eclaimed to be spoken of always as
immense, and I at any rate entertained the sense that we should have
been great proprietors, in the far wilderness, if we had only taken more
interest. Our interests were peculiarly urban--though not indeed that
this had helped us much. Something of the mystery of the vanished acres
hung for me about my maternal uncle, John Walsh, the only one who
appeared to have been in respect to the dim possessions much on the
spot, but I too crudely failed of my chance of learning from him what
had become of them.

Not that they had seen _him_, poor gentleman, very much further, or that
I had any strong sense of opportunity; I catch at but two or three
projections of him, and only at one of his standing much at his ease: I
see him before the fire in the Fourteenth Street library, sturdy, with
straight black hair and as if the Beaverkill had rather stamped him, but
clean-shaven, in a "stock" and a black frock-coat--I hear him perhaps
still more than I see him deliver himself on the then great subject of
Jenny Lind, whom he seemed to have emerged from the wilderness to listen
to and as to whom I remember thinking it (strange small critic that I
must have begun to be) a note of the wilderness in him that he spoke of
her as "Miss Lind"; albeit I scarce know, and must even less have known
then, what other form he could have used. The rest of my sense of him is
tinged with the ancient pity--that of our so exercised response in those
years to the general sad case of uncles, aunts and cousins obscurely
afflicted (the uncles in particular) and untimely gathered. Sharp to me
the memory of a call, one dusky wintry Sunday afternoon, in Clinton
Place, at the house of my uncle Robertson Walsh, then the head of my
mother's family, where the hapless younger brother lay dying; whom I was
taken to the top of the house to see and of the sinister twilight
grimness of whose lot, stretched there, amid odours of tobacco and of
drugs, or of some especial strong drug, in one of the chambers of what I
remember as a remote and unfriended arching attic, probably in fact the
best place of prescribed quiet, I was to carry away a fast impression.
All the uncles, of whichever kindred, were to come to seem sooner or
later to be dying, more or less before our eyes, of melancholy matters;
and yet their general story, so far as one could read it, appeared the
story of life. I conceived at any rate that John Walsh, celibate, lonely
a