ng signally forfeited a title. It glimmers back to me
that I quite definitely and resignedly thought of him as in the most
exemplary manner already beforehand with me, already seated at his task
when the attempt to drag me crying and kicking to the first hour of my
education failed on the threshold of the Dutch House in Albany after the
fashion I have glanced at in a collection of other pages than these
(just as I remember to have once borrowed a hint from our grandmother's
"interior" in a work of imagination). That failure of my powers or that
indifference to them, my retreat shrieking from the Dutch House, was to
leave him once for all already there an embodied demonstration of the
possible--already wherever it might be that there was a question of my
arriving, when arriving at all, belatedly and ruefully; as if he had
gained such an advance of me in his sixteen months' experience of the
world before mine began that I never for all the time of childhood and
youth in the least caught up with him or overtook him. He was always
round the corner and out of sight, coming back into view but at his
hours of extremest ease. We were never in the same schoolroom, in the
same game, scarce even in step together or in the same phase at the same
time; when our phases overlapped, that is, it was only for a moment--he
was clean out before I had got well in. How far he had really at any
moment dashed forward it is not for me now to attempt to say; what
comes to me is that I at least hung inveterately and woefully back, and
that this relation alike to our interests and to each other seemed
proper and preappointed. I lose myself in wonder at the loose ways, the
strange process of waste, through which nature and fortune may deal on
occasion with those whose faculty for application is all and only in
their imagination and their sensibility. There may be during those
bewildered and brooding years so little for them to "show" that I liken
the individual dunce--as he so often must appear--to some commercial
traveller who has lost the key to his packed case of samples and can but
pass for a fool while other exhibitions go forward.

I achieve withal a dim remembrance of my final submission, though it is
the faintest ghost of an impression and consists but of the bright blur
of a dame's schoolroom, a mere medium for small piping shuffling sound
and suffered heat, as well as for the wistfulness produced by
"glimmering squares" that were fitfully