ander Robertson, a faint and diminished
replica of whose picture (the really fine original, as I remember it,
having been long since perverted from our view) I lately renewed
acquaintance with in a pious institution of his founding, where, after
more than one push northward and some easy accommodations, he lives on
into a world that knows him not and of some of the high improvements of
which he can little enough have dreamed. Of the world he had personally
known there was a feature or two still extant; the legend of his acres
and his local concerns, as well as of his solid presence among them, was
considerably cherished by us, though for ourselves personally the
relics of his worth were a lean feast to sit at. They were by some
invidious turn of fate all to help to constitute the heritage of our
young kinsman, the orphaned and administered _fils de famille_, whose
father, Alexander Wyckoff, son of our great-aunt and one of the two
brothers of cousin Helen, just discernibly flushes for me through the
ominous haze that preceded the worst visitation of cholera New York was
to know. Alexander, whom, early widowed and a victim of that visitation,
I evoke as with something of a premature baldness, of a blackness of
short whisker, of an expanse of light waistcoat and of a harmless pomp
of manner, appeared to have quite predominantly "come in" for the values
in question, which he promptly transmitted to his small motherless son
and which were destined so greatly to increase. There are clues I have
only lost, not making out in the least to-day why the sons of Aunt
Wyckoff should have been so happily distinguished. Our great-uncle of
the name isn't even a dim ghost to me--he had passed away beyond recall
before I began to take notice; but I hold, rightly, I feel, that it was
not to his person these advantages were attached. They could have
descended to our grandmother but in a minor degree--we should otherwise
have been more closely aware of them. It comes to me that so far as we
had at all been aware it had mostly gone off in smoke: I have still in
my ears some rueful allusion to "lands," apparently in the general
country of the Beaverkill, which had come to my mother and her sister as
their share of their grandfather Robertson's amplitude, among the
further-apportioned shares of their four brothers, only to be sacrificed
later on at some scant appraisement. It is in the nature of "lands" at a
distance and in regions imperfectly r