Moths by Ouida — page 249: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

MOTHS. | 248 poettoo. I saw him first when he wasa little lad in the hills above Sion. You know people alwayssay that part of his story is not true, but it is quite true. I am not aware why people who have not genius invariably think that people of genius lie; but they do so. I suppose Mediocrity cannot comprehend Imagination failing to avail itself of its resources! Three-and- twenty years ago, princess, I was already an old man, but more active than Iam now. After a long and ar- ‘duous season at my post I was allowing myself the luxury of an incognito tour, leaving my secretaries and servants at Geneva. No one enjoys the privacy and ease of such holidays like an old harness-worn public servant, and there is no harness heavier than diplomacy, though they do give it bells and feathers. One of those short—too short—summer days I had overwalked myself among the green Alps of the Valais, and had to rest at a con- siderable. elevation, from which I was not very certain howl should get down again. It was an exquisite day—such a day as only the mountains can give one, with that exhilarating tonic in the air that does worried nerves more good than all the physicians. Almost unconsciously I repeated aloud in the fullness of my heart, with a boyishness that I ought perhaps to have been ashamed of, but was not, the Thalysia; you will know it, princess: I have heard that you are a student that would have charmed Roger Ascham. As I murmured it myself, I heard a voice take up the Idyl and continue with the song of Lycidas—a_ pretty childish voice, that had laughter in it, laughter no doubt at my surprise. I turned and saw a little fellow with a herd of goats: he was a beautiful child about nine or ten years old.. His Greek was quite pure. I was very astonished, and questioned kim. He told me he was called Raphael de Correze. As it was near evening, he offered me to go down with him to his father’s hut, and I did so; and, as he trotted by my side, he told me that his father had taught himall he knew. He kept goats, he said, but he - studied too. I was belated, and should have fared ill but for the hospitality of that mountain-hut. I cannot tell you how greatly his father interested me, He wasa scholar, and had all the look and bearing of a man of birth. He told me briefly how his father had taken to the mountains when the Revolution ruined the nobility of Savoy. He was then in feeble health; he was anxious for the future of his boy, who was all alive with genius, and mirth, and music, and sang to me, after the simple supper, in the sweetest boyish pipe that it has ever been my lot to hear. [I left them my name, and begged them to use me as they chose; but I never heard anything from them after the bright morning walk when the boy guided me down into the high-road for Sion. I sent him some books and a silver flute from Geneva, but I never knew that he got them. My own busy life began again, and lam shocked to say that I forgot that hut in the Alps, though that tranquil homely interior was one of the prettiest pictures which life has ever shown me. Many years afterward, in Berlin, one night after the opera, going on to the stage with some of the rinces to congratulate a new singer, who had taken the world by storm, the singer looked hard at me fora moment and then — bee 4 * comicboo a ‘. ey seh 3 mX - -