ion. He had to have a _relation_,
somehow expressed--and as he was the vividest and happiest of
letter-writers it rarely failed of coming; but once it was established
it served him, in every case, much better than fussy challenges, which
had always the drawback of involving lapses and inattentions in regard
to solicitudes more pressing. He incurably took for granted--incurably
because whenever he did so the process succeeded; with which
association, however, I perhaps overdrench my complacent vision of our
summer snatches at town. Through a grave accident in early life country
walks on rough roads were, in spite of his great constitutional
soundness, tedious and charmless to him; he liked on the other hand the
peopled pavement, the thought of which made him restless when away.
Hence the fidelities and sociabilities, however superficial, that he
couldn't _not_ reaffirm--if he could only reaffirm the others, the
really intimate and still more communicable, soon enough afterwards.

It was these of the improvised and casual sort that I shared with him
thus indelibly; for truly if we took the boat to town to do things I did
them quite as much as he, and so that a little boy could scarce have
done them more. My part may indeed but have been to surround his part
with a thick imaginative aura; but that constituted for me an activity
than which I could dream of none braver or wilder. We went to the office
of The New York Tribune--my father's relations with that journal were
actual and close; and that was a wonderful world indeed, with strange
steepnesses and machineries and noises and hurrying bare-armed,
bright-eyed men, and amid the agitation clever, easy, kindly, jocular,
partly undressed gentlemen (it was always July or August) some of whom I
knew at home, taking it all as if it were the most natural place in the
world. It was big to me, big to me with the breath of great vague
connections, and I supposed the gentlemen very old, though since aware
that they must have been, for the connections, remarkably young; and the
conversation of one of them, the one I saw oftenest up town, who
attained to great local and to considerable national eminence
afterwards, and who talked often and thrillingly about the theatres, I
retain as many bright fragments of as if I had been another little
Boswell. It was as if he had dropped into my mind the germ of certain
interests that were long afterwards to flower--as for instance on his
announci