 CHAPTER XIV It must have been after the Sing Sing episode that Gussie came to us in New York for Sundays and holidays, from scarce further off than round the corner, his foreign institution flourishing I seem to remember, in West 10th Street or wherever, and yet as floated by exotic airs and with the sense of the spice islands hanging about him. He was being educated largely with Cubans and Mexicans, in those New York days more than half the little flock of the foreign institutions in general, over whom his easy triumphs, while he wagged his little red head for them, were abundantly credible, reinforced as my special sense of them was, moreover, by the similar situation of his sister, older than he but also steeped in the exotic medium, and also sometimes bringing us queer echoes of the tongues. I remember being deputed by my mother to go and converse with her on some question of her coming to us, at the establishment of Madame Reichart, pronounced à la Française, Richard, where I felt that I had crossed, for the hour, the very threshold of Europe, it being impressed on me by my cousin, who was tall and handsome and happy, with a laugh of more beautiful sound than any laugh we were to know again, that French only was speakable on the premises. I sniffed it up aromatically, the superior language, in passage and parlor. It took the form of some strong savoury soup, an educational potage richard that must excellently have formed the taste. That was again, I felt as I came away, a part of the rich experience of being thrown in tender juvenile form upon the world. This genial girl, like her brother, was in the grand situation of having no home and of carrying on life, such a splendid kind of life, by successive visits to relations. Though neither she nor Gussie quite achieved the range of their elder brother, Bob, of that ilk, a handsome young man, a just blurred, attractive, elusive presence, who hovered a bit beyond our real reach, and apparently displayed the undomesticated character at its highest. He seemed exposed for his pleasure, if pleasure it was, and my wonder, to every assault of experience. His very name took on from these imputations a browner glow. And it was all in the right key that, a few years later, he should, after showing some talent for sculpture, have gone the hapless way of most of the Albany youth, have become a theme for sad, vague head shakes, kind and very pitying in his case, and died prematurely and pointlessly, or in other words, by my conception, picturesquely. The head shakes were heavier and the size sharper for another slim shade, one of the younger and I believe quite the most hapless of those I have called the outstanding ones. He too several years older than we again, a tormenting hoverer and vanisher. He too charmingly sistered, though sistered only, and succumbing to monstrous early trouble after having shown some talent for music. The ghostliness of these aesthetic manifestations, as I allude to them, is the thinnest conceivable chip of stray marble, the faintest far off twang of old chords. I ask myself, for the odd obscurity of it, under what inspiration music and sculpture may have tinkled and glimmered to the Albany ear and eye, as we at least knew those organs. And with what queer and weak delusions our unfortunates may have played, quite ineffably quaint and fallow this proposition of that sort of resource for the battle of life as it then and there opened. And above all, beautifully suggestive of our sudden collective disconnectedness, ours as the whole kinships, from the American resource of those days, Albanian or other, that precious light was the light of business only, and we, by a common instinct artlessly joining hands, went forth into the wilderness without so much as a twinkling taper. Our consensus on all this ground was amazing. It broke no exception. The word had been passed, all round, that we didn't, that we couldn't and shouldn't understand these things, questions of arithmetic and of fond calculation, questions of the counting-house and the market, and we appear to have held to our agreement as loyally and to have accepted our doom as serenely as if our faith had been mutually pledged. The rupture with my grandfather's tradition and attitude was complete. We were never, in a single case, I think, for two generations, guilty of a stroke of business. The most that could be said of us was that, though about equally wanting, all round, in any faculty of acquisition, we happened to pay for the amiable weakness less in some connections than in others. The point was that we moved so oddly and consistently, as it was our only form of consistency, over our limited pasture, never straying to nibble in the strange or the steep places. What was the matter with us under this spell, and what the moral might have been for our case, are issues of small moment after all, in face of the fact of our mainly so brief duration? It was given to but few of us to be taught by the event, to be made to wonder with the last intensity what had been the matter. This it would be interesting to worry out, might I take the time, for the story wouldn't be told, I conceive, by any mere, rueful glance at other evidities, the preference for ease, the play of the passions, the appetite for pleasure. These things have often accompanied the business imagination, just as the love of life and the love of other persons, and many of the things of the world, just as quickness of soul and sense, have again and again not excluded it. However it comes back, as I have already hinted, to the manner in which the things of the world could but present themselves. There were not enough of these, and they were not fine and fair enough, to engage happily so much unapplied, so much loose and crude attention. We hadn't doubtless at all a complete play of intelligence, if I may so far not discriminate as to say they hadn't, or our lack of the instinct of the market, needn't have been so much worth speaking of. Other curiosities, other sympathies, might have redressed the balance. I make out our young cousin J.J., as dimly aware of this, while composing the light melodies that polluted to his extinction, and which that catastrophe so tried to admonish us to think of as promising. But his image is more present to me still as the great enticement, during the few previous years, to our constant dream of educational relief, of some finer kind of social issue, through Europe. It was to Europe J.J. had been committed. He was over there forging the small apologetic sums that were so little to avail him. But it was quite enough for us that he had pointed the way to the Pancian C. Lig at Vive, which shone at us from afar as our own more particular solution. It was true that Pancian C. Lig figured mainly as the solution in cases of recognized wildness. There long flourished among New York parents whose view of such resources had the proper range of faith in it for that complaint. And it was as an act of faith that, failing other remedies, our young, wifeless uncle, conscious himself of no gift for control or for edification, had placed there his difficult son. He returned with delight from this judicious course, and there was an hour when we invoked to intensity a similar one in our own interest, and when the air of home did little but reflect from afar the glitter of blue Swiss lakes, the tinkle of cattlebells and alpine pastures, the rich Bonomi that M. C. Lig, dispensing an education all of milk and honey and edelweiss and rancest vache, combined with his celebrated firmness for tough subjects. Poor J.J. came back, I fear, much the same subject that he went. But he had verily performed his scant office on earth, that of having brought our then prospect, our apparent possibility, a trifle nearer. He seemed to have been wild even beyond M. C. Lig's measure, which was highly disappointing, but if we might on the other hand be open to the reproach of falling too short of it, there were establishments adapted to every phase of the American predicament, so that our general direction could but gain in vividness. I think with compassion altogether of the comparative obscurity to which our eventual success in gathering the fruits, few and scant though they might be, thus relegates those to whom it was given but to toy so briefly with the flowers. They make collectively their tragic trio. J.J., the elder, most loved, most beautiful, most sacrificed of the Albany uncles. J.J., the younger, they were young together, they were luckless together, and the combination was as strange as the disaster was sweeping. And the daughter and sister, amplest of the natural, easiest of the idle, who lived dawn to dress their memory with every thread and patch of her own perfect temper, and then confirm the tradition, after all, by too early and woeful an end. If it comes over me under the brush of multiplied memories that we might well have invoked the educational relief I just spoke of, I should doubtless as promptly add that my own case must have been intrinsically of the poorest, and indeed make the point once and for all that I should be taken as having seen and felt much of the whole queerness through the