ally aware of how little I
got or how much I did without. I read back into the whole connection
indeed the chill, or at least the indifference, of a foreseen and
foredoomed detachment: I have noted how at this desperate juncture the
mild forces making for our conscious relief, pushing the door to Europe
definitely open, began at last to be effective. Nothing seemed to matter
at all but that I should become personally and incredibly acquainted
with Piccadilly and Richmond Park and Ham Common. I regain at the same
time the impression of more experience on the spot than had marked our
small previous history.

Pitiful as it looks to these ampler days the mere little fact that a
small court for recreation was attached to our academy added something
of a grace to life. We descended in relays, for "intermission," into a
paved and walled yard of the scantest size; the only provision for any
such privilege--not counting the street itself, of which, at the worst
of other conditions, we must have had free range--that I recover from
those years. The ground is built over now, but I could still figure, on
a recent occasion, our small breathing-space; together with my then
abject little sense that it richly sufficed--or rather, positively, that
nothing could have been more romantic. For within our limit we freely
conversed, and at nothing did I assist with more interest than at free
conversation. Certain boys hover before me, the biggest, the fairest,
the most worthy of freedom, dominating the scene and scattering upon
fifty subjects the most surprising lights. One of these heroes, whose
stature and complexion are still there for me to admire, did tricks of
legerdemain, with the scant apparatus of a handkerchief, a key, a
pocket-knife--as to some one of which it is as fresh as yesterday that I
ingenuously invited him to show me how to do it, and then, on his
treating me with scorn, renewed without dignity my fond solicitation.
Fresher even than yesterday, fadelessly fresh for me at this hour, is
the cutting remark thereupon of another boy, who certainly wasn't
Simpson and whose identity is lost for me in his mere inspired
authority: "Oh, oh, oh, I should think you'd be too proud--!" I had
neither been too proud nor so much as conceived that one might be, but I
remember well how it flashed on me with this that I had failed thereby
of a high luxury or privilege--which the whole future, however, might
help me to make up for. To what exte