sconnecting the scene, by intention at
least, from the basely bourgeois and giving value to the whole effect of
opposed and windowed wall and important, or balanced and "placed,"
_perron_. These are many words for the dull precinct, as then presented,
I admit, and they are perhaps half prompted by a special association,
too ghostly now quite to catch again--the sense of certain Sundays,
distinct from the grim, that is the flatly instructional, body of the
week, when I seem to myself to have successfully flouted the whole
constituted field by passing across it and from it to some quite ideally
old-world little annexed _musee de province_, as inviolate in its way as
the grey rampart and bare citadel, and very like them in unrelieved
tone, where I repeatedly, and without another presence to hinder, looked
about me at goodness knows what weird ancientries of stale academic art.
Not one of these treasures, in its habit as it lived, do I recall; yet
the sense and the "note" of them was at the time, none the less, not so
elusive that I didn't somehow draw straight from them intimations of the
interesting, that is revelations of the aesthetic, the historic, the
critical mystery and charm of things (of such things taken altogether),
that added to my small loose handful of the seed of culture.

That apprehension was, in its way, of our house of learning too, and
yet I recall how, on the scant and simple terms I have glanced at, I
quite revelled in it; whereas other impressions of my brief ordeal
shrink, for anything in the nature of interest, but to three or four
recovered marks of the social composition of the school. There were the
sons of all the small shop-keepers and not less, by my remembrance, of
certain of the mechanics and artisans; but there was also the English
contingent, these predominantly _internes_ and uniformed, blue-jacketed
and brass-buttoned, even to an effect of odd redundancy, who by my
conceit gave our association a lift. Vivid still to me is the summer
morning on which, in the wide court--as wide, that is, as I liked to
suppose it, and where we hung about helplessly enough for recreation--a
brownish black-eyed youth, of about my own degree of youthfulness,
mentioned to me with an air that comes back as that of the liveliest
informational resource the outbreak, just heard of, of an awful Mutiny
in India, where his military parents, who had not so long before sent
him over thence, with such weakness of imagin