had come to America to lecture on The
English Humourists, and still present to me is the voice proceeding from
my father's library, in which some glimpse of me hovering, at an opening
of the door, in passage or on staircase, prompted him to the formidable
words: "Come here, little boy, and show me your extraordinary jacket!"
My sense of my jacket became from that hour a heavy one--further
enriched as my vision is by my shyness of posture before the seated, the
celebrated visitor, who struck me, in the sunny light of the animated
room, as enormously big and who, though he laid on my shoulder the hand
of benevolence, bent on my native costume the spectacles of wonder. I
was to know later on why he had been so amused and why, after asking me
if this were the common uniform of my age and class, he remarked that in
England, were I to go there, I should be addressed as "Buttons." It had
been revealed to me thus in a flash that we were somehow _queer_, and
though never exactly crushed by it I became aware that I at least felt
so as I stood with my head in Mr. Brady's vise. Beautiful most decidedly
the lost art of the daguerreotype; I remember the "exposure" as on this
occasion interminably long, yet with the result of a facial anguish far
less harshly reproduced than my suffered snapshots of a later age. Too
few, I may here interject, were to remain my gathered impressions of the
great humourist, but one of them, indeed almost the only other, bears
again on the play of his humour over our perversities of dress. It
belongs to a later moment, an occasion on which I see him familiarly
seated with us, in Paris, during the spring of 1857, at some repast at
which the younger of us too, by that time, habitually flocked, in our
affluence of five. Our youngest was beside him, a small sister, then not
quite in her eighth year, and arrayed apparently after the fashion of
the period and place; and the tradition lingered long of his having
suddenly laid his hand on her little flounced person and exclaimed with
ludicrous horror: "Crinoline?--I was suspecting it! So young and so
depraved!"

A fainter image, that of one of the New York moments, just eludes me,
pursue it as I will; I recover but the setting and the fact of his brief
presence in it, with nothing that was said or done beyond my being left
with my father to watch our distinguished friend's secretary, who was
also a young artist, establish his easel and proceed to paint. The
setti