medium of rare inaptitudes. I can only have been inapt, I make out, to have retained so positively joyless a sense of it all, to be aware of most of it now but as dim confusion, as bewildered anxiety. There was interest always, certainly, but it strikes me today as interest in everything that wasn't supposedly or prescriptively of the question at all, and in nothing that was so respectably involved and accredited. Without some sharpness of interest I shouldn't now have the memories, but these stick to me somehow with none of the hard glue of recovered spirits. Recovered vivacities, assurances, successes. I can't have had through it all, I think, a throb of assurance or success. Without which at the same time absurdly and indescribably I lived and wriggled, floundered and failed, lost the glue of everything but a general lucid consciousness, lucid that is for my tender years, which I clutched with a sense of its value. What happened all the while, I conceive, was that I imagined things, and as if quite on system, wholly other than as they were, and so carried on in the midst of the actual ones, an existence that somehow floated and saved me, even while cutting me off from any degree of direct performance, in fact from any degree of direct participation at all. There, presumably, was the interest, in the intensity and plausibility and variety of the irrelevance, an irrelevance which, for instance, made all pastors and masters, and especially all fellow occupants of benches and desks, all elbowing and kicking presences within touch or view, so many monsters and horrors, so many wonders and splendors and mysteries, but never, so far as I can recollect, realities of relation, dispensers either of knowledge or of fate, playmates, intimates, mere, co-evils and co-equals. They were something better, better above all than the co-equal or co-evil. They were so thoroughly figures and characters, divinities or demons, and endowed in this light with the vividness that the mere reality of relation, a commoner directness of contact, would have made, I surmise, comparatively poor. This superior shade of interest was not, nonetheless, so beguiling that I recall without unmitigated horror, or something like it, a winter past with my brother at the antistitutions verniès, our sorry subjection to which argues to my present sense an unmitigated surrounding aridity. To a French school must have been earnestly imputed the virtue of keeping us in patience till easier days should come. Simply touching our parent's view of that New York fetish of our young time, an acquisition of the languages, an acquisition reinforcing those opportunities which we enjoyed at home, as far as they mustered, and at which I have briefly glanced. Charming and amusing to me indeed, certain faint echoes wavering images of this superstition as it played about our path. Ladies and gentlemen, dimly foreign, mere broken syllables of whose names come back to me, attending there to converse in tongues, and then giving way to others through failures of persistence, whether in pupils or perceptors I know not. Their hovers even count Adam Gorowski, Polish, patriotic, exiled, temporarily famous, with the vision of his being invoked for facility, and then relinquished for difficulty. Though I scarce guess on which of his battlegrounds. He was so polyglot that he even had a rich command of New Yorkese. End of chapter 14. Chapter 15 of A Small Boy and Others This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. It is to the institution vernieuse that my earliest recovery of the sense of being in any degree educated with W.J. attaches itself, an establishment which occupied during the early fifties a site in the very middle of Broadway, of the lower, the real Broadway, where it could throb with the very pulse of the traffic in which we all innocently rejoiced. Believing it, I surmise, the liveliest conceivable, a fact that is by itself in the light of the present, an odd Rococo note. The lower Broadway, I allude to the whole fourth street and Bond Street, where now is the Bond Street of that antiquity, was then a seat of education, since we had not done with it, as I shall presently show, even when we had done with the institution, a prompt disillusionment. And I brood thus over a period which strikes me as long, and during which my personal hours of diligence were somehow more than anything else, hours of the pavement and the shopfront, or of such contemplative exercise as the very considerable distance for small legs between those regions, and the westward fourteenth street might comprise. Pedestrian gaping having been in childhood, as I have noted, prevailingly my line, fate appeared to have kindly provided for it on no small scale, to the extent even that it must have been really my soul and single form of athletics. Big heated competition and agitation in the then enclosed Union Square would seem to point a little among us all to nobler types of motion, but of any basis for recreation, anything in the nature of a playground or a breathing space, the institution itself was serenely innocent. This I take again for a note extraordinarily medieval. It occupied the first and second floors, if I rightly remember, of a wide front that, overhanging the endless thoroughfare, looked out on the bouncing, clattering stages and painfully dragged carts and the promiscuous human shuffle, the violence of repercussions from the New York pavement of those years to be further taken into account. And I win it back from every side as, in spite of these aspects of garish publicity, a dark and dreadful and with all quite absurd seen, I see places of that general time, even places of confinement, in a dusty golden light that special memories of small misery scarce in the least bedim, and this holds true of our next and quite neighbouring refuge. The establishment of Monsieur Veniez alone darkles and shrinks to me. Assordedly black interior is my main image for it, attenuated only by its having very soon afterwards, as a suffered ordeal altogether lapsed and intermitted. Faintly in the gloom I distinguish Monsieur Veniez himself, quite old, very old indeed as I supposed him, and highly irritated and markedly bristling, though of nothing in particular that happened to me at his or at anyone else's hands, have I the scantest remembrance. What really most happened, no doubt, was that my brother and I should both come away, with a mind prepared for a perfect assimilation of Alphonse Daudet's Chronicle of Jack, years and years later on. To make the acquaintance in that work of the Petit Payet show, among whom Jack learnt the first lessons of life, was to see the Estudion Veniez at once revive, swarming as it did with small homesick Cubans and Mexicans. The complete failure of blondness that marks the memory is doubtless the cumulative effect of so many of the New York Petit Payet show preponderantly brown and black in conducting to a greasy gloom. Into this gloom I fear I should see all things recede together, but for a certain salient note the fact that the whole staff appears to have been constantly in a rage, from which naturally resulted the accent of shrillness, the only accent we could pick up, though we were supposed to be learning, for the extreme importance of it, quantities of French, and the sound of high vociferation. I remember infuriated ushers of foreign speech and flushed complexion, the tearing across of hapless exercises and dictes, and the hurtle through the air of dodged volumes, only never, despite this, the extremity of smiting. There can have been, at the institution, no blows instructionally dealt, not even from our hours of ease do any such echoes come back to me. Little Cubans and Mexicans, I make out, were not to be vulgarly whacked, indefinance presumably to some latent relic or imputed survival of Castilian pride, which would impose with all considerations of quite practical prudence. Food for reflection and comparison might well have been so suggested. Interesting at least, the element of contrast between such opposed conceptions of tone, as the passion without wax, or with wax only of inanimate objects, ruling the scene I have described, and the wax without passion, the grim, impersonal, strictly penal applications of the rod, which then generally represented what was still involved in our English tradition. It was the two theories of sensibility, of personal dignity, that so diverged, but with such other divergences now on top of those, that the old comparison falls away. We today go unwacked altogether, though from a pride other than Castilian. It is very difficult to say at least, what ideal has thus triumphed. In the vernier's air at any rate, I seem myself to have sat unscathed and unterrified, not alarmed even by so much as a call to the blackboard, only protected by my insignificance, which yet covered such a sense of our dusty squalor. Queer for us the whole affair assuredly, but how much queer for the poor petite pey showed who had come so far for their privilege. We had come comparatively, but from round the corner, and that left the state of education, and the range of selection, all about as quaint enough. What could