nd good-naturedly black-browed, had been sacrificed to the far-off
Robertson acres, which on their side had been sacrificed to I never knew
what. The point of my divagation, however, is that the Barmecide banquet
of another tract of the same _provenance_ was always spread for us
opposite the other house, from which point it stretched, on the north
side of the street, to Sixth Avenue; though here we were soon to see it
diminished at the corner by a structure afterwards known to us as our
prosiest New York school. This edifice, devoted to-day to other uses,
but of the same ample insignificance, still left for exploitation at
that time an uncovered town-territory the transmitted tale of which was
that our greatgrandfather, living down near the Battery, had had his
country villa or, more strictly speaking, his farm there, with free
expanses roundabout. Shrunken though the tract a part of it remained--in
particular a space that I remember, though with the last faintness, to
have seen appeal to the public as a tea-garden or open-air cafe, a haunt
of dance and song and of other forms of rather ineffective gaiety. The
subsequent conversion of the site into the premises of the French
Theatre I was to be able to note more distinctly; resorting there in the
winter of 1874-5, though not without some wan detachment, to a series
of more or less exotic performances, and admiring in especial the high
and hard virtuosity of Madame Ristori, the unfailing instinct for the
wrong emphasis of the then acclaimed Mrs. Rousby (I still hear the
assured "Great woman, great woman!" of a knowing friend met as I went
out,) and the stout fidelity to a losing game, as well as to a truth not
quite measurable among us, of the late, the but lugubriously-comic, the
blighted John Toole.

These are glimmering ghosts, though that drama of the scene hard by at
which I have glanced gives me back its agents with a finer intensity.
For the long action set in, as I have hinted, with the death of Aunt
Wyckoff, and, if rather taking its time at first to develop, maintained
to the end, which was in its full finality but a few years since, the
finest consistency and unity; with cousin Helen, in rich prominence, for
the heroine; with the pale adventurous Albert for the hero or young
protagonist, a little indeed in the sense of a small New York Orestes
ridden by Furies; with a pair of confidants in the form first of the
heroine's highly respectable but quite negligible