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 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 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 betimes 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 doubtless 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
lustre, 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; convictio