"Sebastian Erard, Manufacturer of Pianos and Harps for S.A.R. Madame la
Duchesse de Berri." Not only Louise, the eldest of the Gerards--a large
girl now, having been to her first communion, dressing her hair in bands,
and wearing white waists--not only Louise, who had become a good
musician, had made the piano submit to long tortures, but her sister
Maria, and Amedee also, already played the 'Bouquet de Bal' or 'Papa,
les p'tits bateaux'. Rosine, too, in her character of street urchin,
knew all the popular songs, and spent entire hours in picking out the
airs with one finger upon the old instrument.

Ah! the songs of those days, the last of romanticism, the make-believe
'Orientales'; 'Odes' and 'Ballads', by the dozen; 'Comes d'Espagne et
d'Italie', with their pages, turrets, chatelaines; bull-fighters, Spanish
ladies; vivandieres, beguiled away from their homes under the pale of the
church, "near a stream of running water, by a gay and handsome
chevalier," and many other such silly things--Amedee will remember them
always! They bring back to him, clearly and strongly, certain happy
hours in his childhood! They make him smell again at times even the odor
that pervaded the Gerards' house. A mule-driver's song will bring up
before his vision the engraver working at his plate before the
curtainless window on a winter's day. It snows in the streets, and large
white flakes are slowly falling behind the glass; but the room,
ornamented with pictures and busts, is lighted and heated by a bright
coke fire. Amedee can see himself seated in a corner by the fire,
learning by heart a page of the "Epitome" which he must recite the next
morning at M. Batifol's. Maria and Rosine are crouched at his feet, with
a box of glass beads, which they are stringing into a necklace. It was
comfortable; the whole apartment smelled of the engraver's pipe, and in
the dining-room, whose door is half opened, Louise is at the piano,
singing, in a fresh voice, some lines where "Castilla" rhymes with