ge of
selection all about as quaint enough. What could these things then have
been in the various native climes of the petits pays chauds?

It was by some strong wave of reaction, clearly, that we were floated
next into the quieter haven of Mr. Richard Pulling Jenks--where cleaner
waters, as I feel their coolness still, must have filled a neater
though, it was true, slightly more contracted trough. Yet the range of
selection had been even on this higher plane none too strikingly
exemplified; our jumping had scant compass--we still grubbed with a good
conscience in Broadway and sidled about Fourth Street. But I think of
the higher education as having there, from various causes, none the less
begun to glimmer for us. A diffused brightness, a kind of high
crosslight of conflicting windows, rests for me at all events on the
little realm of Mr. Pulling Jenks and bathes it as with positively sweet
limitations. Limited must it have been, I feel, with our couple of
middling rooms, front and back, our close packing, our large
unaccommodating stove, our grey and gritty oilcloth, and again our
importunate Broadway; from the aggregation of which elements there
distils itself, without my being able to account for it, a certain
perversity of romance. I speak indeed here for myself in particular, and
keen for romance must I have been in such conditions, I admit; since the
sense of it had crept into a recreational desert even as utter as that
of the Institution Vergnes. Up out of Broadway we still scrambled--I can
smell the steep and cold and dusty wooden staircase; straight into
Broadway we dropped--I feel again the generalised glare of liberation;
and I scarce know what tenuity of spirit it argues that I should neither
have enjoyed nor been aware of missing (speaking again for myself only)
a space wider than the schoolroom floor to react and knock about in. I
literally conclude that we must have knocked about in Broadway, and in
Broadway alone, like perfect little men of the world; we must have been
let loose there to stretch our legs and fill our lungs, without
prejudice either to our earlier and later freedoms of going and coming.
I as strictly infer, at the same time, that Broadway must have been then
as one of the alleys of Eden, for any sinister contact or consequence
involved for us; a circumstance that didn't in the least interfere, too,
as I have noted, with its offer of an entrancing interest. The interest
verily could have