omesick Cubans and Mexicans; the complete failure of
blondness that marks the memory is doubtless the cumulative effect of so
many of the New York "petits pays chauds," preponderantly brown and
black and conducing to a greasy gloom. Into this gloom I fear I should
see all things recede together but for a certain salient note, the fact
that the whole "staff" appears to have been constantly in a rage; from
which naturally resulted the accent of shrillness (the only accent we
could pick up, though we were supposed to be learning, for the extreme
importance of it, quantities of French) and the sound of high
vociferation. I remember infuriated ushers, of foreign speech and
flushed complexion--the tearing across of hapless "exercises" and
_dictees_ and the hurtle through the air of dodged volumes; only never,
despite this, the extremity of smiting. There can have been at the
Institution no blows instructionally dealt--nor even from our hours of
ease do any such echoes come back to me. Little Cubans and Mexicans, I
make out, were not to be vulgarly whacked--in deference, presumably, to
some latent relic or imputed survival of Castilian pride; which would
impose withal considerations of quite practical prudence. Food for
reflection and comparison might well have been so suggested; interesting
at least the element of contrast between such opposed conceptions of
tone, temper and manner as the passion without whacks, or with whacks
only of inanimate objects, ruling the scene I have described, and the
whacks without passion, the grim, impersonal, strictly penal
applications of the rod, which then generally represented what was still
involved in our English tradition. It was the two theories of
sensibility, of personal dignity, that so diverged; but with such other
divergences now on top of those that the old comparison falls away. We
to-day go unwhacked altogether--though from a pride other than
Castilian: it is difficult to say at least what ideal has thus
triumphed. In the Vergnes air at any rate I seem myself to have sat
unscathed and unterrified--not alarmed even by so much as a call to the
blackboard; only protected by my insignificance, which yet covered such
a sense of our dusky squalor. Queer for us the whole affair, assuredly;
but how much queerer for the poor petits pays chauds who had come so far
for their privilege. _We_ had come, comparatively, but from round the
corner--and that left the "state of education" and the ran