recall it as most
intimately and objectionably near--and carried on in the interest of
those parents from New York who, in villeggiatura under the queer
conditions of those days, with the many modern mitigations of the
gregarious lot still unrevealed and the many refinements on the
individual one still undeveloped, welcomed almost any influence that
might help at all to form their children to civility. Yet I remember
that particular influence as more noisy and drowsy and dusty than
anything else--as to which it must have partaken strongly of the general
nature of New Brighton; a neighbourhood that no apt agency whatever had
up to that time concerned itself to fashion, and that was indeed to
remain shabbily shapeless for years; since I recall almost as dire an
impression of it received in the summer of 1875. I seem more or less to
have begun life, for that matter, with impressions of New Brighton;
there comes back to me another, considerably more infantile than that of
1854, so infantile indeed that I wonder at its having stuck--that of a
place called the Pavilion, which must have been an hotel sheltering us
for July and August, and the form of which to childish retrospect,
unprejudiced by later experience, was that of a great Greek temple
shining over blue waters in the splendour of a white colonnade and a
great yellow pediment. The elegant image remained, though imprinted in a
child so small as to be easily portable by a stout nurse, I remember,
and not less easily duckable; I gasp again, and was long to gasp, with
the sense of salt immersion received at her strong hands. Wonderful
altogether in fact, I find as I write, the quantity, the intensity of
picture recoverable from even the blankest and tenderest state of the
little canvas.

I connect somehow with the Pavilion period a visit paid with my
father--who decidedly must have liked to take me about, I feel so rich
in that general reminiscence--to a family whom we reached in what struck
me as a quite lovely embowered place, on a very hot day, and among whom
luxuries and eccentricities flourished together. They were numerous, the
members of this family, they were beautiful, they partook of their
meals, or were at the moment partaking of one, out of doors, and the
then pre-eminent figure in the group was a very big Newfoundland dog on
whose back I was put to ride. That must have been my first vision of the
liberal life--though I further ask myself what my age could pos