these things then have been in the various native climes of the petite pey showed? It was by some strong wave of reaction, clearly that we were floated next into the quieter haven of Mr. Richard Pulling Jenks, where cleaner waters, as I feel their coolness still, must have filled a neater though it was true, slightly more contractive, trough. Yet the range of selection had been even on this higher plain, none too strikingly exemplified. Our jumping had scant compass. We still grubbed with a good conscience in Broadway and sidled about 4th Street. But I think of the higher education, as having there, from various causes, nonetheless begun to glimmer for us. A diffused brightness, a kind of high cross-light of conflicting windows, rests for me at all events on the little realm of Mr. Pulling Jenks, and bays it as with positively sweet limitations. It must it have been, I feel, with our couple of middling rooms, front and back, our close packing, from the aggregation of which elements there distills itself without my being able to account for it, a certain perversity of romance. I speak indeed here for myself in particular, and keen for romance must I have been in such conditions, I admit. Since the sense of it had crept into a recreational desert, even as utter as that of the institution verniers. Up out of Broadway we still scrambled. I can smell the steep and cold and dusty wooden staircase, straight into Broadway we dropped. I feel again the generalized glare of liberation, and I scarce know what tenuity of spirit it argues that I should neither have enjoyed nor have been aware of missing, speaking again for myself only, a space wider than the schoolroom floor to react and knock about him. I literally conclude that we must have knocked about in Broadway and in Broadway alone, like perfect little men of the world. We must have been let loose there to stretch our legs and fill our lungs, without prejudice either to our earlier and later freedoms of going and coming. I as strictly infer at the same time that Broadway must have been then as one of the alleys of Eden for any sinister contact or consequence involved for us, a circumstance that didn't in the least interfere too, as I have noted, with its offer of an entrancing interest. The interest verily could have been a calculated thing on the part of our dear parents, as little as on that of Mr. Jenks himself. Therefore let it be recorded as still most odd that we should all have assented to such deficiency of landscape, such exeguity of sport. I take the true inwardness of the matter to have been in our having such short hours, long as they may have appeared at the time, that the day left margin at the worst for private inventions. I think we found landscape for ourselves, and wherever I at least found vision I found such sport as I was capable of, even between the front and back rooms and the conflicting windows, even by the stove which somehow scorched without warming, and yet round which Mr. Coe and Mr. Dolmage, the drawing master and the writing master, arriving of a winter's day, used notedly and in the case of Mr. Coe, lamentedly, to draw out their delays. Is the dusty golden light of retrospect in this connection an effluence from Mr. Dolmage and Mr. Coe, whose administrations come back to me as the soul directly desired or invoked ones I was to know in my years, such as they were of pupillage? I see them in any case as old world images, figures of an antique stamp, products, mustn't they have been, of an order in which some social relativity or matter of course adjustment, some transmitted form and pressure, were still at work. Mr. Dolmage, inordinately lean, clean shaved, was as comparatively uncommon then, and in a swallow-tailed coat and I think a black satin stock was surely perfect in his absolutely functional way, a pure pen holder of a man, melancholy and mild, who taught the most complicated flourishes, great scrolls of them met our view in the form of surging seas and beaked in beady-eyed eagles, the eagle being so calligraphic a bird, while he might just have taught resignation. He was not at all funny. No one out of our immediate family circle, in fact almost no one but W. J. himself, who flowered in every waste, seems to have struck me as funny in those years, but he was to remain with me a picture of somebody in Dickens. One of the fizz, if not the crookshank pictures. Mr. Coe was another affair, bristling with the question of the hard, but somehow too with the revelation of the soft, the deeply attaching, a worthy of immense stature and presence, crowned as with the thick white hair of genius, wearing a great gathered or puckered coat with a vast velvet collar, and resembling, as he comes back to me, the general Winfield Scott, who lived so much in our eyes then. The oddity may well even at that hour have been present to me of its taking so towering a person to produce such small drawing-carts. It was as if some mighty bird had laid its diminutive eggs. Mr. Coe, of a truth, laid his all over the place, and though they were not more than handy size, very small boys could set them up in state on very small desks. They had doubtless a great range of number and effect. They were scattered far abroad and, I surmise, celebrated. They represented crooked cottages, feathery trees, browsing in bristling beasts, and other rural objects. All rendered, as I recall them, in little detached dashes that were like stories told in words of one syllable, or even more perhaps in short gasps of delight. It must have been a stammering art, but I admired its fluency, which swims for me moreover, enricher those slightly vague associations. Mr. Coe practiced on a larger scale in color, in oils, producing wondrous neat little boards that make me to this day think of them and more particularly smell them when I hear of a panel picture. A glamour of greatness attends them as brought home by W.J. from the master's own place of instruction to that old university building which partly formed the east side of Washington Square and figures to memory, or to fond imagination, as throbbing with more offices and functions a denser churrasqueuro than any reared hugeness of today where a character is so lost in quantity. Is there any present structure that plays such a part in proportion to its size? Though even as I ask the question I feel how nothing on earth is proportioned to present sizes. These alone are proportioned, and to mere sky-space and mere amount, amount of steel and stone, which is comparatively uninteresting. Perhaps our needs and our elements were then absurdly, were then provincially few, and that the patches of character in that small grey granite compendium were all we had in general to exhibit. Let me add at any rate that some of them were exhibitional, even to my tender years I mean, since I respond even yet to my privilege of presence at some commencement or commemoration. Such as might be natural doubtless to any university, whereas under a high rich roof, before a chancellor in a gown, and amid serried admirers and impressive applause, there was speaking of the finest sort, and where above all I gathered in as a dazzling example the rare assurance of young Winthrop somebody, or somebody Winthrop, who though still in jackets, held us spellbound by his rendering of Sergeant Buzzfuzz's exposure of Mr. Pickwick. Long was I to marvel at the high sufficiency of young Winthrop somebody or somebody Winthrop, in which romantic impression it is perhaps after all, though with the consecration of one or two of the novels of the once admired Theodore of that name, which so remarkably insists thrown in, the sense of the place is embalmed. I must not forget indeed that I throw in also Mr. Coe, even if, with less assured a hand, by way of a note on those higher flights of power and promise that I at this time began to see definitely determined in my brother. As I catch W. J.'s image, from far back, at its most characteristic, he sits drawing and drawing, always drawing, especially under the lamplight of the fourteenth street back parlor, and not as with applauding patience, which I think would have less affected me, but easily, freely, and, as who should say, infallibly, always at the stage of finishing off, his head dropped from side to side and his tongue rubbing his lower lip. I recover a period during which to see him at all was so to see him. The other flights and faculties removed him from my view. These were a matter of course. He recurred, he passed nearer, but in his moments of ease, and I clearly quite accepted the ease of his disappearances. Didn't he always, when within my view, light them up and justify them by renewed and enlarged vividness, so that my whole sense of him, as formed from assimilations scarce conceivable, made our gaps of contact too natural for me even to be lessons in humility. Humility had nothing to do with it, as little even as envy would have had. I was below humility, just as we were together outside of competition, mutually or conquer. His competitions were with others, in which how wasn't he, how could he not be successful? While mine were with nobody, or nobody's with me, which came to the same thing, as