 6. I see a small and compact and ingenuous society, screened in somehow conveniently from north and west, but open wide to the east and comparatively to the south, and though perpetually moving up Broadway, nonetheless constantly and delightfully walking down it. Broadway was the feature and the artery, the joy and the adventure of one's childhood, and it stretched, and prodigiously, from Union Square to Barnum's great American Museum by the City Hall. Or only went further on the Saturday mornings, absurdly and deplorably frequent, alas, when we were swept off by a loving aunt, our mother's only sister, then much domesticated with us and to whom the ruthless care had assigned itself from the first, to Wall Street and the torture chamber of Dr. Parkhurst, our tremendously respectable dentist, who was so old and so impurpled and so polite in his stock and dress coat and dark and glossy wig that he had been our mother's and our aunt's haunting fear in their youth as well, since in their quiet Warren Street, not far off, they were dreadful to think, comparatively under his thumb. He extremely resembles, to my mind's eye, certain figures in phys's illustrations to Dickens, and it was clear to us through our long ordeal that our elders must, by some mistaken law of compensation, some refinement of the vindictive, be making us pay for what they in like helplessness had suffered from him, as if we had done them any harm. Our analysis was muddled, yet in a manner relieving, and for us too there were compensations, which we grudged indeed to allow, but which I could easily, even if shyly, have named. One of these was Godi's Lady's Book, a sallow pile of which it shows to me for sallow in the warmer and less stony light of the Wall Street of those days, and through the smell of ancient anodynes. Lay on Joey Bagstock's table for our beguilement while we waited. I was to encounter in phys's Dombie and son that design for our tormentor's type. There is no doubt whatever that I succumbed to the spell of Godi, who, unlike the present essences, was an anodyne before the fact as well as after. Since I remember pouring in his pages over tales of fashionable life in Philadelphia while awaiting my turn in the chair, not less than doing so when my turn was over and to the music of my brother's groans. This must have been at the hours when we were left discreetly to our own fortitude, through our aunts availing herself of the relative proximity to go and shop at Stewart's, and then come back for us. The Lady's great shop, vast, marmorian, plate glassy, and notoriously fatal to the female nerve. We ourselves had wearily trailed through it hanging on the skirts very literally of indecision, which bravely way-laid custom on the Broadway corner of Chambers Street. Wasn't part of the charm of life, since I assumed there was such a charm. In its being then, I allude to life itself, so much more downtown-y, on the supposition at least, that our young gravitation in that sense, for most of the larger joys, consorted with something of the general habit. The joy that had to be fished out, like truth from the very bottom of the well, was attendance at Trinity Church, still in that age supereminent, pointedly absolute, the finest feature of the southward scene, to the privilege of which the elder Albany cousins were apt to be treated when they came to stay with us, and indulgence making their enjoyment of our city as downtown-y as possible too, for I seem otherwise to see them but as returning with the familiar steward headache from the prolonged strain of selection. The great reward dispensed to us for our sessions in the House of Pain, as to which it became our subsequent theory that we had been regularly dragged there on alternate Saturdays, was our being carried on the return to the House of Delight, or to one of them, for there were specifically two, where we partook of ice cream, deemed sovereign for sore mouths, deemed sovereign in fact, all through our infancy, for everything. Two great establishments for the service of it graced the prospect, one Thompson's, and the other Taylor's, the former, I perfectly recall, Grave and Immemorial, the latter upstart but dazzling, and having together the effect that whichever we went to, we wondered if we hadn't better have gone to the other, with that capacity of childhood for making the most of its adventures after a fashion that may look so like making the least. It is in our father's company indeed that, as I press the responsive spring, I see the bedisand saucers heaped up for our fond consumption. They bore the Taylor title, painted in blue and gilded, with the Christian name, as parentally pointed out to us, perverted to J-H-O-N, for John, whereas the Thompson name scorned such vulgar, and above all such misspelled appeals. Whence I infer that still other occasions for that experience waited on us, as almost any would serve, and a paternal presence so associated with them was not in the least conceivable in the Wall Street Repair. The presence is, in fact, not associated from me to any effective directness with the least of our suffered shocks or penalties, though partly doubtless because our acquaintance with such was of the most limited. A conclusion I form even while judging it to have been on the whole sufficient for our virtue. This sounds perhaps as if we had borne ourselves as prodigies or prigs, which was as far as possible from being the case. We were bred in horror of conscious propriety, of what my father was fond of calling flagrant morality. What I myself at any rate read back into our rare educational ease, for the memory of some sides of which I was ever to be thankful, is, besides the general humanization of our apprehended world and our social tone, the unmistakable appearance that my father was again and again accompanied in public by his small second son. So many impressions come back to me as gathered at his side and in his personal haunts. Not that he mustn't have offered his first borne at least equal opportunities, but I make out that he seldom led us forth, such as we were, together, and my brother must have had in his turn many a mild adventure of which the secret, I like to put it so, perished with him. He was to remember, as I perceived later on, many things that I didn't. Impressions I sometimes wished, as with the retracing jealousy or at least envy, that I might also have fallen direct heir to. But he professed amazement and even occasionally impatience at my reach of reminiscence, liking as he did to brush away old moral scraps in favor of new, rather than to hoard and so complacently exhibit them. If in my way I collected the new as well, I yet cherished the old. The rag-bag of memory hung on its nail in my closet, though I learned with time to control the habit of bringing it forth. And I say that with a due sense of my doubtless now appearing to empty it into these pages. I keep picking out at hazard those passages of our earliest age that helped to reconstruct for me even by tiny touches the experience of our parents, any shade of which seems somehow to signify. I cherish, to the extent of here reproducing, an old daguerreotype, all the circumstances of the taking of which I intensely recall, though as I was lately turned twelve when I figured for it, the feat of memory is perhaps not remarkable. It documents for me in so welcome and so definite a manner my father's cultivation of my company. It documents at the same time the absurdest little legend of my small boyhood, the romantic tradition of the value of being taken up from wherever we were staying to the queer, empty, dusty, smelly New York of mid-summer. I apply that last term because we always arrived by boat, and I have still in my nostril the sense of the abode of the hot town, the rank and rubbishy waterside quarters where big loose cobbles, for the least of all the base items, lay wrenched from their sockets of pungent black mud, and where the dependent streets managed by a law of their own to be all corners, and the corners to be all groceries. Groceries indeed largely of the green order, so far as greenness could persist in the torrid air, and that bristled inglorious defiance of traffic with the overflow of their wares and implements. Carts and barrows and boxes and baskets, sprawling or stacked, familiarly elbowed in its course the bumping hack, the comprehensive carriage of other days, the only vehicle of hire then known to us. While the situation was accepted by the loose citizen in the garb of a freeman, save for the brass star in his breast, and the New York garb of the period was, as I remember it, an immense attestation of liberty. Why the throb of romance should have beat time for me to such visions I can scarce explain, or can explain only by the fact that the squalor was a squalor wonderfully mixed and seasoned, and that I should wrong the whole impression if I didn't figure it first and foremost as that of some vast succulent cornucopia. What did the stacked boxes and baskets of our youth represent, but the boundless fruited of that more bucolic age of the American world, and what was, after all, of so strong an assault as the rankness of such a harvest? Where is that fruited now? Where in particular are the peaches downtown? Where the mounds of Isabella grapes and sickle-pairs in the sticky sweetness of which our childhood seems to have been steeped? It was, surely, save perhaps for oranges, a more informally and familiarly fruit-eating time, and bushels of peaches in particular. Peaches big and peaches small, peaches white and peaches yellow, played a part in life from which they have somehow been deposed. Every garden, almost every bush, and the very boy's pockets grew them. They were cut up and eaten with cream at every meal. Domestically brandied, they figured, the rest of the year, scarce less freely. If they were rather a party dish, it was because they made the party whenever they appeared, and when ice cream was added, or they were added to it, they formed the highest revel we knew. Above all the public heaps of them, the high-piled receptacles at every turn, touched the street as with a sort of southern plenty. The note of rejected and scattered fragments, the memory of the slippery skins and rinds and kernels with which the old dislocated flags were bestrown, is itself endeared to me and contributes a further pictorial grace. We ate everything in those days by the bushel and the barrel, as from stores that were infinite. We handled watermelons as freely as coconuts, and the amount of stomachache involved was negligible in the general