his lips (his vocabulary was scant and stiff, the vocabulary of pleading
explanation, often found too complicated by the witty,) retired once
more to his room sometimes indeed for hours, to think it all over again;
but had never failed of sobriety or propriety or punctuality or
regularity, never failed of one of the virtues his imputed indifference
to which had been the ground of his discipline. It was very
extraordinary, and of all the stories I know is I think the most
beautiful--so far at least as _he_ was concerned! The flaw I have
mentioned, the one break in the final harmony, was the death of our
admirable aunt too soon, shortly before his own and while, taken with
illness at the same time, he lay there deprived of her attention. He had
that of the gentlewomen, however, two or three of the wisest and
tenderest being deputed by the others; and if his original estate
reverted at law they presently none the less had occasion to bless his
name.

XII

I turn round again to where I last left myself gaping at the old
ricketty bill-board in Fifth Avenue; and am almost as sharply aware as
ever of the main source of its spell, the fact that it most often blazed
with the rich appeal of Mr. Barnum, whose "lecture-room," attached to
the Great American Museum, overflowed into posters of all the theatrical
bravery disavowed by its title. It was my rueful theory of those
days--though tasteful I may call it too as well as rueful--that on all
the holidays on which we weren't dragged to the dentist's we attended as
a matter of course at Barnum's, that is when we were so happy as to be
able to; which, to my own particular consciousness, wasn't every time
the case. The case was too often, to my melancholy view, that W. J.,
quite regularly, on the non-dental Saturdays, repaired to this seat of
joy with the easy Albert--_he_ at home there and master of the scene to
a degree at which, somehow, neither of us could at the best arrive; he
quite moulded, truly, in those years of plasticity, as to the aesthetic
bent and the determination of curiosity, I seem to make out, by the
general Barnum association and revelation. It was not, I hasten to add,
that I too didn't, to the extent of my minor chance, drink at the
spring; for how else should I have come by the whole undimmed sense of
the connection?--the weary waiting, in the dusty halls of humbug, amid
bottled mermaids, "bearded ladies" and chill dioramas, for the
lecture-room, the