ad of the inevitable we should
accept the invitation; the place was in the wilderness, incalculably
distant, reached by a whole day's rough drive from the railroad, through
every danger of flood and field, with prowling bears thrown in and
probable loss of limb, of which there were sad examples, from swinging
scythes and axes; but we of course measured our privation just by those
facts, and grew up, so far as we did then grow, to believe that
pleasures beyond price had been cruelly denied us. I at any rate myself
grew up sufficiently to wonder if poor Albert's type, as it developed to
the anxious elder view from the first, mightn't rather have undermined
countenance; his pleasant foolish face and odd shy air of being
suspected or convicted on grounds less vague to himself than to us may
well have appeared symptoms of the course, of the "rig," he was
eventually to run. I could think of him but as the _fils de famille_
ideally constituted; not that I could then use for him that designation,
but that I felt he must belong to an important special class, which he
in fact formed in his own person. Everything was right, truly, for these
felicities--to speak of them only as dramatic or pictorial values; since
if we were present all the while at more of a drama than we knew, so at
least, to my vague divination, the scene and the figures were there, not
excluding the chorus, and I must have had the instinct of their being as
right as possible. I see the actors move again through the high, rather
bedimmed rooms--it is always a matter of winter twilight, firelight,
lamplight; each one appointed to his or her part and perfect for the
picture, which gave a sense of fulness without ever being crowded.

That composition had to wait awhile, in the earliest time, to find its
proper centre, having been from the free point of view I thus cultivate
a little encumbered by the presence of the most aged of our relatives,
the oldest person I remember to have familiarly known--if it can be
called familiar to have stood off in fear of such strange proofs of
accomplished time: our Great-aunt Wyckoff, our maternal grandmother's
elder sister, I infer, and an image of living antiquity, as I figure her
to-day, that I was never to see surpassed. I invest her in this vision
with all the idol-quality that may accrue to the venerable--solidly
seated or even throned, hooded and draped and tucked-in, with big
protective protrusive ears to her chair which hel