Eden-like consciousness. The glow of this consciousness, even in so small an organism, was part of the charm of these retreats offered me city-word upon our base of provisions. A part of the rest of which, I disengage, was in my fond perception of that almost eccentrically home-loving habit in my father which furnished us with half the household humor of our childhood, besides furnishing him with any quantity of extravagant picture of his so prompt pangs of anguish in absence for celebration of his precipitant returns. It was traditional for us later on, and especially on the European scene, that for him to leave us in pursuit of some advantage or convenience, some improvement of our condition, some enlargement of our view, was for him breathlessly to reappear after the shortest possible interval, with no account at all to give of the benefit aimed at, but instead of this, a moving representation, a far richer recital of his spiritual adventures at the horrid inhuman ends and amid the hard alien races which had stayed his advance. He reacted, he rebounded, in favour of his fireside, from whatever brief explorations or curiosities. These passionate spontaneities were the pulse of his life and quite some of the principal events of ours. And, as he was nothing if not expressive, whatever happened to him for inward intensity happened abundantly to us for pity and terror, as it were, as well as for an ease and equality of amusement among ourselves that was really always to fail us among others. Comparatively late in life after his death, I had occasion to visit, in lieu of my brother then in Europe, an American city in which he had had, since his own father's death, interests that were of importance to us all. On my asking the agent in charge when the owner had last taken personal cognizance of his property, that gentleman replied, only half to my surprise that he had never in all his years of possession performed such an act. Then it was perhaps that I took the most measure of his fine faith in human confidence as an administrative function. He had to have a relation, somehow expressed, and as he was the vividest and happiest of letter writers it rarely failed of coming, but once it was established it served him in every case much better than fussy challenges which had always the drawback of involving lapses and inattentions in regard to solicitudes more pressing. He incurably took for granted, incurably because whenever he did so the process succeeded, with which association however I perhaps overdrench my complacent vision of our summer snatches at town. Through a grave accident in early life country walks on rough roads were, in spite of his great constitutional soundness, tedious and charmless to him. He liked on the other hand the people pavement, the thought of which made him restless went away. Hence the fidelities and sociabilities however superficial that he could not reaffirm, if he could only reaffirm the others, the really intimate and still more communicable soon enough afterwards. It was these of the improvised and casual sort that I shared with him thus indelibly, for truly if we took the boat to town to do things I did them quite as much as he and so that a little boy could scarce have done them more. My part may indeed but have been to surround his part with a thick imaginative aura, but that constituted for me an activity then which I could dream of none braver or wilder. We went to the office of the New York Tribune, my father's relations with that journal were actual and close, and that was a wonderful world indeed with strange steepnesses and machineries and noises and hurrying, bare armed bright eyed men and amid the agitation clever, easy, kindly, jocular, partly underdressed gentlemen. It was always July or August, some of whom I knew at home, taking it all as if it were the most natural place in the world. It was big to me, big to me with the breath of great vague connections, and I suppose the gentlemen very old, though since aware that they must have been for their connections, remarkably young, and the conversation of one of them, the one I oftenest saw up town, who attained to great local and to considerable national eminence afterwards, and who talked often and thrillingly about the theatres, I retain as many bright fragments of as if I had been another little Boswell. It was as if he had dropped into my mind the germ of certain interests that were long afterwards to flower, as for instance on his announcing the receipt from Paris of news of the appearance of the théâtre français of an actress, Madame Judite, who was formidable to compete with her co-religionary Rachelle, and to endanger that artist's laurels. Why should Madame Judite's name have stuck to me through all the years, since I was never to see her, and she is as forgotten as Rachelle is remembered? Why should that scrap of gossip have made a date for my consciousness, turning it to the comedy with such an intensity that was long afterwards to culminate? Why was it equally to abide for me that the same gentleman had on one of these occasions mentioned his having just come back from a wonderful city of the West, Chicago, which, though but a year or too old, with plank sidewalks when there were any, and holes and humps where there were none, and shanties where there were not big blocks, and everything where there had yesterday been nothing, had already developed a huge energy and curiosity, and also an appetite for lectures? I became aware of the comedy, I became aware of Chicago. I also became aware that even the most alluring fiction was not always for little boys to read. It was mentioned at the Tribune Office that one of its reporters, Mr. Solon Robinson, had put forth a novel rather oddly entitled Hot Corn, and more or less having for its subject the career of a little girl who hawked that familiar American luxury in the streets. The volume, I think, was put into my father's hand, and I recall my prompt desire to make acquaintance with it no less than the remark as promptly addressed to my companion that the work, however engaging, was not one that should be left accessible to an innocent child. The pang occasioned by this warning has scarcely yet died out for me, nor my sense of my first wonder at the discrimination. So great became from that moment the mystery of the tabooed book of whatever identity. The question in my breast of why, if it was to be so right for others, it was only to be wrong for me. I remember the soreness of the thought that it was I, rather, who was wrong for the book, which was somehow humiliating. In that amount of discredit one couldn't but be involved. Neither then nor afterwards was the secret of hot corn revealed to me, and the sense of privation was to be more prolonged, I fear, than the vogue of the tale, which even as a success of scandal couldn't have been great. I'm afraid I mean that what was touching was rather the fact that the tinkle could penetrate than the fact that it died away. The light of criticism might have beat so straight if the sense of proportion and the fact of compassion hadn't waved it away, on the aesthetic phase during which the appeal was mainly by the tinkle. The scarlet letter and the seven gables had the deep tone as much as one would, but of the current efforts of the imagination they were alone in having it till Walt Whitman broke out in the later fifties, and I was to know nothing of that happy genius till long after. An absorbed perusal of the lamplighter was what I was to achieve at the fleeting hour I continue to circle round. That romance was on everyone's lips, and I recollected as more or less thrust upon me in amends for the imposed sacrifice of a ranker actuality, that of the improper Mr. Robinson, I mean, as to whom there revives in me the main question of where his impropriety, in so general a platitude of the bourgeois, could possibly have dwelt. It was to be true indeed that Walt Whitman achieved an impropriety of the first magnitude. That success, however, but showed us the platitude returning in a genial rage upon itself and getting out of control by generic excess. There was no rage at any rate in the lamplighter, for which I fondly hung, and which would have been my first grown-up novel, it had been soothingly offered me for that. Had I consented to take it as really and truly grown-up. I couldn't have said what it lacked for the character. I only had my secret reserves, and when one blessed afternoon on the new brightened boat I waded into the initials I saw how right I had been. The initials was grown-up, and the difference thereby exquisite. It came over me with the very first page, assimilated in the fluttered little cabin to which I had retired with it, all in spite of the fact, too, that my attention was distracted by a pair of remarkable little girls, who looked there out of more public view as to hint that they weren't to be seen for nothing. That must have been a rich hour, for I mixed the marvel of the boon children, strange pale little flowers of the American theatre, with my conscious joy in bringing back to my mother, from our forage in New York, a gift of such happy promise as the history of the long-legged Mr. Hamilton and his two Bavarian beauties, the elder of whom Hildegard, who was to figure for our generation as the very type of the haughty as distinguished from the forward heroine. Since I think our categories really came to no more than those. I couldn't have got very far with Hildegard in moments so scant, but I memorably felt that romance was thick around me, everything at such a crisis, seeming to make for it at once. The boon children conveyed thus to new Brighton the under-care of a lady in whose aspect the strain of the resolute triumphed over the note of the battered, though the showy in it rather succumbed at the same time to the dowdy, were already billed as infant phenomena, for a performance that night at the pavilion, where our attendance, it was a shock to feel, couldn't be promised. And in gazing without charge at the pair of weary and sleepy little mount-a-banks, I found the histrionic character and the dramatic profession for the first time revealed to me. They filled me with fascination and yet with fear. They expressed a melancholy grace and a sort of peevish refinement, yet seemed awfully detached and indifferent, indifferent perhaps even to being pinched and slapped for art's sake at home. They honoured me with no notice whatever, and regarded me doubtless as no better than one of the little louts peeping through the tent of the show. In return I judged their appearance