broken promises, orphaned children. It
sounds cold-blooded, but part of the charm of our grandmother's house
for us--or I should perhaps but speak for myself--was in its being so
much and so sociably a nurseried and playroomed orphanage. The children
of her lost daughters and daughters-in-law overflowed there, mainly as
girls; on whom the surviving sons-in-law and sons occasionally and most
trustingly looked in. Parentally bereft cousins were somehow more
thrilling than parentally provided ones; and most thrilling when, in the
odd fashion of that time, they were sent to school in New York as a
preliminary to their being sent to school in Europe. They spent scraps
of holidays with us in Fourteenth Street, and I think my first childish
conception of the enviable lot, formed amid these associations, was to
be so little fathered or mothered, so little sunk in the short range,
that the romance of life seemed to lie in some constant improvisation,
by vague overhovering authorities, of new situations and horizons. We
were intensely domesticated, yet for the very reason perhaps that we
felt our young bonds easy; and they were so easy compared to other small
plights of which we had stray glimpses that my first assured conception
of true richness was that we should be sent separately off among cold or
even cruel aliens in order to be there thrillingly homesick.
Homesickness was a luxury I remember craving from the tenderest age--a
luxury of which I was unnaturally, or at least prosaically, deprived.
Our motherless cousin Augustus Barker came up from Albany to the
Institution Charlier--unless it was, as I suspect, a still earlier
specimen, with a name that fades from me, of that type of French
establishment for boys which then and for years after so incongruously
flourished in New York; and though he professed a complete satisfaction
with pleasures tasted in our innocent society I felt that he was engaged
in a brave and strenuous adventure while we but hugged the comparatively
safe shore.

II

We were day-boys, William and I, at dispensaries of learning the number
and succession of which to-day excite my wonder; we couldn't have
changed oftener, it strikes me as I look back, if our presence had been
inveterately objected to, and yet I enjoy an inward certainty that, my
brother being vividly bright and I quite blankly innocuous, this
reproach was never brought home to our house. It was an humiliation to
me at first, smal