rending groans' and saw 'anguished claspings of hands' as he lost his way among their arid intricacies.

In this picture of the lad at the piano, there