dissipated, though fascinating, and sought consolation for the memory of their scorn and the loss of their exhibition as time went on, in noting that the bounds of their fame seemed somehow to have been stayed. I neither met nor heard of them again. The little batements must have obscured their comparatively dim luster, pushing at the same period and with a larger command of the pictorial poster and the other primitive symbols in broadway. Such posters and such symbols as they were at that time. The little batements who were to be reserved in mature form form I much later and more grateful appreciation. This weak reminiscence has obstructed, however, something more to the purpose. The restrained impression of those choices of our loiterings that took place still far downtown at the bookstore, home of delights and haunt of fancy. It was at the bookstore we had called on the day of the initials and the boon children, and it was thence we were returning with our spoil, of which the charming novel must have been but a fragment. My impression composed itself of many pieces, a great and various practice of burying my nose in the half-open book for the strong smell of paper and printer's ink, known to us as the English smell, was needed to account for it. That was the exercise of the finest scents that hung about us, my brother and me, or of one at least but little less fine than the scents for the satisfaction of which we resorted to Thompson's and to Taylor's. It bore me company during all our returns from forages and left me persuaded that I had only to snuff up hard enough, fresh, uncut volume in hand, to taste of the very substance of London. All our books in that age were English, at least all our downtown ones. I personally recall scarce any that were not, and I take perception of that quality in them to have associated itself with more fond dreams and glimmering pictures than any other one principle of growth. It was all a result of the deeply infected state. I had been prematurely poisoned, as I shall presently explain. The bookstore, fondest of my father's resorts, though I remember no more of its public identity than that it further enriched the brave depth of Broadway, was overwhelmingly and irresistibly English. As not less tonically English was our principal host there, with whom we had, moreover, my father and I, thanks to his office, such personal and genial relations that I recall seeing him grace our board at home, in company with his wife, whose vocal strain and complexion and coiffure and flounces I found nonetheless informing, nonetheless racial, for my not being then versed in the language of analysis. The true inwardness of these rich meanings, those above all of the bookstore itself, was that a tradition was thus fed, a presumption thus created, a vague vision thus filled in. All expression is clumsy for some mystic process. For what else can have happened but that having taken over, under suggestion and with singular infant promptitude, a particular throbbing consciousness, I had become aware of the source at which it could best be refreshed. That consciousness, so communicated, was just simply of certain impressions, certain sources of impressions again, proceeding from over the sea and situated beyond it, or even much rather of my parents own impression of such. The fruit of a happy time spent in and about London with their two babies, and reflected in that portion of their talk with each other to which I best attended. Had all their talk for its subject, in my infant ears, that happy time, did it deal only with London and Piccadilly and the Green Park, where, over against their dwelling, their two babies mainly took the air under the charge of fanny of Albany, their American nurse, whose remark as to the degree to which the British Museum fell short for one who had the privilege of that of Albany, was handed down to us? Did it never forbear from Windsor and Richmond and Sudbrook and Ham Common, amid the rich complexity of which, crowding their discourse with echoes, they had spent their summer? All a scattering of such pearls as it seemed that their second-born could most deftly and instinctively pick up. Our sole maternal aunt, already mentioned as a devoted and cherished presence during those and many later years, was in a position to share with them the treasure of these mild memories, which strike me as having for the most part, through some bright household habit, overflowed at the breakfast table, where I regularly attended with W.J. She had imbibed with times in Europe the seeds of a long nostalgia, and I think of her as ever so patiently communicative on that score under pressure of my artless appeal. That I should have been so inquiring while still so destitute of primary data was nevertheless rather an anomaly, and it was for that matter quite as if my infant divination proceeded by the light of nature. I divined that it would matter to me in the future that English life should be of this or that fashion. My father had subscribed for me to a small periodical of quarto form covered in yellow and entitled The Charm, which shed on the question the softest luster, but of which the appearances were sadly intermittent or then struck me as being. Inasmuch as many of our visits to the bookstore were to ask for the new number, only to learn with painful frequency that the last consignment from London had arrived without it. I feel again the pang of that disappointment, as if through the want of what I needed most for going on. The English smell was exhaled by the charm in a peculiar degree, and I see myself affected by the failure as by that of a vital tonic. It was not at the same time by a charm the more or the less that my salvation was to be as it were worked out, or my imagination at any rate duly convinced. Conviction was the result of the very air of home, so far as I most consciously inhaled it. This represented, no doubt, a failure to read into matters close at hand all the interest they were capable of yielding, but I had taken the twist, had sipped the poison, as I say, and was to feel it to that end the most salutary cup. I saw my parents homesick, as I conceived, for the ancient order and distressed and inconvenienced by many of the more immediate features of the modern, as the modern pressed upon us. And since their theory of our better living was from an early time that we should renew the quest of the ancient on the very first possibility, I simply grew greater in the faith that somehow to manage that would constitute a success in life. I never found myself deterred from this fond view, which was implied in every question I asked, every answer I got and every plan I formed. Those are great words for the daydream of infant ignorance, yet if success in life may perhaps be best defined as the performance in age of some intention arrested in youth, I may frankly put in a claim to it. To press my nose against the sources of the English smell, so different for young bibliophiles from any American, was to adopt that sweetness as the sign of my atmosphere. Roundabout might be the course to take, but one was in motion from the first, and one never lost sight of the goal. The very names of places and things in the other world, the marked opposite in most ways of that in which New York and Albany, Fort Hamilton and New Brighton, formed Sopholatius a maximum, became to me values and secrets and shibbolats. They were probably often on my tongue and employed as ignorance determined, but I quite recall being ashamed to use them as much as I should have liked. It was New Brighton I construct and indeed definitely remember that finished us at last. That and our final sordid school WJs and mine in New York. The ancient order had somehow to be invoked when such advantages as those were best within our compass and our means. Not further to anticipate at all events that climax was for a while but vaguely in sight and the illusion of felicity continued from season to season to shut us in. It is only of what I took for felicity, however few the years and however scant the scene that I am pretending now to speak, though I shall have strained the last drop of romance from this vision of our townie summers with the quite sharp reminiscence of my first sitting for my daguerreotype. I repaired with my father on an August day to the great Broadway establishment of Mr. Brady, supreme in that then beautiful art, and it is my impression, the only vague point with me, that though we had come up by the Staten Island boat for the purpose we were to keep the affair secret till the charming consequence should break at home upon my mother. Strong is my conviction that our mystery in the event yielded almost at once to our elation, for no tradition had a brighter household life with us than that of our father's headlong impatience. He moved in a cloud, if not rather in a high radiance, of precipitation and divulgation, a chartered rebel against cold reserves. The good news in his hand refused under any persuasion to grow stale. The sense of communicable pleasure in his breast was positively explosive, so that we saw those surprises in which he had conspired with our mother for our benefit, converted by him in every case under our shamelessly encouraged guesses into common conspiracies against her, against her knowing that is how thoroughly we were all compromised. He had a special and delightful sophistry at the service of his overflow, and never so fine a fancy as in defending it on human grounds. He was something very different with all from apparent of weak mercies. Weakness was never so positive and plausible, nor could the attitude of sparing you be more handsomely or on occasion even more comically aggressive. My small point is simply, however, that the secrecy of our conjoined portrait was probably very soon by his act to begin a public and shining life and to enjoy it till we received the picture, as to which, moreover, still another remembrance steals on me, a proof of the fact that our adventure was improvised. Sharp again is my sense of not being so adequately dressed as I should have taken thought for had I foreseen my exposure. Though the resources of my wardrobe is then constituted, could surely have left me but few alternatives. The main resource of a small New York boy in this line at that time was the little sheath-like jacket tied to the body, closed at the neck, and adorned in front with a single row of brass buttons, a garment of scant grace assurantly and compromised to my consciousness above all by a strange ironic light from an unforgotten source. It