self, and was an admirable mimic. When a boy it had been said of him that he was born to be a great actor. His capacity for facial expression was something extraordinary; he often amused his friends by imitations of fellow-musicians, reproducing their manner and gestures to the life; so well as actually on more than one occasion to take in the spectator.
Madame Sand thus gives account of the even tenor of her way, in a letter of September 1845:—
I have been in Paris till June, and since then am at Nohant until the winter, as usual; for henceforward my life is ruled as regularly as music paper. I have written two or three novels, one of which is just going to appear.
My son is still thin and delicate, but otherwise well. He is the best being, the gentlest, most equable, industrious, simple-minded, and straightforward ever seen. Our characters, like our hearts, agree so well that we can hardly live a day apart. He is entering his twenty-third year, Solange her eighteenth. We have our ways of merriment, not noisy, but sustained, which bring our ages nearer together, and when we have been working hard all the week we allow ourselves, by way of a grand holiday, to go and eat our cake out of doors some way off, in a wood or an old ruin, with my brother, who is like a sturdy peasant, full of fun and good nature, and who dines with us every day, seeing that he lives not two miles off. Such are our grand pranks.
Sometimes these little outings would originate a novel, as with the Meunier d'Angibault, which she ascribes to "a walk, a discovery, a day of leisure, an hour of idleness." On a ramble with her children she came upon what she calls "a nook in a wild paradise"; a mill, whose owner had allowed everything to grow around the sluices that chose to spring up, briar and