heaven knows I neither braved them nor missed them. That winter, as I recover it, represents him as sufficiently within view to make his position or whereabouts in the upper air definite. I must have taken it for granted before, but could now in a manner measure it, and the freshness of this sense, something serene in my complacency, had to do, I divine, with the effect of our moving with the rest of our company, which was not numerous but practically, but appreciably select, on a higher and fairer plane than ever yet. Predominantly, of course, we owed this benefit to Richard Pulling himself, of whom I recall my brothers saying to me, at a considerably later time, and with an authority that affected me as absolute, that he had been, of all our masters, the most truly genial, in fact the only one to whom the art of exciting an interest, or inspiring a sympathy, could be in any degree imputed. I take this to have meant that he would have adorned a higher sphere, and it may have been, to explain his so soon swimming out of our ken, that into a higher sphere he rapidly moved. I can't account at least for our falling away from him, the very next year and declining again upon baser things, and a lower civilization, but by some probability of his flight, just thereafter affected, to a greater distance, to one of the far upper reaches of the town. Some years must have elapsed, and some distinction have crowned him when, being briefly in New York together, W. J. and I called on him of a Sunday afternoon to find, what I hadn't been at all sure of, that he still quite knew who we were, or handsomely pretended to, handsomely in spite of his markedly confirmed identity of appearance with the punch, husband to Judy, of the funny papers and the street show. Bald, rotund, of a ruddy complexion, with the nose, the chin, the arch-dye, the punch, and the barbiche, to say nothing of the feral nursed in his arms, and with which, in the show, such free play is made. Mr. Jenks yet seems to me to have preserved a dignity as well as projected an image, and in fact have done other things besides. He whacked occasionally. He must have been one of the last of the whackers. But I don't remember it as ugly or dreadful or droll. Don't remember, that is, either directly feeling or reflectively enjoying it. It fails somehow to break the spell of our civilization. My share in which, however, comes back to me as merely contemplative. It is beyond measure odd, doubtless, that my main association with my studies, whether of the infant or the adolescent order, should be with almost anything but the fact of learning. Of learning, I mean, what I was supposed to learn. I could only have been busy at the same time with other pursuits, which must have borne some superficial likeness, at least, to the acquisition of knowledge of a free irresponsible sword. Since I remember few either of the inward pangs or the outward pains of a merely graceless state, I recognize at the same time that it was perhaps a sorry business to be so interested in one didn't know what. Such are, whether at the worst or at the best, some of the aspects of that season as Mr. Jenks' image presides. In the light of which I may perhaps again rather wonder at my imputation to the general picture of so much humanity. Clearly the good man was a civilizer, wax and all, and by some art not now to be detected. He was a complacent classic, which was what my brothers claim for him, I dare say, mostly represented, though that passed over the head of my tenth year. It was a good note for him in this particular that, deploring the facile textbooks of Dr. Anthon of Columbia College, in which there was even more crib than text, and holding fast to the sterner discipline of Andrews and Stoddard, and of that other more conservative commentator, he too doubtless long superseded, whose name I blushed to forget. I think in fine of Richard Pulling's small but sincere academy, as a consistent little protest against its big and easy and quite out-distancing rival, the Columbia College School, apparently in those days quite the favorite of fortune. CHAPTER XVI I must in some degree have felt at a charm there that we were not, under his rule, inordinately prepared for business, but were on the contrary to remember that the taste of Cornelius Nepos in the air, even rather stale though it may have been, had lacked the black bitterness marking our next-door deal, and that I conceived to have proceeded from some rank predominance of the theory and practice of bookkeeping. It had consorted with this, that we found ourselves, by I know not what in consequence, a pair of the assets of a firm, Messer's Forest and Quackenbos, who carried on business at the northwest corner of 14th Street and 6th Avenue, having for the winter of 1854-5 taken our education in hand. As their establishment had the style, so I was conscious at the time of its having the general stamp and sense of a shop, a shop of longstanding of numerous clients, of lively bustle and traffic. The structure itself was, to my recent recognition, still there and more than ever a shop, with improvements and extensions, but dealing in other wares than those anciently and, as I suppose then, quite freshly pervade. So far at least as freshness was imputable to the senior member of the firm, who had come down to our generation from a legendary past, and with a striking resemblance of head and general air to Benjamin Franklin. Mr. Forest, under whose more particular attention I languished, had lasted on from a plainer age and, having formed, by the legend, in their youth, the taste of two or three of our New York uncles, though for what it could have been goodness only knew, was still of a trump to whack in the fine old way at their nephews and sons. I see him aloft, benevolent and hard, mildly massive, in a black dress coat and trousers, and a white neck cloth that should have figured, if it didn't, a frill, and on the highest rostrum of our experience, whence he comes back to me as the driest of all our founts of knowledge, though quite again as a link with far-off manners and forms, and as the most historic figure we had ever had to do with. W.J., as I distinguished, had in truth scarcely to do with him. W.J. lost again on upper floors, in higher classes, in real pursuits, and connecting me in an indirect and almost deprecated manner, with a strange, curly, glossy, and anointed and bearded Mr. Quackenbos, the junior partner, who conducted the classical department, and never whacked, only sent down his subjects with every confidence to his friend. I make out with clearness that Mr. Forrest was awful and arid, and yet that somehow by the same stroke we didn't under his sway go in terror, only went exceedingly in want, even if in want indeed of I scarce for myself know what, since it might well have been enough for me in so resounding an air to escape with nothing worse than a failure of thrill. If I didn't feel that interest I must clearly not have inspired it, and I marvel afresh under these memories at the few points at which I appear to have touched constituted reality. There, however, is a different connection altogether, and I read back into the one I have been noting much of the chill, or at least the indifference, of a foreseen and foredoomed detachment. It was during that winter that I began to live by anticipation in another world, and to feel our uneasy connection with New York loosen beyond recovery. I remember for how many months, when the rupture took place, we had been to my particular consciousness virtually in motion, though I regained at the same time the impression of more experience on the spot that had marked our small previous history. This, however, a branch of the matter that I must for the moment brush aside, for it would have been, meanwhile, odd enough to hold us in arrest a moment. That quality of our situation that could suffer such elements as those I have glanced at to take so considerably the place of education as more usually and conventionally understood, and by that understanding more earnestly mapped out. A deficiency in the whole thing that I fail at all consistently to deplore, however, as I am with the rare fashion after which, in any small victim of life, the inward perversity may work. It works by converting to its uses, things vain and unintended, to the great discomposure of their prepared opposites, which it by the same stroke so often reduces to not, with the result indeed that one may most of all see it, so at least have I quite exclusively seen it, the little life out for its chance, as proceeding by the inveterate process of conversion. As I reconsider both my own and my brother's early start, even his, too, made under stronger propulsions, it is quite for me as if the authors of our being and guardians of our youth had virtually said to us, but one thing directed our course but by one word, though constantly repeated, convert, convert, convert, with which I have not even the sense of any needed appeal in us for further apprehension of the particular precious metal our chemistry was to have in view. I taste again in that pure air no ghost of a hint, for instance, that the precious