was but a short time before those days that the great Mr. Thackery had come to America to lecture on the English humorists, and still present to me is the voice proceeding from my father's library, in which some glimpse of me hovering at an open door in passage or on staircase prompted him to the formidable words, Come here, little boy, and show me your extraordinary jacket. My sense of my jacket became from that hour a heavy one, further enriched as my vision is by my shyness of posture before the seated, the celebrated visitor who struck me in the sunny light of the animated room as enormously big, and who, though he laid on my shoulder the hand of benevolence, bent on my native costume the spectacles of wonder. I was to know later on why he had been so amused and why after asking me if this were the common uniform of my age and class, he remarked that in England were I to go there, I should be addressed as buttons. It had been revealed to me thus in a flash that we were somehow queer. And though never exactly crushed by it, I became aware that I at least felt so as I stood with my head in Mr. Brady's vice. Beautiful most decidedly the lost art of the daguerreotype. I remember my exposure on this occasion interminably long, yet with the result of a facial anguish far less harshly reproduced than my suffered snapshots of a later age. Too few I may here interject were to remain my gathered impressions of the great humorist, but one of them indeed almost the only other bears again on the play of his humor over our perversities of dress. It belongs to a later moment, an occasion on which I see him familiarly seated with us in Paris during the spring of 1857, at summer past at which the younger of us too by that time habitually flocked in our affluence of five. Our youngest was beside him a small sister, then not quite in her eighth year, and arrayed apparently after the fashion of the period in place. And the tradition lingered long of his having suddenly laid his hand on her little flounced person and exclaimed with ludicrous horror, Krinalyn, I was suspecting it, so young and so depraved. A fainter image, that of one of the New York moments, just eludes me, pursue it as I will. I recover but the setting and the fact of his brief presence in it, with nothing that was said or done beyond my being left with my father to watch our distinguished friend secretary, who is also a young artist, establishes easel and proceed to paint. The setting, as I recall it, was an odd oblong, blank, private parlor at the Clarendon Hotel, then the latest thing in hotels, but whose ancient corner of Fourth Avenue, and was it Eighteenth Street? Long ago ceased to know it. The gentle, very gentle, portraitist, was Mr. Air Crow, and the obliging sitter, my father, who sat in response to Mr. Thackeray's desire that his protege should find employment. The protector, after a little departed, blessing the business, which took the form of a small full length of the model seated, his arm extended and the hand on the knob of his cane. The work, it may at this time of day be mentioned, fell below its general possibilities. But I note the scene, through which I must duly have gaped and wondered, for I had, as yet, seen no one, least of all a casual acquaintance, in an hotel parlor, really paint before. As a happy example again of my parents' positive cultivation of my society, it would seem, and thought for my social education. And then there are other collections. I recall it as a Sunday morning. I recover the place itself as a featureless void, bleak and bare with its developments all to come, the hotel parlor of other New York days. But vivid still to me is my conscious assistance, for the first time, at operations that were to mean much for many of my coming years. Those of quiet Mr. Crow held me spellbound. I was to circle so wistfully as from that beginning round the practice of his art, which in spite of these earnest approaches and intentions, never on its own, in the least acknowledged our acquaintance. Scarcely much more than it was ever to respond, for that matter, to the overtures of the mild aspirant himself, known to my observation long afterwards in the London years, as the most touchingly resigned of the children of disappointment. Not only by association was he a Thackerian figure, but much as if the master's hand had stamped him with the outline and the value, with life and sweetness and patience, shown, as after the long futility, seated in a quiet wait, very long too, for the end. That was sad, one couldn't but feel, yet it was in the oddest way impossible to take him for a failure. He might have been one of fortunes strictly, but what was that when he was one of Thackeray's own successes? In the minor line, but with such a grace and such a truth, those of some dim second cousin to Colonel Newcombe. End of Chapter 7 Chapter 8 I feel that at such a rate I remember too much, and yet this mild apparitionism is only part of it. To look back at all is to meet the apparitional, and to find in its ghostly face the silent stare of an appeal. When I fix it, the hovering shade, whether of person or place, it fixes me back, and seems the less lost. Not to my consciousness, for that is nothing but to its own, by my stopping, however idly for it. The day of the daguerreotype, the August afternoon. What was it if not one of the days when we went to Union Square for luncheon and for more ice cream and more peaches, and even more, even most, enjoyment of ease accompanied by stimulation of wonder? It may have been indeed that a visit to Mrs. Cannon, rather on that occasion, engaged us. Memory selects a little confusedly from such a wealth of experience. For the wonder was the experience, and that was everywhere, even if I didn't so much find it as take it with me, to be sure of not falling short. Mrs. Cannon lurked near Fourth Street. That, I abundantly grasp, not more definitely placing her than in what seemed to me a labyrinth of grave by-streets westwardly back of Broadway. Yet at no great distance from it, where she must have occupied a house at a corner, since we reached her not by steps that went up to a front door, but by others that went slightly down, and formed clearly an independent side-access, a feature that affected me as rich and strange. What the steps went down to was a spacious room, light and friendly, so that it couldn't have been compromised by an area which offered the brave mystification, amid other mystifications, of being at once a parlor and a shop. A shop in particular for the relief of gentlemen in want of pocket-hagger chiefs, neckties, collars, umbrellas, and straw-covered bottles of the essence known in Old New York as Cologne, with a very long and big O. Mrs. Cannon was always seated at some delicate white or other needlework, as if she herself made the collars and the neckties and hemmed the pocket-hanger chiefs, though the air of this conflicts with the sense of importation from remote her centers of fashion breathed by some of the more thrilling of the remarks I heard exchanged, at the same time that it quickened the oddity of the place. For the oddity was in many things. Above all, perhaps, in there being no counter, no rows of shelves, and no vulgar till for Mrs. Cannon's commerce, the parlor clearly dissimulated the shop, and positively to that extent that I might uncannily have wondered what the shop dissimulated. It represented, honestly, I made out in the course of visits that seemed to me to have been delightfully repeated, the more informal of the approaches to our friend's brave background or hinterland, the realm of her main industry, the array of the furnished apartments for gentlemen, gentlemen largely for whom she imported the O. de Cologne and the neckties, and who struck me as principally consisting of the ever-remarkable uncles, desirous at times, on their restless returns from Albany or wherever, of an intimacy of comfort that the New York Hotel couldn't yield. Fascinating thus the implications of Mrs. Cannon's establishment where the talk took the turn, in particular, of Mr. John and Mr. Edward and Mr. Howard, and where Miss Maggie or Miss Susie, who were on the spot in other rocking chairs and with other poised needles, made their points as well as the rest of us. The interest of the place was that the uncles were somehow always under discussion as to where they at the moment might be, or as to when they were expected, or above all as to how, the how was the greater matter and the fine emphasis, they had last appeared and might be conceived as carrying themselves, and that their consumption of neckties and O. de Cologne was somehow inordinate. I might have been judging it on my innocence as their only consummation. I refer to those sources, I say, the charm of the scene. The finer part of me must yet have been that it didn't, as it regularly lapsed, dispose of all mystifications. If I didn't understand, however, the beauty was that Mrs. Cannon understood. That was what she did most of all even more than hem pocket handkerchiefs and collars. And my father understood, and each understood that the other did, Miss Maggie and Miss Susie being no wit behind. It was only I who didn't understand, save in so far as I understood that, which was a kind of pale joy. And meanwhile, there would be more to come from uncles so attachingly, so almost portentously, discussable. The vision at any rate was to stick by me, as through its old world friendly grace, its light on the elder amenity, the prettier manners, the tender, personal note in the good ladies' importations and anxieties, that of a handmade fabric and the discriminating service, fit to figure as a value anywhere, by which I meant in the right corner of any social picture, I afterwards said to myself, that refined and composed significance of Mrs. Cannon's scene. Union Square was a different matter, though with the element there also that I made out that I didn't make out. My sense of drama was in this case, I think, rather more frightened off than let on. A drawback for which, however, I consoled myself by baked apples and custards, an inveterate feature of our Sunday luncheon there, those of weekdays being various and casual. And by a study of a great store, as it seemed to me, of steel-plated volumes, devoted mainly to the heroines of romance, with one in particular presenting those of Shakespeare, in which the plates were so artfully colored and varnished, and complexion and dress, thereby so endeared to memory, that it was for long afterwards a shock to me at the theater, not to see just those bright