the old burial ground at Newport, the cradle of his
father's family. I should further pursue my subject through other
periods and places, other constantly "quiet" but vivid exhibitions, to
the very end of the story--which for myself was the impression, first,
of a little lonely, soft-voiced, gentle, relentless lady, in a dull
Surrey garden of a summer afternoon, more than half blind and all
dependent on the _dame de compagnie_ who read aloud to her that Saturday
Review which had ever been the prop and mirror of her opinions and to
which she remained faithful, her children estranged and outworn, dead
and ignored; and the vision, second and for a climax, of an old-world
rez-de-chaussee at Versailles, goal of my final pilgrimage, almost in
presence of the end (end of her very personal career, I mean, but not of
her perfectly firm spirit or of her charmingly smooth address).

I confess myself embarrassed by my very ease of re-capture of my young
consciousness; so that I perforce try to encourage lapses and keep my
abundance down. The place for the lapse consents with difficulty,
however, to be _any_ particular point of the past at which I catch
myself (easily caught as I am) looking about me; it has certainly
nothing in common with that coign of vantage enjoyed by me one June
afternoon of 1855 in the form of the minor share of the box of a
carriage that conveyed us for the first time since our babyhood, W. J.'s
and mine, through so much of a vast portentous London. I was an item in
the overflow of a vehicle completely occupied, and I thrilled with the
spectacle my seat beside the coachman so amply commanded--without
knowing at this moment why, amid other claims, I had been marked for
such an eminence. I so far justify my privilege at least as still to
feel that prime impression, of extreme intensity, underlie, deep down,
the whole mass of later observation. There are London aspects which, so
far as they still touch me, after all the years, touch me as just
sensible reminders of this hour of early apprehension, so penetrated for
me as to have kept its ineffaceable stamp. For at last we had come to
Europe--we had disembarked at Liverpool, but a couple of days before,
from that steamer Atlantic, of the Collins line, then active but so soon
to be utterly undone, of which I had kept a romantic note ever since a
certain evening of a winter or two before. I had on that occasion
assisted with my parents at a varied theatrical exhib