metal was the refined gold of success, a reward of effort for which I remember to have heard at home no good word nor any sort of word ever faintly breathed. It was a case of the presumption that we should hear words enough abundantly elsewhere, so that any dignity the idea might claim was in the first place not worth insisting on, and in the second might well be overstated. We were to convert and convert success in the sense that was in the general air, or no success, and simply everything that should happen to us, every contact, every impression, and every experience we should know were to form our soluble stuff, with only ourselves to thank should we remain unaware by the time our perceptions were decently developed of the substance finally projected and most desirable. That substance might be just consummately virtue as a social grace and value, and as a matter furthermore, on which pretexts for ambiguity of view and of measure were as little as possible called upon to flourish. This last luxury therefore quite failed us, and we understood no wit the less what was suggested and expected because of the highly liberal way in which the pill, if I may call it so, was gilded. It had been made up, to emphasise my image, in so bright an air of humanity and gaiety, of charity and humour. What I speak of is the medium itself, of course, that we were most immediately steeped in. I am glancing now at no particular turn of our young attitude in it, and I can scarce sufficiently express how little it could have conduced to the formation of prigs. For father's prime horror was of them. He only cared for virtue that was more or less ashamed of itself, and nothing could have been of a happier whimsicality than the mixture in him and in all his walk and conversation of the strongest instinct for the human and the liveliest reaction from the literal. The literal played in our education as small a part as it perhaps ever played in any, and we wholesomely breathed inconsistency and ate and drank contradictions. The presence of paradox was so bright among us, though fluttering ever with as light a wing and as short a flight as need have been, that we fairly grew used to allow from an early time for the so many and odd declarations we heard launched to the extent of happily discounting them. The moral of all of which was that we need never fear not to be good enough if we were only social enough, a splendid meaning indeed being attached to the latter term. Thus we had ever the amusement, since I can really call it nothing less, of hearing morality, or moralism as it was more invidiously worded, made hay of in the very interest of character and conduct. These things suffering much it seemed by their association with the conscience, that is the conscious conscience, the very home of the literal, the haunt of so many pedantries. Studies on all this ground were anathema, and if our dear parent had at all minded his not being consistent and had entertained about us generally less passionate and optimism, not an easy but an arduous state in him moreover, he might have found it difficult to apply to the promotion of our studies, so free a suspicion of the inhumanity of method. It certainly never quite raged among us, but it was our fortune nevertheless that everything had its turn, and that such indifferences were no more pedantic than certain rigors might perhaps have been, of all of which odd notes of our situation there would and possibly will be more to say. My present aim is really but to testify to what most comes up for me today, in the queer educative air I have been trying to breathe again. The definite reflection is that if we had not had in us to some degree the root of the matter, no method, however confessively or aggressively pedantic, would much have availed for us, and that since we apparently did have it, deep down and inert in our small patches of virgin soil, the fashion after which it struggled forth was an experience as intense as any other and a record of as great a dignity. It may be asked of me, I recognize, of the root of what matter I so complacently speak, and if I say why of the matter of our having with considerable intensity proved educable, or if you like better, teachable, that is accessible to experience. It may again be retorted. That won't do for a decent amount of a young consciousness, for think of all the things that the failure of method of which you make so light didn't put into yours. Think of the splendid economy of a real, or at least of a planned and attempted education, a regular course of instruction, and then think of the waste involved in the so inferior substitute of which the pair of you were evidently victims. An admonition this on which I brood less, however, than on the still other sense, rising from the whole retrospect of my now feeling sure of my having mastered the particular history of just that waste, to the point of its actually affecting me as blooming with interest, to the point even of its making me ask myself how in the world if the question is of the injection of more things into the consciousness, as would seem the case, mine could have done with more. Thanks to its small trick, perhaps vicious I admit, of having felt itself from an early time almost uncomfortably stuffed. I see my critic, by whom I mean my representative of method at any price, take in his plea only to crush it with his confidence, that without the signal effects of method one must have had by an inexorable law to resort to shifts and ingenuities, and can therefore only have been an artful dodger more or less successfully dodging. I take full account of the respectability of the prejudice against one or two of the uses to which the intelligence may at a pinch be put, the criminal use in particular of falsifying its history, of forging its records even, and of appearing greater than the traceable grounds warrant. One can but fall back nonetheless on the particular untraceability of grounds when it comes to that, cases abound so in which, with the grounds all there, the intelligence itself is not to be identified. I contend for nothing moreover, but the lively interest of the view, and above all of the measure, of almost any mental history after the fact. Of less interest, comparatively, is that sight of the mind before, before the demonstration of the fact, that is, and while still muffled in theories and presumptions, purple and fine linen, and as such highly becoming, though these be, of what shall prove best for it. Which doubtless two numerous remarks have been determined by my sense of the tenuity of some of my clues. I had begun to count out our wavering steps from so very far back, and with a lively disposition, I confess not to miss even the vaguest of them. I can scarce indeed overstate the vagueness that quite had to attend a greater number in presence of the fact, that our Father, caring for our spiritual decency unspeakably, more than for anything else, anything at all that might be or might become ours, would have seemed to regard this cultivation of it as profession and career enough for us, had he but betrayed more interest in our mastery of any art or craft. It was not certainly that the profession of virtue would have been anything less than abhorrent to him, but that single though the circumstance, there were times when he might have struck us as having, after all, more patience with it than with this, that, or the other, more technical thrifty scheme. Of the beauty of his dissimulated anxiety and tenderness on these and various other such like heads, however, other examples will arise, for I see him now as fairly afraid to recognize certain anxieties, fairly declining to dabble in the harshness of practical precautions or impositions. The effect of his attitude, so little thought out as shrewd or as vulgarly providential, but in spite of this so socially and affectionately grounded, could only be to make life interesting to us at the worst, in default of making it extraordinarily paying. He had a theory that it would somehow or other always be paying enough, and this much less by any poor conception of our wants, for he delighted in our wants, and so sympathetically and sketchily and summarily wanted for us, than by a happy and friendly, though slightly nebulous conception of our resources. Delighting ever in the truth, while generously contemptuous of the facts, so far as we might make the difference, the facts having a way of being many, and the truth remaining but one, he held that there would always be enough, since the truth, the true truth, was never ugly and dreadful, and we didn't and wouldn't depart from it by any cruelty or stupidity, for he wouldn't have had us stupid, and might therefore depend on it for due abundance, even of meat and drink and raiment, even of wisdom and wit and honour. It is too much to say that our preponderantly humanised and socialised adolescence was to make us look out for these things with a subtle indirectness, but I return to my proposition that there may still be a charm in seeing such hazards at work through a given, even if not in a systematised, case. My cases are of course given, so that economy of observation