images with their peculiar tawgaries, come on. I was able, but the other day, moreover, to renew almost on the very spot the continuity of contemplation. Large, lumpish presences, precarious creations of a day, seemed to have elbowed out of the square all but one or two of the minor monuments, pleasant appreciable things, of the other time, yet close to university place the old house of the picture books, and the custards and the domestic situation had, though disfigured and overscored, not quite received its death-stroke. I disengaged, by a mere identification of obscured window and profane portico, a whole chapter of history, which fact should indeed be a warning to penetration, a practical plea here for the superficial, by its exhibition of the rate at which the relations of any gauge of experience multiply and ramify from the moment the mind begins to handle it. I pursued a swarm of such relations, on the occasion I speak of, up and down West 14th Street and over to 7th Avenue, running most of them to earth with difficulty, but finding them at half a dozen points quite confessed to a queer, stale sameness. The gauge of experience, as I say, had in these cases been strangely spared. The sameness had in two or three of them, held out as with conscious craft, but these are impressions. I shall presently find it impossible not to take up again at any cost. I first realized 14th Street at a very tender age, and I perfectly recall that flush of initiation, consisting as it did of an afternoon call with my father at a house there situated, one of an already fairly mature row on the south side and quite near 6th Avenue. It was as our house, just acquired by us, that he thus invited my approval of it, heaping as that does once more the measure of my small adhesiveness. I thoroughly approved, quite as if I had foreseen that the place was to become to me for ever so long afterwards, a sort of anchorage of the spirit, being at the hour as well a fascination for the eyes, since it was there I first fondly gaped at the process of decorating. I saw charming men in little caps ingeniously formed of folded newspaper, where in the roaring city are those quaint badges of the handicrafts now, mounted on platforms and casting plaster into molds. I saw them in particular paste long strips of yellowish-grained paper upon walls, and I vividly remember thinking the grain and the pattern, for there was a pattern from the waist high down, a complication of dragons and sphinxes and scrolls and other fine flourishes, a wonderful and sumptuous thing. I would give much, I protest, to recover its lost secret, to see what it really was. So interesting ever to retrace and sometimes so difficult of belief in a community of one's own knowing, is the general aesthetic adventure, are the dangers and delusions, the all but fatal accidents and mortal ailments, that taste has smilingly survived, and after which the fickle creature may still quite brazenly look one in the face. Our quarter must have bristled in those years with the very worst of the danger signals, though indeed they figured but as coarse complacencies. The age of brownstone had just been ushered in, and that material, in deplorable, in monstrous form, over all the vacant spaces and eligible sites then numerous between the fifth and sixth avenues, more and more affronted the day. We seem to have come from a world of quieter harmonies, the world of Washington Square and thereabouts, so decent in its dignity, so instinctively unpretentious. There were even there spots of shabbiness that I recall, such as the charmless void reaching westward from the two houses that formed the fifth avenue corner to our grandfather's, our New York grandfather's house, itself built by him, with the happiest judgment not so long before and that no distant time in truth to be solidly but much less pleasingly neighbor. The ancient name of the parade ground still hung about the central space and the ancient wooden palings, then so generally accounted proper for central spaces, the whole image infinitely recedes, affected even my innocent childhood as rustic and mean. Union Square, at the top of the avenue, or what practically then counted for the top, was encased, more smartly, in iron rails and further adorned with a fountain and an aged amateur looking constable, awful to my generation in virtue of his star and his switch. I associate less elegance with the parade ground into which we turned for recreation from my neighboring games school and where the parades deployed on no scale to check our own evolutions, though indeed the switch of office abounded there for what I best recover in the connection is a sense and smell of perpetual autumn, with the ground so muffled in the leaves and twigs of the now long defunct aleanthus tree that most of our own motions were a kicking of them up, the semi-sweet rankness of the plant was all in the air, and small boys pranced about as cavaliers whacking their steeds. There were bigger boys, bolder still to whom this vegetation or something kindred that escapes me yielded long black bean-like slips which they lighted and smoked, the smaller one staring and impressed. I at any rate think of the small one I can best speak for as constantly wading through an Indian summer of these disjecta, fascinated by the leaf-kicking process, the joy of lonely trudges over a course in which those parts and the slightly more northward pleasantly confound themselves. These were the homely joys of the nobler neighborhood, elements that had their match and more hard by the 14th street home, in the poplars, the pigs, the poultry, and the Irish houses, two or three in number, exclusive of a very fine Dutch one, seated then, this last, almost as among gardens and groves. A breath of territory still apparent on the spot, in that marginal ease that spread of occupation, to the nearly complete absence of which New York aspects owe their general failure of style. But there were finer vibrations as well, for the safely prowling infant, though none perhaps so fine as when he stood long and drank deep at those founts of romance that gushed from the huge placards of the theater. These announcements, at a day when advertisement was contentedly but information, had very much the form of magnified playbills. They consisted of vast oblong sheets, yellow or white, pasted upon tall wooden screens, or into hollow sockets, and acquainting the possible playgoer with every circumstance that might seriously interest him. These screens rested sociably against trees and lamp posts, as well as against walls and fences, to all of which they were, I suppose, familiarly attached. But the sweetest note of their confidence was that, in parallel lines, and the good old way, characters facing performers, they gave the whole cast, which in the palmy days of the drama, often involved many names. I catch myself again in the fact of endless stations in Fifth Avenue, near the southwest corner of Ninth Street, as I think it must have been, since the dull long run didn't exist then for the young Badeau, and the poster there was constantly and bravely renewed. It engaged my attention whenever I passed, as the canvas of a great master in a great gallery holds that of the pious tourist, and even though I can't at this day be sure of its special reference, I was with precocious passion at home among the theaters. Thanks to our parents' fond interest in them, as from this distance I see it flourish for the time, and to the liberal law and happy view under which the addiction was shared with us, they never caring much for things we couldn't care for, and generally holding that what was good to them would be also good for their children. It had the effect certainly of preparing for these, so far as we should incline to cherish it, a strange little fund of theatrical reminiscence, a small horde of memories maintaining itself in my own case for a lifetime, and causing me to wonder today, before its abundance, on how many evenings of the month, or perhaps even of the week, we were torn from the pursuits of home. End of Chapter 8 Chapter 9 of A Small Boy and Others Chapter 9. The truth is doubtless, however, much less in the wealth of my experience than in the tenacity of my impression, the fact that I have lost nothing of what I saw, and that though I can't now quite divide the total into separate occasions, the various items surprisingly swarm for me. I shall return to some of them wishing it present, only to make my point of when and how the seeds were sown, that afterwards so thickly sprouted and flowered. I was to greatly love the drama, at its best, as a form. Whatever variations of faith or curiosity I was to know in respect to the infirm and inadequate theater. There was, of course, anciently no question for us of the drama at its best. And indeed, while I lately, by chance, looked over a copious collection of theatrical portraits, beginning with the earliest age of lithography and photography, as so applied, and documentary in the highest degrees on the personalities, as we nowadays see of the old American stage, stupid faction grew sharp in me, and skepticism triumphed, so vulgar, so barbarous seemed the array of types, so extraordinarily provincial the note of every figure, so less than scant the claim of such physiognomies and such reputations. Rather dismal everywhere, I admit, the histrionic image with the artificial lights turned off, the fatigued and disconnected face reduced to its mere self, and resembling some closed and darkened in, with the sign still swung but the place blighted for want of custom. That consideration weighs, but what a gang all the same, when thus left to their own devices, the performers, men and women alike, of that world of queer appreciations. I ought, perhaps, to bear on them lightly in view of what, in a special, comes back to me. The sense of the sacred thrill with which I began to watch the green curtain, the particular one that was rise to the comedy of errors, on the occasion that must have been, for what I recall of its almost unbearable intensity, the very first of my ever sitting at a play. I should have been indebted for the momentous evening, in that case, to Mr. William Burton, whose small theatre in Chambers Street, to the rear of Stuart's big shop and hard by the park, as the park was at that time understood, offered me then my prime initiation. Let me not complain of my having owed the adventure to a still greater William as well, nor think again, without the right intensity, the scarce tolerable throb of the way the torment of the curtain was