too much, and yet this mild
apparitionism is only part of it. To look back at all is to meet the
apparitional and to find in its ghostly face the silent stare of an
appeal. When I fix it, the hovering shade, whether of person or place,
it fixes me back and seems the less lost--not to my consciousness, for
that is nothing, but to its own--by my stopping however idly for it. The
day of the daguerreotype, the August afternoon, what was it if not one
of the days when we went to Union Square for luncheon and for more
ice-cream and more peaches and even more, even most, enjoyment of ease
accompanied by stimulation of wonder? It may have been indeed that a
visit to Mrs. Cannon rather on that occasion engaged us--memory selects
a little confusedly from such a wealth of experience. For the wonder was
the experience, and that was everywhere, even if I didn't so much find
it as take it with me, to be sure of not falling short. Mrs. Cannon
lurked near Fourth Street--_that_ I abundantly grasp, not more
definitely placing her than in what seemed to me a labyrinth of grave
bye-streets westwardly "back of" Broadway, yet at no great distance
from it, where she must have occupied a house at a corner, since we
reached her not by steps that went up to a front door but by others that
went slightly down and formed clearly an independent side access, a
feature that affected me as rich and strange. What the steps went down
to was a spacious room, light and friendly, so that it couldn't have
been compromised by an "area," which offered the brave mystification,
amid other mystifications, of being at once a parlour and a shop, a shop
in particular for the relief of gentlemen in want of
pockethandkerchiefs, neckties, collars, umbrellas and straw-covered
bottles of the essence known in old New York as "Cullone"--with a very
long and big O. Mrs. Cannon was always seated at some delicate white or
other needlework, as if she herself made the collars and the neckties
and hemmed the pockethandkerchiefs, though the air of this conflicts
with the sense of importation from remoter centres of fashion breathed
by some of the more thrilling of the remarks I heard exchanged, at the
same time that it quickened the oddity of the place. For the oddity was
in many things--above all perhaps in there being no counter, no rows of
shelves and no vulgar till for Mrs. Cannon's commerce; the parlour
clearly dissimulated the shop--and positively to that extent that I
migh