after the fact, as I have called it, becomes inspiring, not less than the amusement or whatever it may be, of the question of what might happen, of what in point of fact did happen, to several very towny and domesticated little persons, who were confirmed in their towniness, and fairly enriched in their sensibility, instead of being chucked into a scramble or exposed on breezy uplands under the she-wolf of competition and discipline. Perhaps any success that attended the experiment, which was really, as I have hinted, no plotted thing at all, but only an accident of accidents, proceeded just from the fact that the small accidents, a defeated Romulus, a prematurely sacrificed Remus, had in their very sensibility an asset, as we have come to say, a principle of life and even of fun. Perhaps on the other hand, the success would have been greater, with less of that particular complication or facilitation, and more of some other which I shall be at a loss to identify. What I find in my path happens to be the fact of the sensibility, and from the light it sheds the curious, also the common things, that did from occasion to occasion into it seem each to borrow a separate and vivifying glow. As at the institution verniès, and at Mr. Pulling-Jenxes, however this might be, so at forests, or in other words, at the more numerous establishment of Messers Forest and Quackenbos, where we spent the winter of 1854. Reality in the form of multitudinous mates was to have swarmed about me increasingly. At forests the prolonged roll call in the morning, as I sit in the vast bright crowded smelly, smoky room, in which rusty black stove shafts were the nearest hint of architecture, bristles with names, hose and havamairs, stokes'es, felps'es, coal gates, and others of a subsequently great New York salience. It was sociable and gay, it was sortedly spectacular. One was, then, by an inch or two, a bigger boy, though with crushing superiorities in that line all round. And when I wonder why the scene was sterile, which was what I took it for at the worst, the reason glooms out again in the dreadful blight of arithmetic, which affected me at the time as filling all the air. The quantity imposed may not, in fact, have been positively gross, yet it is what I most definitely remember. Not, I mean, that I have retained the dimmest notion of the science, but only of the dire image of our being in one way or another always supposedly addressed to it. I recall strange neighbors and desk fellows, who, not otherwise too objectionable, were uncanny and monstrous through their possession, cultivation, imitation, of ledgers, daybooks, double entry, tall pages of figures, interspaces streaked with oblique ruled lines that weirdly balanced whatever that might mean, and other like horrors. Nothing in truth is more distinct to me than the time to which they were, without exception, at their ease on such ground, unless it be my general dazzled humiliated sense through those years of the common, the baffling mystery all round me of a hundred handy arts and devices. Everyone did things and had things. Everyone knew how, even when it was a question of the small animals, the dormice and grasshoppers, or the hordes of food and stationery that they kept in their desks, just as they kept in their heads such secrets for how to do sums, those secrets that I must even then have foreseen I should even so late in life as this have failed to discover. I may have known things, have by that time learned a few myself, but I didn't know that. But I did know, whereas those who surrounded me were all agog to my vision with the benefit of their knowledge. I see them in this light across the years, fairly grin and grimace with it, and the presumable vulgarity of some of them, certain scattered shades of baseness still discernible, comes to me as but one of the appearances of an abounding play of genius. Who was it I ever thought stupid, even when knowing or at least feeling that sundry expressions of life or force which I yet had no name for, represented somehow art without grace or what after a fashion came to the same thing, presence without type, all of which I should add didn't in the least prevent my moving on the plane of the remarkable. So that if as I have noted the general blank of consciousness in the conditions of that winter rather tended to spread, this could perhaps have had but for its reason that I was fairly gorged with wonders. They were too much of the same kind, the result that is of everyone seeming to know everything, to the effect a little that everything suffered by it. There was a boy called Simpson, my juxtaposition to whom I recall as uninterruptedly close, and whose origin can only have been, I think, quite immediately Irish, and Simpson, I feel sure, was a friendly and helpful character. Yet even he reeked, to my sense, with strange accomplishment. No single show of which but was accompanied in him by a smart protrusion of the lower lip, a crude complacency of power that almost crushed me to sadness. It is as if I had passed in that sadness most of those ostensibly animated months, and effect, however doubtless in some degree proceeding for later appreciation from the more intelligible nearness of the time. It had brought me to the end of my twelfth year, which helps not a little to turn it to prose. How I gave to that state in any case such an air of occupation as to beguile not only myself, but my instructors, which I infer I did from there so intensely letting me alone, I am quite at a loss to say. I have in truth mainly the remembrance of being consistently either ignored or exquisitely considered. I know not which to call it, even if without the belief which would explain it, that I passed for generally wanting any more than for naturally odious. It was strange at all events. It could only have been to be so stupid without being more brutish and so perceptive without being more keen. Here were a case and a problem to which no honest master with other and better cases could have felt justified in giving time. He would have had at least to be morbidly curious. And I recall from that sphere of rule no instance whatever of the least refinement of inquiry. I should even probably have missed one of those more fluttering shades of attention had I missed attention at all. But I think I was never really aware of how little I got or how much I did without. I read back into the whole connection indeed the chill or at least the indifference of a foreseen and foredoomed detachment. I have noted how at this desperate juncture the mild forces making for our conscious relief, pushing the door to Europe definitely open, began at last to be effective. Nothing seemed to matter at all, but that I should become personally and incredibly acquainted with Piccadilly and Richmond Park and Ham Common. I regained at the same time the impression of more experience on the spot than had marked our small previous history. Pitiful as it looks to these ampler days, the mere little fact that a small court for recreation was attached to our academy added something of a grace to life. We descended in relays for intermission into a paved and walled yard of the scantist size, the only provision for any such privilege, not counting the street itself, of which at the worst of other conditions we must have had free range, that I recover from those years. The ground is built over now, but I could still figure on a recent occasion our small breathing space, together with my then abject little sense that it richly sufficed, or rather positively, that nothing could have been more romantic. For within our limit we freely conversed, and that nothing did I assist with more interest than at free conversation. Certain boys hover before me, the biggest, the fairest, the most worthy of freedom, dating the scene, and scattering upon fifty subjects the most surprising lights. One of these heroes, whose stature and complexion are still there for me to admire, did tricks of ledger domain, with the scant apparatus of a handkerchief, a key, a pocket knife, as to some one of which it is as fresh as yesterday that I ingenuously invited him to show me how to do it. And then, on his treating me with scorn, renewed without dignity my fond solicitation, fresher even then yesterday, fabelessly fresh for me at this hour, is the cutting remark thereupon of another boy, who certainly wasn't Simpson, and whose identity is lost for me in his mere inspired authority. Oh, oh, oh, I should think you'd be too proud. I had neither been too proud, nor so much as conceived that one might be. But I remember well how it flashed on me with this that I had failed thereby of a high luxury or privilege, which the whole future, however, might help me to make up for. To what extent it has helped is another matter, but so fine was the force of the suggestion that I think I have never in all the years made certain returns upon my spirit without again feeling the pang from the cool little voice of the fourteenth street yard. Such was the moral exercise it at least allowed us room for. It also allowed us room to be just for an inordinate consumption of hot waffles retailed by a benevolent black