mixed, half so dark a defiance and half so rich a promise. One's eyes bored into it in vain, and yet one knew it would rise at the named hour, the only question being if one could exist till then. The play had been read to us during the day. A celebrated English actor, whose name I inconsistently forget, had arrived to match Mr. Burton as the other of the Dromeos, and the agreeable Mrs. Holman, who had, to my relentless vision to retreating a chin, was so good as to represent Adriana. I regarded Mrs. Holman as a friend, though in no warmer light than that in which I regarded Miss Mary Taylor, save indeed that Mrs. Holman had the pull on one's affections of coming out to sing in white satin and quite irrelevantly between the acts. An advantage she shared with the younger and fairer and more dashing, the dancing Miss Malvina, who footed it and tamborined it and shalled it eruptively in lonely state. When not admiring Mr. Burton in Shakespeare, we admired him as Paul Pry, as Mr. Tootles, and as Aminadab Sleek in The Serious Family, and we must have admired him very much, his huge fat person, his huge fat face and his vast slightly pendulous cheek, surmounted by a sort of elephantine wink to which I impute a remarkable baseness, being still perfectly present to me. We discriminated nonetheless. We thought Mr. Blake a much finer comedian, much more of a gentleman than a scholar. Mellow, Mr. Blake, whom with the brave and emphatic Mrs. Blake, how they must have made their points, I connect partly with the Burton scene, and partly with the head of slightly subsequent creation, which, after flourishing a while, slightly further up Broadway under the tronlessly commercial name of Broom's Lyceum, we had almost only lyceums and museums and lecture rooms and academies of music for Playhouse and Opera then, entered upon a long career and migratory life as Wallach's Theatre. I failed doubtless to keep all my associations clear, but what is important, or what I desire at least to make pass for such, is that when we most admired Mr. Blake, we also again admired Ms. Mary Taylor, and it was at Broom's, not at Burton's, that we rendered her that tribute, reserved for her performance of the fawn theatrical daughter in the English version of La Paire de Le Devittante, where I see the charming, panting, dark-haired creature in flowing white, classically relieved by a gold tiara and a golden scarf, rushed back from the supposed stage to the represented green room, followed by thunders of applause, and throw herself upon the neck of the broken-down old gentleman in a blue coat with brass buttons, who must have been, after all, on second thoughts, Mr. Placide. Greater flights or more delicate shades, the art of pathetic comedy was at that time held not to achieve. Only I straighten it out that Mr. and Mrs. Blake, not less than Ms. Mary Taylor, who preponderantly haunts my vision, even to the disadvantage of Ms. Kate Horn in Nan the Good for Nothing, until indeed she is displaced by the brilliant Laura Keane, did migrate to Broom's, where we found them all themselves as Goldsmith's hardcastle pair and other like-matters. We rallied especially to Blake as Dogbury on the occasion of my second Shakespearean night, for as such I seem to place it, when Laura Keane and Mr. Leicester, the Leicester Wallach that was to be, did Beatrice and Benedict. I yield to this further proof that we had our proportion of Shakespeare, though perhaps and to dating that rapt vision of much ado, which may have been preceded by the dazzle apprehension of a Midsummer night's dream at the Broadway. There was a confessed theatre. This latter now present to me in every bright particular. It supplied us, we must have felt, our greatest conceivable adventure. I cannot otherwise account for its emerging so clear. Everything here is as of yesterday, the identity of the actors, the details of their dress, the charm imparted by the sisters Guggenheim, the elegant elder as the infatuated Helena, and the other, the roguish Joey, as the mischievous Puck. Hermia was Mrs. Nagel in a short, salmon-coloured peplum over a white petticoat, the whole bulgingly confined by a girdle of shining guilt and forming a contrast to the loose scarves of Helena. While Mr. Nagel not devoid, I seem to remember, of a blue chin, and the latency of a fine brogue was either Lysander or Demetrius. Mr. Davidge, also I surmise with a brogue, was Barne the Weaver and Madame Penissi Oberon, Madame Penissi whose range must have been wide, since I see her also as the white veiled heroine of the cataract of the Ganges, where, preferring death to dishonour, she dashes up the more or less perpendicular waterfall on a fiery black steed, and with an effect only a little blighted by the chance flutter of a drapery out of which peeps the leg of a trouser and a big male foot, and then again only presumably at a somewhat later time, or in strictness, after childhood's fond hour, as this and that noble matron or tragedy queen. I describe her at any rate as representing all characters alike, with a broad brown face framed in bands or crowns or other heavy headgear, out of which cropped a row of very small tight black curls. The cataract of the Ganges is all there as well, a tragedy of temples and idols and wicked rajas and real water, with Davidge and Joey Guggenheim again for comic relief, though all in a coarser radiance, thanks to the absence of fairies and amazons and moonlit mechanical effects, the charm above all so seen of the play within the play. And I rank it in that relation with green bushes. Despite the celebrity in the latter of Madame Celeste, who came to us straight out of London, and whose admired walk up the stage is Miami the Huntress, a wonderful majestic and yet voluptuous stride, enhanced by a short kilt, black velvet leggings, and a gun hotly borne on the shoulder, is vividly before me as I write. The piece in question was, I recall, from the pen of Mr. Borsucho, as he then wrote his name. He was so early in the field, and must have been from long before, inasmuch as he now appears to me to have supplied Mr. Broom of the Lyceum of said, with his choicest productions. I sit again at London Assurance with Mrs. Wallach, Fanny Wallach, I think, not that I quite know who she was, as Lady Gay Spanker, flushed and vociferous, first in a riding habit with a tail yards long, and afterwards in a yellow satin with scarce a tail at all. I am present also at Love in a Maze, in which the stage represented with primitive art, I fear, a supposedly intricate garden labyrinth, and in which I admired for the first time Mrs. Russell, afterwards long before the public as Mrs. Hoey, even if opining that she wanted, especially for the low necked ordeal, less auspicious a structure. There are pieces of that general association, I admit, the clue to which slips from me. The drama of modern life and of French origin, though what was then not of French origin, in which Ms. Julia Bennett, fresh from triumphs at the Haymarket, made her first appearance in a very becoming white bonnet, either as a brilliant adventurous or as the innocent victim of licentious design, I forget which, though with a sense somehow that the white bonnet, one of true elegance, was the note at that period of the adventurers. Ms. Julia Bennett, with whom at a later age one was to renew acquaintance as the artful and ample Mrs. Barrow, full of manner and presence, and often Edwin Booth's Porsche, Desdemona, and Julie de Montemayre. I figure her, as having in the dimmer phase succeeded to Miss Laura Keane at Wallach's, on the succession thence of this original charmer of our parents, the flutter of whose prime advent is perfectly present to me, with the relish expressed for that English sweetness of her speech. I already wondered why it shouldn't be English, which was not as the speech mostly known to us. The uncles within my hearing even imitated for commendation some of her choicer sounds, to which I strained my ear on seeing her afterwards as Mrs. Chillington in the refined commietta of a morning call, where she made delightful game of Mr. Lester as Sir Edward Ardent, even to the point of causing him to crawl about on all fours and covered with her shawl after the fashion of a horse blanket. That delightful impression was then unconscious of the blight to come. That of my apprehending, years after, that the brilliant commietta was of the tribute of our Anglo-Saxon taste to Alfred de Musée's elegant proverb of the porte ouvert ou ferme, in which nothing could find itself less at home than the horseplay of the English version. Miss Laura Keane, with a native grace at the start, a fresh and delicate inspiration, I infer from the kind of pleasure she appears to have begun with giving, was to live to belie her promise and, becoming hard and rattled, forfeit on the evidence, all claim to the higher distinction. A fact not surprising under the lurid light projected by such a sign of the atmosphere of ineptitude, as an accepted and condoned perversion to vulgarity of Musée's perfect little work. How could quality of talent consort with so dire an absence of quality in the material offered it? Where could such lapses lead but to dust and desolation, and what happy instinct not be smothered in an air so dismally non-conducting? Is it a foolish fallacy that these matters may have been on occasion at that time worth speaking of? Is it only presumable that everything was perfectly cheap and common, and everyone perfectly bad and barbarous, and that even the least corruptible of our typical spectators were too easily beguiled and too helplessly kind? The beauty of the main truth, as to any remembered matter looked at in due detachment, or in other words through the haze of time, is that comprehension has then become one with criticism, compassion as it may be called, one with musing vision, and the whole company of the anciently restless, with their elations and mistakes, their sincerities and fallacies and vanities and triumphs, embalmed for us in the mild essence of their collective submission to fate. We needn't be strenuous about them unless we particularly want to, and are glad to remember in season all that this would imply of the strenuous about our own origins, our muddled initiations. If nothing is more certain for us than that many persons within our recollection couldn't help being rather generally unadmonished and unaware, so nothing is more in the note of peace than that such a perceived state pushed to a point makes our scales of judgment but ridiculously rattle. Our admonition, our superior awareness, is of