not offend you by offering to pay you for this, but I have brought you a little present which you will find useful." With that he handed her the card. She read it and then said to him: "What is this, my lord?" He told her what it was, but she laid it down before him on a table, and said: "I thank you, my lord, but I can't go against my own class." "Why, Mrs. Noseda," said he, "you will save ten or fifteen per cent in the purchasing of all your household supplies." "Let the shopkeepers make their profit out of me!" she shouted (by this time she was angry). "My lord," she went on, "you and the other great property owners are starving your own tenants, and if this goes on you will have whole rows of shops standing empty and idle. I won't accept your card!" The Marquis of Salisbury was little used to having such "faithful" talk addressed to him by one of his own tenants, so he stared at the angry old woman, put the offending card in his pocket, and exclaiming "God bless my soul!” strode away to his carriage.

In attending the many important auction sales in Paris, she had no mercy on her own health. She would quit London in the evening, travel all night to Paris (a wearisome journey), next morning she would examine the prints, then spend the whole afternoon in the auction room, and that same evening she would set out on her return to London.

In Paris "Madame" Noseda was almost as well known as were the two great towers of the cathe

dral of Notre Dame. Indeed, any one seeing her in her street attire (which was the same at all seasons and for long years) was not likely to forget her. She generally wore a yellow gown; her hat was of the most outlandish and flamboyant British style, but it was her outer street garment which made her unforgetable. It was a satin shawl of scarlet and yellow, in broad alternate stripes, and it could be seen in the street as far as human eyesight could reach. Whenever some great collection of prints came to be sold at auction she was pretty sure to be the largest buyer; and yet her knowledge of the French language was of the slightest. She could say "oui" and "non" and "bon jour," but beyond that she knew little more except the numerals 1, 2, 3, etc., which were indispensable for her buying and selling; but, all the same, and by some "rule of thumb" of her own, she generally managed to puzzle out the meaning of auction catalogues and books of reference in the French and German languages. Once, I remember, she missed buying an important old Dutch print at a Paris auction. She had consulted the standard French authority on the prints by that master, and had read that in the middle distance, to the left, there stood a "meule." After she had missed getting possession of the coveted print, she said to me: "It's not the right one. The book describes a mule standing in the landscape. I could see no quadruped there, all I saw was a hayrick." She did not know that the French word "meule" was a hayrick!

How often it happens, in this "vale of tears,” that a human life ends sadly enough. It was so in Mrs. Noseda's case. When she was nearly eighty I noticed, during my visits to London, that her strenuous day's work tired her greatly, and I used to exhort her to take a long and complete rest. Her answer generally was: "I cawn't. Who could take my place 'ere?" When I returned to London one year, my first visit was to the printseller whom she used to call "that old woman.' I said to him that I did not quite feel that I was in London because I had not yet seen Mrs. Noseda. This man, rubbing his hands gleefully, said to me: "We shall have no more trouble with her. She's in Bedlam" (Bedlam, the Bethlehem Hospital for the insane, was what he meant). I was shocked and grieved at the news he gave me, but I said to him: "I see that your most formidable rival has been disabled; but let me tell you that Mrs. Noseda had more brains than you and I and any other half dozen of us put together."

The valiant old woman lingered on in the asylum for about three years, and then she died.

Another, though a minor character, among the old-time London printsellers was Mr. Benoni White, of Brownlow Street, High Holborn. It was known that he was an expert who had accumulated a fine stock of good prints. But his wife inherited a legacy which was sufficient to maintain the old couple in comfort to the end of their lives, and the true spirit of the old man was able

to assert itself. Then it was found that he loved his prints far too well to think of parting with any of them. During the nine or ten years when I knew him he used to keep regular business hours. He would arrive in the morning, open his shop, carefully locking the front door from the inside, and then settle down to be happy until the evening hour for closing. Many a time have I stared through the windows at prints which I would have been very glad to buy; and having tried the locked door I would knock, the old man would look up, pleasantly enough, but would give me a decided shake of his head and then go on contemplating some of his particular pets, and leave me fretting and fuming on the sidewalk. After the legacy he never parted with a print to the day of his death.

When famous collections of old prints have come to be dispersed at public auction in Europe the operation of buying what one wants has its own adventures. One such I shall relate. At the sale in Berlin of a great collection, I bought, for 1400 marks, Rembrandt's large etching called "The Great Ecce Homo" representing Pontius Pilate presenting Christ to the people. After the print had been "knocked down" to me, a well-dressed but somehow suspicious looking man came and spoke to me in German, but quickly perceiving that I did not understand that language he at once dropped into excellent French. At the theater I have sometimes paid my money to witness an actor playing a part which was not so well acted

as this comedy which my interlocutor then proceeded to play for me.

He said, very politely, "Sir, I see that you are a stranger in Berlin. I myself was born here and I have some civic pride in my native city. I am sorry to tell you that you have been defrauded in paying the price which you did for that Rembrandt etching. There is an unfair combination here to compel strangers to pay an excessive price at auctions of works of art. I have often remonstrated with my fellow citizens and have told them that they were driving away such sales to the Paris and London auction houses." After he had ascertained that I was willing to buy a duplicate proof of the Ecce Homo, he said: "As a loyal citizen of Berlin, it is in my power to make restitution to you for the excessive price which they have made you pay just now" (I knew that I had not paid an excessive price). He went on: "I have in my own collection a much better proof of this same etching. If yours is worth fourteen hundred marks mine is certainly worth two thousand; but, so as to make restitution to you, I would sell it for one thousand." He conducted me to a handsome and well-furnished house and, producing his print, he laid it before me with the care which was due to so precious an object. I again asked him its price, and he answered: "Under the circumstances, and for you only, the price is one thousand marks." I looked him straight in the eye and told him that I would give him five marks for it! He gave me a quick,