ante who presided with her husband's aid, as I remember, at a portable stove set up in a passage or recess opening from the court, to which we flocked and pushed in a merciless squeeze with all our coppers, and the products of which the oblong, ferocious compound, faintly yet richly brown, stamped and smoking, not crisp nor brittle, but softly absorbent of the syrup dabbed upon it for a finish, revealed to me I for a long time, even for a very long time, supposed, the highest pleasure of sense. We stamped about, we freely conversed, we ate sticky waffles by the hundred. I recall no worse acts of violence, unless I count as such our intermissional rushes to Pimpsons of the Avenue, a few doors off, in the particular interest of a confection that ran the waffle close, as the phrase is, for popularity, while even surpassing it for stickiness. Pimpsons was higher up in the row in which forests had its front. Other and dearer names have dropped from me, but Pimpsons adheres with all the force of the strong saccharine principle. This principle, at its highest, we conceived, was embodied in small amber-colored mounds of chopped coconut, or whatever other substance, if a finer there be, profusely, lusciously endued and distributed on small tin trays in the manner of haycocks in a field. We acquired, we appropriated, we'd transported, we enjoyed them. They fairly formed, perhaps after all, our highest enjoyment, but with consequences to our pockets, and I speak of those other than financial, with an intimacy, a reciprocity of contact at any or at every personal point, that I lose myself in the thought of. CHAPTER 17 I LOSE MYSELF OF A TRUTH under the whole pressure of this spring of memory, proceeding from recent revisitings and recognitions. The action of the fact that time until lately had spared hereabouts, and may still be sparing, in the most exceptional way, by an anomaly or a mercy of the rarest in New York, a whole cluster of landmarks, leaving me to spot and verify, right and left, the smallest preserved particulars. These things, at the pressure, flush together again, interweave their pattern and quite thrusted at me, the absurd little fusion of images, for a history or a picture of the time, the background of which I see after all so much less as the harsh Sixth Avenue corner than as the many other matters. Those scant shades claimed us but briefly and superficially, and it comes back to me that oddly enough, in the light of autumn afternoons, our associates, the most animated or at any rate the best put-in little figures of our landscape, were not our comparatively obscure schoolmates, who seemed mostly to have swam out of our can between any day and its morrow. Our other companions, those we practically knew at home, ignored our school, having better or worse of their own, but peopled somehow for us the social scene, which, figuring there for me in documentary vividness, bristles with Van Burans, Van Winkles, DePasters, Costars, Centres, Norcoms, Robinson's, these last composing round a stone-throwing Eugene, Wards, Hunts, and Tutiquanti, to whose ranks I must add our invariable Albert before mentioned, and to swam from up and down and east and west, appearing to me surely to have formed a rich and various society. No salon, it is true, was mainly the street, loose and wide and crude in those days at best, though with a rapid increase of redeeming features, to the extent to which the spread of my casious brown stone could redeem. As exhibited especially in the ample face of the scotch-presbyterian church, promptly rising just opposite our own peculiar row, in which it now marks for me somewhat grimly a span of life, to have seen laboriously rear itself, continuously flourish and utterly disappear. While in construction it was only less interesting than the dancing academy of Mr. Edward Ferrero, slightly west of it and forming with it in their embryonic stage, a large and delightfully dangerous adjunct to our playground, though with the distinction of coming much to surpass it for interest in the final phase. While we clambered about on ladders and toyed with the peril of unflored abysses, while we trespassed and pried and pervaded, snatching a scant impression from sorry material enough, clearly the sacred edifice enjoyed a credit beyond that of the profane. But when both were finished and opened, we flocked to the sound of the fiddle more freely, it need scarce be said than to that of the psalm. Freely indeed in our particular case, scarce expresses the latter relation, since our young liberty in respect to church-going was absolute, and we might range at will, through the great city, from one place of worship and one form of faith to another, or might on occasion ignore them all equally, which was what we mainly did, whereas we rallied without a break to the halls of Ferrero, a view of the staringly and as I supposed dazzlingly frescoed walls, the internal economy, the high amenity, the general aesthetic and social appeal of which still hangs in its wealth before me. Dr. McElroy, lifting tight-closed eyes, strange, long-drawn accents and gaunt, scraggy chin, squirming and swaying and cushion-thumping in his only a shade more chastely adorned temple, is distinct enough too. Just as we enjoyed this bleak intensity the more to my personal vision, through the vague legend, and no legend was too vague for me to cherish, of his being the next pastor in succession to the one under whom our mother, thereto predirected by our good great-grandfather Alexander Robertson, already named, who was nothing if not scotch and presbyterian and authoritative, as his brave old portrait by the elder Jarvis attests had sat before her marriage. The marriage so lamentedly diverting her indeed from this tradition that, to mark the rueful rupture, it had invoked one evening with the aid of India muslin and a wondrous gold headband in the maternal, the Washington square, parlours, but the secular nuptial consecration of the then mayor of the city. I think, Mr. Varek. We progeny were, of course, after this mild convulsion, not at all in the fold. Yet it strikes me as the happy note of a simple age, that we were practically, of a Sunday night at least, wherever we might have chosen to enter, since going forth hand in hand into the sunshine, and I connect myself here with my next younger, not with my elder brother whose orbit was other and larger, was sampled, in modern phrase, as small, unprejudiced inquirers obeying their inspiration, any resort of any congregation detected by us. Doing so I make out, moreover, with a sense of earnest provision for any contemporary challenge. What church do you go to? The challenge took in childish circles that searching form, of the form it took among our elders my impression is more vague, to which I must add as well that our offending in this fashion for ourselves didn't so prepare us for invidious remark. Remark, I mean, upon our pealless state, which involved, to my imagination, much the same discredit that a houseless or a cookless would have done. As to hush in my breast, the appeal to our parents, not for religious instruction, of which we had plenty and of the most charming and familiar, but simply for instruction, a very different thing, as to where we should say we went in our world under cold scrutiny or derisive comment. It was colder than any criticism, I recall, to hear our father reply that we could plead nothing less than the whole privilege of Christendom, and that there was no communion, even that of the Catholics, even that of the Jews, even that of the Swedenborgians, from which we need find ourselves excluded. With the freedom we enjoyed, our dilemma clearly amused him. It would have been impossible, he affirmed, to be theologically more unregal. How, as mere detached, unaccompanied infants, we enjoyed such impunity of range and confidence of welcome, is beyond comprehension, saved by the light of the old manners and conditions, the old local bonnemy, the comparatively primal innocence, the absence of complications, with the several notes of which last beatitude, my reminiscence surely shines. It was the theory of the time and place that the young, were they but young enough, could take publicly no harm, to which adds itself moreover, and touchingly enough, all the difference of the old importances. It wasn't doubtless that the social, or call it simply the human, position of the child was higher than today, a circumstance not conceivable. It was simply that other dignities and values and claims, other social and human positions, were less definite and settled, less prescriptive and absolute. A rich sophistication is, after all, a gradual growth, and it would have been sophisticated to fear for us, before such bright and vacant vistas, the perils of the way, or to see us received anywhere even with the irony of patronage. We hadn't, in fact, seats of honour, but that justice was done us, that is, we were placed to our advantage. I infer from my having liked so to go, even though my grounds may have been but the love of the exhibition in general, thanks to which figures, faces, furniture, sounds, smells and colours, became for me, wherever enjoyed, and