had borne ourselves as prodigies or
prigs--which was as far as possible from being the case; we were bred in
horror of _conscious_ propriety, of what my father was fond of calling
"flagrant" morality; what I myself at any rate read back into our rare
educational ease, for the memory of some sides of which I was ever to be
thankful, is, besides the _general_ humanisation of our apprehended
world and our "social" tone, the unmistakeable appearance that my father
was again and again accompanied in public by his small second son: so
many young impressions come back to me as gathered at his side and in
his personal haunts. Not that he mustn't have offered his firstborn at
least equal opportunities; but I make out that he seldom led us forth,
such as we were, together, and my brother must have had in _his_ turn
many a mild adventure of which the secret--I like to put it so--perished
with him. He was to remember, as I perceived later on, many things that
I didn't, impressions I sometimes wished, as with a retracing jealousy,
or at least envy, that I might also have fallen direct heir to; but he
professed amazement, and even occasionally impatience, at my reach of
reminiscence--liking as he did to brush away old moral scraps in favour
of new rather than to hoard and so complacently exhibit them. If in my
way I collected the new as well I yet cherished the old; the ragbag of
memory hung on its nail in my closet, though I learnt with time to
control the habit of bringing it forth. And I say that with a due sense
of my doubtless now appearing to empty it into these pages.

I keep picking out at hazard those passages of our earliest age that
help to reconstruct for me even by tiny touches the experience of our
parents, any shade of which seems somehow to signify. I cherish, to the
extent of here reproducing, an old daguerreotype all the circumstances
of the taking of which I intensely recall--though as I was lately turned
twelve when I figured for it the feat of memory is perhaps not
remarkable. It documents for me in so welcome and so definite a manner
my father's cultivation of my company. It documents at the same time the
absurdest little legend of my small boyhood--the romantic tradition of
the value of being taken up from wherever we were staying to the queer
empty dusty smelly New York of midsummer: I apply that last term because
we always arrived by boat and I have still in my nostril the sense of
the _abords_ of the hot tow