our company, which was not
numerous but practically, but appreciably "select," on a higher and
fairer plane than ever yet. Predominantly of course we owed this benefit
to Richard Pulling himself; of whom I recall my brother's saying to me,
at a considerably later time, and with an authority that affected me as
absolute, that he had been of all our masters the most truly genial, in
fact the only one to whom the art of exciting an interest or inspiring a
sympathy could be in any degree imputed. I take this to have meant that
he would have adorned a higher sphere--and it may have been, to explain
his so soon swimming out of our ken, that into a higher sphere he
rapidly moved; I can account at least for our falling away from him the
very next year and declining again upon baser things and a lower
civilisation but by some probability of his flight, just thereafter
effected, to a greater distance, to one of the far upper reaches of the
town. Some years must have elapsed and some distinction have crowned
him when, being briefly in New York together, W. J. and I called on him
of a Sunday afternoon, to find--what I hadn't been at all sure of--that
he still quite knew who we were, or handsomely pretended to; handsomely
in spite of his markedly confirmed identity of appearance with the
Punch, husband to Judy, of the funny papers and the street show. Bald,
rotund, of ruddy complexion, with the nose, the chin, the arched eye,
the paunch and the _barbiche_, to say nothing of the ferule nursed in
his arms and with which, in the show, such free play is made, Mr. Jenks
yet seems to me to have preserved a dignity as well as projected an
image, and in fact have done other things besides. He whacked
occasionally--he must have been one of the last of the whackers; but I
don't remember it as ugly or dreadful or droll--don't remember, that is,
either directly feeling or reflectively enjoying it: it fails somehow to
break the spell of our civilisation; my share in which, however, comes
back to me as merely contemplative. It is beyond measure odd, doubtless,
that my main association with my "studies," whether of the infant or the
adolescent order, should be with almost anything but the fact of
learning--of learning, I mean, what I was supposed to learn. I could
only have been busy, at the same time, with other pursuits--which must
have borne some superficial likeness at least to the acquisition of
knowledge of a free irresponsible sort; since I