forage in New
York, a gift of such happy promise as the history of the long-legged Mr.
Hamilton and his two Bavarian beauties, the elder of whom, Hildegarde,
was to figure for our small generation as the very type of the haughty
as distinguished from the forward heroine (since I think our categories
really came to no more than those). I couldn't have got very far with
Hildegarde in moments so scant, but I memorably felt that romance was
thick round me--everything, at such a crisis, seeming to make for it at
once. The Boon Children, conveyed thus to New Brighton under care of a
lady in whose aspect the strain of the resolute triumphed over the note
of the battered, though the showy in it rather succumbed at the same
time to the dowdy, were already "billed," as infant phenomena, for a
performance that night at the Pavilion, where our attendance, it was a
shock to feel, couldn't be promised; and in gazing without charge at the
pair of weary and sleepy little mountebanks I found the histrionic
character and the dramatic profession for the first time revealed to me.
They filled me with fascination and yet with fear; they expressed a
melancholy grace and a sort of peevish refinement, yet seemed awfully
detached and indifferent, indifferent perhaps even to being pinched and
slapped, for art's sake, at home; they honoured me with no notice
whatever and regarded me doubtless as no better than one of the little
louts peeping through the tent of the show. In return I judged their
appearance dissipated though fascinating, and sought consolation for the
memory of their scorn and the loss of their exhibition, as time went on,
in noting that the bounds of their fame seemed somehow to have been
stayed. I neither "met" them nor heard of them again. The little
Batemans must have obscured their comparatively dim lustre, flourishing
at the same period and with a larger command of the pictorial poster and
the other primitive symbols in Broadway--such posters and such symbols
as they were at that time!--the little Batemans who were to be reserved,
in maturer form, for my much later and more grateful appreciation.

This weak reminiscence has obstructed, however, something more to the
purpose, the retained impression of those choicest of our loiterings
that took place, still far down-town, at the Bookstore, home of delights
and haunt of fancy. It was at the Bookstore we had called on the day of
The Initials and the Boon Children--and it was the