enjoyed most where most collected, a positive little orgy of the senses and riot of the mind. Let me at the same time make the point that, such may be the snobbery of extreme youth, I not only failed quite to rise to the parental reasoning, but made out in it, rather a certain sophistry. Such a perverication, for instance, as if we had habitually said, we kept the carriage we observably didn't keep, kept it because we sent when we wanted one to university place, where Mr. Haythorn had his livery stable, a connection this last promoted by my father's frequent need of the aid to circulate, his walks were limited through an injury received in youth, and promoting in turn and at a touch to my consciousness, the stir of small, the smallest remembered things. I recall the adventure, no infrequent one, of being dispatched to Mr. Haythorn to bespeak a conveyance and the very air and odour, the genial warmth at a fine steaming Irish pitch of the stables and their stamping and backing beasts, their resounding boardedness, their chairs tipped up at such an angle for lifted heels, a pair of which latter seek the floor again at my appeal, as those of big-bearded Mr. Haythorn himself, an impression enriched by the drive home in lawling and bumping procession of the great vehicle, and associated further with Sunday afternoons in spring, with the question of distant Harlem and remote Bloomingdale with the experience at one of these junctures of far away Hoboken, if it wasn't Williamsburg, which fits infancyfully somewhere, when the carriage was reinforced by a ferry and the ferry by something, something to my present vision very dim and dusty and archaic, something quite ragged and graceless in the nature of a public tea garden and ices. The finest link here, however, is for some reason with the New York Hotel and thereby with Albany uncles, thereby also with Mr. Haythorn in person, waiting and waiting expensively on his box before the house, and somehow felt as attuned to Albany uncles, even as Mrs. Cannon had subtly struck me as being. Intenser than these vague shades, meanwhile, is my vision of the halls of Ferrero, where the orgy of the senses, and even the riot of the mind of which I have just spoken, must quite literally have led me more of a dance than anywhere. Let this sketch of a lost order note with all, that under so scant a general provision for infant exercise, as distinguished from infant ease, our hopping and sliding in tune, had to be deemed urgent. It was the sense of this form of relief that clearly was general, superseding as the Ampler Ferrero scene did previous limited exhibitions. Even those for that matter, coming back to me in the ancient person of Mr. Chariot, I guess at the writing of his name, whom I work in but confusedly as a professional visitor, a subject gaped at across a gulf of fear, in one of our huddled schools. All the more that I perfectly evoke him as resembling, with a difference or two, the portraits of the aged Voltaire, and that he had, fiddle in hand and gérée tendu, incited the young agility of our mother and aunt. Edward Ferrero was another matter. In the prime of life, good-looking, romantic and moustachioed, he was suddenly to figure, on the outbreak of the Civil War, as a general of volunteers. Very much as if he had been one of Bonaparte's improvised young marshals. In anticipation of which, however, he wasn't at all fierce or superior to my remembrance, but most kind to sprawling youth, in a charming man of the world fashion, and as if we wanted but a touch to become also men of the world. Remarkably good-looking, as I say, by the measure of that period, and extraordinarily agile. He could so gracefully leap and bound that his bounding into the military saddle such occasion offering had all the felicity, and only wanted the pink fleshings of the circus. He was still more admired by the mothers, with whom he had to my eyes a most elegant relation than by the pupils, among all of whom, at the frequent and delightful soirees, he caused trays laden with lucent syrups repeatedly to circulate. The scale of these entertainments, as I figured it, and the florid frescoes, just damp though they were with newness, and the free lemonade, and the freedom of remark equally great with the mothers, were the lavish note in him, just as the fact that he never himself fiddled but was followed over the shining parquet by attended fiddlers, represented doubtless a shadow the less on his later dignity, so far as that dignity was compassed. Dignity marked in full measure even at the time the presence of his sister, Madame Dubrois, a handsome authoritative person who instructed us equally, in fact preponderantly, and who though comparatively not sympathetic, so engaged physiognomically my wondering interest, that I here to this hour her shrill Franco-American accent. Don't look at me, little boy, look at my feet. I see them now, these somewhat fat members, beneath the uplifted skirt, encased in bronzed slippers, without heels but attached by graceful cross-bands over her white stockings to her solid ankles, an emphatic sign of the time. Not less than I recover my surprised sense of their supporting her without loss of balance, substantial as she was in the first position. Her command of which, her ankles clapped close together and her body very erect, was so perfect that even with her toes right and left, fairly turning the corner backward, she never fell prone on her face. It consulted somehow with this wealth of resource in her that she appeared at the soirees, or at least at the great fancy dress soiree in which the historic truth of my experience, free lemonade and all, is doubtless really shut up, as the genius of California, a dazzling vision of white satin and golden flounces. Her brother, meanwhile, maintaining that more distinctively European color, which I feel to have been, for my young presumption, the convincing essence of the scene, in the character of a musketeer to Louis Kahn's, highly consonant with his type. They're hovered in the background, a flushed, full-chested, and tonally short-bearded Monsieur Dubray, who, as a singer of the heavy order, at the opera, carried us off into larger things still. The opera having at last about then, after dwelling for years downtown, in shifty tents and tabernacles, set up its own spacious pavilion and reared its head as the Academy of Music. All at the end, or what served for the end, of our very street, where, though it wasn't exactly near and Union Square bristled between, I could yet occasionally gape at the great bills beside the portal, in which Monsieur Dubray always so serviceably came at the bottom of the cast. A subordinate artist, a grand utility at the best, I believe, and presently to become, on that scene, slightly ragged I fear, even in its freshness, permanent stage manager, or, as we say nowadays, producer. He had yet, eminently, to my imagination, the richer the European value. Especially, for instance, when our air thrilled in the sense that our attentive parents re-echoed with the visit of the great Greci and the great Mario, and I seemed, though the art of advertisement was then comparatively so young and so chaste, to see our personal acquaintance, as he could almost be called, thickly sandwiched between them. Such was one's strange sense for the connections of things that they drew out the halls of Ferrero, till these, too, seemed fairly to resound with Norma and Lucrezia Borgia, as if opening straight upon the stage and Europe, by the stroke, had come to us in such force that we had but to enjoy it on the spot. That could never have been more the case than on the occasion of my assuming for the famous fancy ball, not at the operatic academy, but at the dancing school, which came so nearly to the same thing. The dress of a debaudeur, whatever that might be, which carried in its puckered folds of dark green, relieved with scarlet and silver, such an exotic fragrance and appealed to me by such a legend. The legend had come round to us, if it was true, by way of Albany, once we learned at the moment of our need, that one of the adventures, one of the least lamentable of our cousin Johnny, had been his figuring as a debaudeur at some Parisian revel. The elegant evidence of which, neatly packed, with but vague instructions for use, was helpfully sent on to us. The instructions for use were, in fact, so vague that I was afterward to become a bit ruefully conscious of having sadly dishonored, or at least abbreviated, my model. I fell, that is, I stood, short of my proper form by no less than half a leg. The essence of the debaudeur, being it appeared, that he emerged at the knees, in white silk stockings and with neat calves, from the baribid breeches which I artlessly suffered to flap at my ankles. The discovery, after the fact, was disconcerting, yet had been best made with all too late, for it would have seemed, I conceive, a less monstrous act to attempt to lengthen my legs than to shorten Johnny's collot. The trouble had been that we hadn't really known what a debaudeur was, and I am not sure indeed that I know to this day. It had been more fatal still, that even Fond Albany couldn't tell us.