many things, and among these of how infinitely at the worst they lived, the pale superseded, and how much it was by their virtue. Which reflections in the train of such memories as those just gathered may perhaps seem overstrained, though they really to my own eyes cause the images to multiply. Still others of these break in upon me and refuse to be slighted, reconstituting as I practically am the history of my fostered imagination for whatever it may be worth, I won't pretend to a disrespect for any contributive particle. I left myself just above staring at the Fifth Avenue poster, and I can't but linger there while the vision it evokes insists on swarming. It was the age of the arrangements of dickens for the stage, vamped up promptly on every scene, and which must have been the roughest theatrical thinker's work, but at two or three of which we certainly assisted. I associate them with Mr. Broom's Temple of Art, yet I am at the same time beset with the Captain Cuttle of Dombie and Son in the form of the Big Burton, who never, I earnestly conceive, graced that shrine, so that I wander a trifle confusedly. Isn't it he whom I remember as a monstrous macabre, the coarse parody of a charming creation, with the entire baldness of a huge easter egg, and collar points like the sails of Mediterranean faluchas? Dyer, of course, for all temperance in these connections was the need to conform to the illustrations of Fizz, himself already an improvising paradist, and happy only so long as not imitated, not literally reproduced, strange enough the aesthetic of artists who could desire but literally to reproduce. I give the whole question up, however. I stray too in the dust, and with the positive sense of having in the first place what languished at home, when my betters admired Miss Cushman, terribly out of the picture and the frame we should today pronounce her, I fear, as the Nancy of Oliver Twist. As far away this must have been as the lifetime of the prehistoric park, to which it was just within my knowledge that my elders went for opera, to come back on sounding those ritual Italian names, Bozio and Badiali, and Ronconi and Stefanoni, I am not sure I have them quite right. Signs of a rueful sound to us, that the line as to our infant participation was somewhere drawn. It had not been drawn, I all the more like to remember, when, under proper protection at Castle Garden, I listened to that rarest of infant phenomena, Adelina Patti, poised in an armchair that had been pushed to the footlights and announcing her incomparable gift. She was about her own age, she was one of us, even though at the same time the most prodigious of fairies, of glittering fables. That principle of selection was indeed in abeyance, while I sat with my mother, either at Tripler Hall or at Nibblos. I am vague about the occasion, but the names, as for fine old confused reasons, plead alike to my pen, and pay to homage, quite other than critical, I dare say, to the then slightly worn Henrietta Sontag, Countess Rossi, who struck us as supremely elegant in pink silk and white lace flounces, and with whom there had been for certain members of our circles some contact or intercourse that I have wonderingly lost. I learned at that hour, in any case, what acclamation might mean, and have again before me the vast high piled auditory thundering applause at the beautiful pink lady's clear bird notes. A thrilling tremendous experience, and my sole other memory of concert going at that age, saved the impression of a strange huddled hour in some smaller public space, some very minor hall under dim lamps and again in my mother's company, where we were so near the improvised platform that my nose was brushed by the petticoats of the distinguished amateur who sang Castediva, a very fine fair woman with a great heaving bosom and flirt of crinolin, and that the ring-lit Italian gentleman in black velvet and a romantic voluminous cloak who represented or rather who professionally and uncontrollably was, an improvisatore, had for me the effect as I crouched gaping of quite bellowing down my throat. That occasion, I am clear, was a concert for charity with the volunteer performance and the social patroness, and it had squeezed in where it could, at the same time that I somehow connect the place in Broadway on the right going down and not much below 4th Street, except that everything seems to me to have been just below 4th Street when not just above. With the scene of my great public exposure somewhat later, the wonderful exhibition of Sr. Blitz, the peerless conjurer who, on my attending his entertainment with W. J., and our frequent comrade of the early time, Hal Costa, practiced on my innocence to seduce me to the stage and there plunge me into the shame of my sad failure to account arithmetically for his bewilderingly subtracted or added or divided pocket handker chips and playing cards, a paralysis of wit as to which I once more and with the same wand despair feel my companion's shy telegraphy of relief, their snickering and mouthings and raised numerical fingers reach me from the benches. The second definite matter in the Dickens' connection is the smite of Miss Weston, whose prenome I frivolously forget, though I fear it was Lizzie, but who was afterwards Mrs. E. L. Davenport, and then, sequentially to some public strife or chatter, Mrs. Tarle's Matthews, in a version of Nicholas Nicolby that gracelessly managed to be all tearful melodrama, long lost found place, wicked Ralph Nicolby's and scowling Arthur Gryde's, with other baffled villains. And scarcely at all, Cromels' or Ken Wiggs' or much less Squeers' though there must have been something of dothaboy's haul for the proper tragedy of smite, and for the broad Yorkshire effect a precious theatrical value of John Brodie. The inefficibility was the anguish to my tender sense of Nicholas's starved and tattered and fawning and whining protege. In the face of my sharp retention of which, through all the years, who shall deny the immense authority of the theatre, or that the stage is the mightiest of modern engines? Such, at least, was to be the force of the Dickens' imprint, however applied, in the soft clay of our generation. It was to resist so serenely the wash of the waves of time. To be brought up thus against the author of it, or to speak at all of the dawn of one's early consciousness of it and his presence and power, is to begin to tread ground at once sacred and boundless, the associations of which, looming large, warn us off even while they hold. He did too much for us, surely even, to leave us free. Free of judgment, free of reaction, even should we care to be, which heaven forbid. He laid his hand on us, in a way to undermine, as in no other case, the power of detached appraisement. We react against other productions of the general kind, without liking them the less, but we somehow like Dickens the more, for having forfeited the claim to appreciation. The process belongs to the fact that criticism round about him is somehow futile and tactless. His own taste is easily impugned, but he entered so early into the blood and bone of our intelligence that it always remained better than the taste of overhauling him. When I take him up today and find myself holding off, I simply stop, not holding off, that is, but holding on, and from the very fear to do so, which sounds I recognize like perusal, like renewal, of the scantist. I don't renew, I wouldn't renew for the world, wouldn't, that is, with one's treasure so hoarded in the dusty chamber of youth, let in the intellectual air. Happy the house of life in which such chambers still hold out, even with the draft of the intellect whistling through the passages. We were practically contemporary, contemporary with the issues, though fluttering monthly numbers. That was the point. It made for us a good fortune, constituted for us in itself romance, on which nothing to the end succeeds in laying its hands. The whole question dwells for me in a single small reminiscence, though there are others still. That of my having been sent to bed one evening in 14th Street, as a very small boy, at an hour when, in the library and under the lamp, one of the elder cousins from Albany, the youngest of an orphaned brood of four, of my grandmother's most extravagant adoption, had begun to read aloud to my mother the new, which must have been the first, installment of David Copperfield. I had feigned to withdraw, but had only retreated to cover close at hand, the friendly shade of some screen or drooping tablecloth, folded up behind which, and glued to the carpet, I held my breath and listened. I listened long and drank deep while the wondrous picture grew, but the tense chord at last snapped under the strain of the murderstones, and I broke into the sobs of sympathy that disclosed my subterfuge. I was at this time effectively banished, but the ply then taken was ineffacable. I remember, indeed, just afterwards finding the sequel, in a special, the vast extrusion of the macabres beyond my actual capacity, which took a few years to grow adequate. Years in which the bleak, contagious consciousness, and our own household response, not least, breathed heavily through hard times, bleak house, and little Dorot, the seeds of acquaintance with chuzzle-wit and donbian sun, these coming thickly on, I had already found some. I was to feel that I had been born, born to a rich awareness under the very meridian. There sprouted in those years no such other crop of ready references as the golden harvest of Copperfield. Yet, if I was to wait to achieve the happier of these recognitions, I had already poured over Oliver Twist, albeit now uncertain of the relation born by that experience to the incident just recall. When Oliver was new to me at any rate, he was already old to my betters, whose view of his particular adventures and exposures must have been concerned, I think moreover, in the fact of my public and lively wonder about them. It was an exhibition deprecated to infant innocence, I judge, unless, indeed, my remembrance of enjoying it only on the terms of fitful snatches, in another, though kindred house, is due mainly to the existence there of George Crookshanks' splendid form of the work, of which our own foreground was clear. It perhaps even seemed to me more Crookshanks than Dickens's. It was a thing of such vividly terrible images, and all marked with that peculiarity of Crookshanks that the offered flowers or goodnesses, the scenes and figures intended to comfort and cheer, present themselves under his hand as but more subtly sinister or more