mallest preserved particulars. These
things, at the pressure, flush together again, interweave their pattern
and quite thrust it at me, the absurd little fusion of images, for a
history or a picture of the time--the background of which I see after
all so much less as the harsh Sixth Avenue corner than as many other
matters. Those scant shades claimed us but briefly and superficially,
and it comes back to me that oddly enough, in the light of autumn
afternoons, our associates, the most animated or at any rate the best
"put in" little figures of our landscape, were not our comparatively
obscure schoolmates, who seem mostly to have swum out of our ken between
any day and its morrow. Our other companions, those we practically knew
"at home," ignored our school, having better or worse of their own, but
peopled somehow for us the social scene, which, figuring there for me in
documentary vividness, bristles with Van Burens, Van Winkles, De
Peysters, Costers, Senters, Norcoms, Robinsons (these last composing
round a stone-throwing "Eugene,") Wards, Hunts and _tutti quanti_--to
whose ranks I must add our invariable Albert, before-mentioned, and who
swarm from up and down and east and west, appearing to me surely to have
formed a rich and various society. Our salon, it is true, was mainly the
street, loose and rude and crude in those days at best--though with a
rapid increase of redeeming features, to the extent to which the spread
of micaceous brown stone could redeem: as exhibited especially in the
ample face of the Scotch Presbyterian church promptly rising just
opposite our own peculiar row and which it now marks for me somewhat
grimly a span of life to have seen laboriously rear itself, continuously
flourish and utterly disappear. While in construction it was only less
interesting than the dancing-academy of Mr. Edward Ferrero, slightly
west of it and forming with it, in their embryonic stage, a large and
delightfully dangerous adjunct to our playground, though with the
distinction of coming much to surpass it for interest in the final
phase. While we clambered about on ladders and toyed with the peril of
unfloored abysses, while we trespassed and pried and pervaded,
snatching a scant impression from sorry material enough, clearly, the
sacred edifice enjoyed a credit beyond that of the profane; but when
both were finished and opened we flocked to the sound of the fiddle more
freely, it need scarce be said, than to that of the