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Cornugaya Directory 01
Page 07
I have never seen Mendelssohn, but there is a fresco of him on the
terrace, or open-air dining-room, of an inn at Chiavenna. He is not
called Mendelssohn, but I knew him by his legs. He is in the
costume of a dandy of some five-and-forty years ago, is smoking a
cigar, and appears to be making an offer of marriage to his cook.
Beethoven both my friend Mr. H. Festing Jones and I have had the
good fortune to meet; he is an engineer now, and does not know one
note from another; he has quite lost his deafness, is married, and
is, of course, a little squat man with the same refractory hair that
he always had. It was very interesting to watch him, and Jones
remarked that before the end of dinner he had become positively
posthumous. One morning I was told the Beethovens were going away,
and before long I met their two heavy boxes being carried down the
stairs. The boxes were so squab and like their owners, that I half
thought for a moment that they were inside, and should hardly have
been surprised to see them spring up like a couple of Jacks-in-the-
box. "Sono indentro?" said I, with a frown of wonder, pointing to
the boxes. The porters knew what I meant, and laughed. But there
is no end to the list of people whom I have been able to recognise,
and before I had got through it myself, I found I had walked some
distance, and had involuntarily paused in front of a second-hand
bookstall.
Dr. Salomon Mueller, an accomplished Dutch naturalist, who lived for
many years in the Eastern Archipelago, and to the result of whose
personal experience I shall frequently have occasion to refer, states
that the Gibbons are true mountaineers, loving the slopes and edges of
the hills, though they rarely ascend beyond the limit of the
fig-trees. All day long they haunt the tops of the tall trees, and
though toward evening, they descend in small troops to the open
ground, no sooner do they spy a man than they dart up the hillsides
and disappear in the darker valleys.
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