fined and composed
significance of Mrs. Cannon's scene.

Union Square was a different matter, though with the element there also
that I made out that I _didn't_ make out (my sense of drama was in this
case, I think, rather more frightened off than led on;) a drawback for
which, however, I consoled myself by baked apples and custards, an
inveterate feature of our Sunday luncheon there (those of weekdays
being various and casual) and by a study of a great store, as it seemed
to me, of steel-plated volumes, devoted mainly to the heroines of
Romance, with one in particular, presenting those of Shakespeare, in
which the plates were so artfully coloured and varnished, and complexion
and dress thereby so endeared to memory, that it was for long afterwards
a shock to me at the theatre not to see just those bright images, with
their peculiar toggeries, come on. I was able but the other day,
moreover, to renew almost on the very spot the continuity of
contemplation; large lumpish presences, precarious creations of a day,
seemed to have elbowed out of the Square all but one or two of the minor
monuments, pleasant appreciable things, of the other time; yet close to
University Place the old house of the picture-books and the custards and
the domestic situation had, though disfigured and overscored, not quite
received its death-stroke; I disengaged, by a mere identification of
obscured window and profaned portico, a whole chapter of history; which
fact should indeed be a warning to penetration, a practical plea here
for the superficial--by its exhibition of the rate at which the
relations of any gage of experience multiply and ramify from the moment
the mind begins to handle it. I pursued a swarm of such relations, on
the occasion I speak of, up and down West Fourteenth Street and over to
Seventh Avenue, running most of them to earth with difficulty, but
finding them at half a dozen points quite confess to a queer stale
sameness. The gage of experience, as I say, had in these cases been
strangely spared--the sameness had in two or three of them held out as
with conscious craft. But these are impressions I shall presently find
it impossible not to take up again at any cost.

I first "realised" Fourteenth Street at a very tender age, and I
perfectly recall that flush of initiation, consisting as it did of an
afternoon call with my father at a house there situated, one of an
already fairly mature row on the south side and quite near Si