e coaevals and coequals. They were
something better--better above all than the coequal or coaeval; they were
so thoroughly figures and characters, divinities or demons, and endowed
in this light with a vividness that the mere reality of relation, a
commoner directness of contact, would have made, I surmise,
comparatively poor. This superior shade of interest was not, none the
less, so beguiling that I recall without unmitigated horror, or
something very like it, a winter passed with my brother at the
Institution Vergnes; our sorry subjection to which argues to my present
sense an unmitigated surrounding aridity. To a "French school" must have
been earnestly imputed the virtue of keeping us in patience till easier
days should come; infinitely touching our parents' view of that New York
fetish of our young time, an "acquisition of the languages"--an
acquisition reinforcing those opportunities which we enjoyed at home, so
far as they mustered, and at which I have briefly glanced. Charming and
amusing to me indeed certain faint echoes, wavering images, of this
superstition as it played about our path: ladies and gentlemen, dimly
foreign, mere broken syllables of whose names come back to me, attending
there to converse in tongues and then giving way to others through
failures of persistence--whether in pupils or preceptors I know not.
There hovers even Count Adam Gurowski, Polish, patriotic, exiled,
temporarily famous, with the vision of _his_ being invoked for facility
and then relinquished for difficulty; though I scarce guess on which of
his battle-grounds--he was so polyglot that he even had a rich command
of New Yorkese.

XV

It is to the Institution Vergnes that my earliest recovery of the sense
of being in any degree "educated with" W. J. attaches itself; an
establishment which occupied during the early 'fifties a site in the
very middle of Broadway, of the lower, the real Broadway, where it could
throb with the very pulse of the traffic in which we all innocently
rejoiced--believing it, I surmise, the liveliest conceivable: a fact
that is by itself, in the light of the present, an odd rococo note. The
lower Broadway--I allude to the whole Fourth Street and Bond Street
(where now _is_ the Bond Street of that antiquity?)--was then a seat of
education, since we had not done with it, as I shall presently show,
even when we had done with the Institution, a prompt disillusionment;
and I brood thus over a period w