folk piece. I think he erred, for it was a favourite in the public-houses, and the singers were all country peasants. Oh, the dear old punch bowl, and the whalebone ladle with a Queen Anne silver coin in the hollow. Shall we ever see it steaming on our tables again as in the olden times ? The handsome ironstone bowls formerly employed for the purpose are fast disappearing. Alas, the day!
On fair days at Bayonne arrived a seller of prints—I think he came from Spain. He fastened a string horizontally against a stone wall, and suspended his wares from it. He had also a stall in front littered with old wood-cuts and steel engravings almost all by early masters, but there were a few eighteenth century mezzotints as well. There were scores of Albert Dürer's woodcuts at a franc apiece, also his steel engravings at two francs. The Melancholia, the Knight and Death; also innumerable Caillot's gruesome representations of the ragged, the wretched, the deformed. There were Teniers, and Breughel's wildly imaginative illustrations of witch gatherings and of Temptations of S. Anthony. I bought a few of Dürer's woodcuts, a Teniers and a Breughel, as many as my scanty means would allow. I begged hard that my father would advance me some money so that I might make up a portfolio of Albert Dürer's woodcuts, but no, he was obdurate ; he pronounced them to be "rubbish," and sorrowfully I had to forgo what I believed to be a treasure. Now here is an odd thing. I can recall distinctly the man with his plates, on several of which I had set my heart, but had to forgo purchase, and yet the faces of the Frazers have completely passed out of my recollection, so that I think that my brother has exaggerated my devotion to Constance. Indeed, but for my brother's diary, I should not have recalled their existence.
Bayonne may be said to be the capital of the Basques. This peculiar people with their language akin to no Aryan tongue, nearest, but not near to Finn and Lett, have their peculiar customs. They were much in Bayonne, or rather in its outskirts, at festivals, when they danced to their own music My father got a Basque schoolmaster to make for him a collection of their dance tunes. They were familiar to me but had passed out of my mind till some forty-five years later when I heard Carmen for the first
