he relation borne by that experience to the incident just recalled.
When Oliver was new to me, at any rate, he was already old to my
betters; whose view of his particular adventures and exposures must have
been concerned, I think, moreover, in the fact of my public and lively
wonder about them. It was an exhibition deprecated--to infant innocence
I judge; unless indeed my remembrance of enjoying it only on the terms
of fitful snatches in another, though a kindred, house is due mainly to
the existence there of George Cruikshank's splendid form of the work,
of which our own foreground was clear. It perhaps even seemed to me more
Cruikshank's than Dickens's; it was a thing of such vividly terrible
images, and all marked with that peculiarity of Cruikshank that the
offered flowers or goodnesses, the scenes and figures intended to
comfort and cheer, present themselves under his hand as but more subtly
sinister, or more suggestively queer, than the frank badnesses and
horrors. The nice people and the happy moments, in the plates,
frightened me almost as much as the low and the awkward; which didn't
however make the volumes a source of attraction the less toward that
high and square old back-parlour just westward of Sixth Avenue (as we in
the same street were related to it) that formed, romantically, half our
alternative domestic field and offered to our small inquiring steps a
larger range and privilege. If the Dickens of those years was, as I have
just called him, the great actuality of the current imagination, so I at
once meet him in force as a feature even of conditions in which he was
but indirectly involved.

For the other house, the house we most haunted after our own, was that
of our cousin Albert, still another of the blest orphans, though this
time of our mother's kindred; and if it was my habit, as I have hinted,
to attribute to orphans as orphans a circumstantial charm, a setting
necessarily more delightful than our father'd and mother'd one, so
there spread about this appointed comrade, the perfection of the type,
inasmuch as he alone was neither brother'd nor sister'd, an air of
possibilities that were none the less vivid for being quite indefinite.
He was to embody in due course, poor young man, some of these
possibilities--those that had originally been for me the vaguest of all;
but to fix his situation from my present view is not so much to wonder
that it spoke to me of a wild freedom as to see in it the elem