suggestively queer than the frank badness and horrors. The nice people and the happy moments in the plates frightened me almost as much as the low and the awkward, which didn't, however, make the volumes a source of attraction the less, toward that high and square old back parlor just westward of Sixth Avenue, as we in the same street were related to it, that formed romantically half-hour alternative domestic field, and offered to our small inquiring steps a larger range and privilege. If the Dickens of those years was, as I have just called him, the great actuality of the current imagination, so I at once met him in force as a feature even of conditions in which he was but indirectly involved. For the other house, the house we most haunted after our own, was that of our cousin Albert, still another of the blessed orphans, though this time of our mother's kindred, and if it was my habit, as I have hinted, to attribute to orphans as orphans a circumstantial charm, a setting necessarily more delightful than our fathered and mothered one. So there spread about this appointed comrade the perfection of the type. It as much as he alone was neither brother nor sistered, an air of possibilities that were nonetheless vivid for being quite indefinite. He was to embody in due course, poor young man, some of these possibilities, those that had originally been for me the vaguest of all. But to fix his situation from my present view is not so much to wonder that it spoke to me of a wild freedom, as to see in it the elements of a rich and rounded picture. The frame was still there, but a short time since, cracked and empty, broken and gaping like those few others of the general overgrown scene that my late quest had puzzled out. And this has somehow helped me to read back into the old figures and the old long story told as with excellent art. We knew the figures well while they lasted, and had with them the happiest relation, but without doing justice to their truth of outline, their felicity of character, and force of expression and function, above all to the compositional harmony in which they moved. That lives again to my considering eyes, and I admire as never before the fine artistry of fate. Our cousin's guardian, the natural and the legal, was his aunt, his only one, who was the cousin of our mother and our own aunt, virtually our only one. So far as a felt and adopted closeness of kinship went, and the three daughters of two soul and much united sisters, having been brought up together as to have quite all the signs and accents of the same string and the same nest. The cousin Helen of our young prospect was thus all but the sister Helen of our mother's lifetime, as was to happen, and was scarcely less a stout brave presence and an emphasized character for the new generation than for the old, noted here as she was, in particular, for her fine old-time value of clearness and straightness. I see in her strong simplicity that of an earlier quieter world, of a New York of better manners and better morals and homelier beliefs, the very elements of some portrait by a grave dutch or other truth-seeking master. She looks out with some of these strong marks, the anxious honesty, the modest humor, the folded resting hands, the dark handsome serious attire, the important composed cap, almost the badge of a guild or an order that hang together about the images of past worthies of whatever sex, who have had, as one may say, the courage of their character, and qualify them for places in great collections. I note with appreciation that which she was strenuously actively good and had the liveliest impression both that no one was ever better and that her goodness somehow testifies for the whole tone of a society a remarkable cluster of private decencies. Her value to my imagination is even most of all perhaps in her mere local consistency. Her fine old New York ignorance and rigor. Her traditions, scant but stiff, had grown there close to her. They were all she needed and she lived by them candidly and stoutly. That there have been persons so little doubtful of duty helps to show us how societies grow. A proportionately small amount of absolute conviction about it will carry. We thus make out a vast dead weight of mere comparative. She was as anxious over hers indeed as if it had ever been in question, which is a proof perhaps that being void of imagination when you are quite entirely void makes scarcely more of a comfort than having too much, which only makes it in a manner for a homeless freedom or even at the worst for a questioned veracity. With a big installed conscience there is a virtue in a grain of the figurative faculty. It acts as oil to the stiff machine yet this life of straight and narrow insistences seated so clearly in our view didn't take up all the room in the other house the house of the picture the intermittent Oliver. Though of the fewer books in general than ours and of the finer proportions and less people spaces there were but three persons to fill them as well as of the more turbulent and powdered family portraits. One of these the most antique a French pastel which must have been charming of a young collateral ancestor who had died on the European tour. A vast marginal range seemed to me on the contrary to surround the adolescent nephew who was some three years I judge beyond me in age and had other horizons and prospects than ours. No question of Europe for him but a patriotic preparation for acquaintance with the south and west or what was then called the west. He was to see his own country first winking at us while he did so though he was in spite of differences so nearly and naturally neighboured and brothered with us that the extensions of his range and the charms of his position counted somehow as the limits and the humilities of ours. He went neither to our schools nor to our hotels but hovered out of our view in some other educational error that I can't now point to and had in a remote part of the state a vast wild property of his own known as the beaver kill to which so far from his aunts and his uncles taking him there he affably took them and to which he also vainly invited wj and me pointing thereby to us though indirectly enough perhaps the finest childish case we were to know for the famous acceptance of the inevitable it was apparently not to be thought of that instead of the inevitable we should accept the invitation the place was in the wilderness incalculably distant reached by a whole days rough drive from the railroad every danger of flood and field with prowling bears thrown in and probable loss of limb of which there were sad examples from swinging sides and axes but we of course measured our privation just by those facts and grew up so far as we did then grow to believe that pleasures beyond price had been cruelly denied us I at any rate myself grew up sufficiently to wonder if poor Albert's type as it developed to the anxious elder view from the first might not rather have undermined countenance his pleasant foolish face and odd shy air of being suspected or convicted on grounds less vague to himself than to us may well have appeared symptoms of the course of the rig he was eventually to run I could think of him but as the feast of family ideally constituted not that I could then use for him that designation but that I felt he must belong to an important special class which he in fact formed in his own person everything was right truly for these felicities to speak of them only as dramatic or pictorial values since if we were present all the while at more of a drama than we knew so at least to my vague divination the scene and the figures were there not excluding the chorus and I must have had the instinct of their being as right as possible I see the actors move again through the high rather bedimbed rooms it is always a matter of winter twilight firelight lamp light each one appointed to his or her part and perfect for the picture which gave a sense of fullness without ever being crowded that composition had to wait a while in the earliest time to find its proper center having been from the free point of view I thus cultivate a little encumbered by the presence of the most aged of our relatives the oldest person I remember to have familiarly known if it can be called familiar to have stood off in fear of such strange proofs of accomplished time our great aunt wickoff our maternal grandmother's eldest sister I infer and an image of living antiquity as I figure her today that I was never to see surpassed I invest her in this vision with all the idle quality that may accrue to the venerable solidly seated or even thrown hooded and draped and tucked in with big protective protrusive ears to her chair which helped it to the effect of a shrine and a large face in which the odd blackness of eyebrow and of a couple of other touches suggested the conventional marks of a painted image she signified her wants as divinities do for a recover from her presence neither sound nor stir remembering of her only that as described by her companions the pious ministers she had said so and so when she hadn't spoken at all was she really as she seemed so tremendously old so old that her daughter our mother's cousin Helen and ours would have had to come to her in middle life to account for it or did antiquity at that time set in earlier and was surrender of appearance and dress matching the intrinsic decay only more complacent more submissive and as you should say more abject I have my choice of these suppositions each in its way of so lively an interest that I scarce know which to prefer though inclining a little to the idea of the backward reach if ant wick off was as I first remember her scarce more than 70 say the thought fills me with one sort of joy the joy of our modern are so generally greater and no blur effect of duration who wouldn't more subtly strive for that effect and intelligently so striving reach it better than such non-questioners of fate the moral of whose case is surely that if they gave up too soon and softly we wiser witnesses can reverse the process and fight the whole ground but I apologize to the heavy shading question if she had really drained her conceivable cup and for that matter rather like to suppose it so rich and strange is the pleasure of finding the past the past above all answered for to one's own touch this being our only way to be sure of it it was the past that one touched in her the American past of a preponderant unthinkable queerness and great would seem the fortune of helping on the continuity at some other far end end of chapter nine