y 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 neighbouring dame's-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 ailanthus-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 beanlike slips which they lighted and smoked, the
smaller ones 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 neighbourhood, elements that had their match, and more, hard
by the Fourteenth 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
breadth 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
theatre. 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 migh