“Oh,” I said, and, looking at it curiously for a moment, asked gravely, “And is he inside it?” It seemed to fit him and to correspond so perfectly with him in every way that one felt as though if he were not inside it he ought to be.
The second time was at Boulogne this spring. There were three Germans at the Hôtel de Paris who sat together, went in and out together, smoked together and did everything as though they were a unity in trinity and a trinity in unity. We settled that they must be the Heckmann Quartet, minus Heckmann: we had not the smallest reason for thinking this but we settled it at once. The middle one of these was like Beethoven also. On Easter Sunday, after dinner, when he was a little—well, it was after dinner and his hair went rather mad—Jones said to me:
“Do you see that Beethoven has got into the posthumous quartet stage?” [1885.]
Silvio
In the autumn of 1884, Butler spent some time at Promontogno and Soglio in the Val Bregaglia, sketching and making notes. Among the children of the Italian families in the albergo was Silvio, a boy of ten or twelve. He knew a little English and was very fond of poetry. He could repeat, “How doth the little buzzy bee.” The poem which pleased him best, however, was:
Hey diddle diddle,
The Cat and the Fiddle,
The Cow jumped over the Moon.
They had nothing, he said, in Italian literature so good as this. Silvio used to talk to Butler while he was sketching.
“And you shall read Longfellow much in England?”
“No,” I replied, “I don’t think we read him very much.”
“But how is that? He is a very pretty poet.”