dably towered Kiss's
mounted Amazon attacked by a leopard or whatever, a work judged at that
day sublime and the glory of the place; so that I felt the journey back
in the autumn dusk and the Sixth Avenue cars (established just in time)
a relapse into soothing flatness, a return to the Fourteenth Street
horizon from a far journey and a hundred looming questions that would
still, tremendous thought, come up for all the personal answers of which
one cultivated the seed.

XIII

Let me hurry, however, to catch again that thread I left dangling from
my glance at our small vague spasms of school--my personal sense of them
being as vague and small, I mean, in contrast with the fuller and
stronger cup meted out all round to the Albany cousins, much more
privileged, I felt, in every stroke of fortune; or at least much more
interesting, though it might be wicked to call them more happy, through
those numberless bereavements that had so enriched their existence. I
mentioned above in particular the enviable consciousness of our little
red-headed kinsman Gus Barker, who, as by a sharp prevision, snatched
what gaiety he might from a life to be cut short, in a cavalry dash, by
one of the Confederate bullets of 1863: he blew out at us, on New York
Sundays, as I have said, sharp puffs of the atmosphere of the
Institution Charlier--strong to us, that is, the atmosphere of whose
institutions was weak; but it was above all during a gregarious visit
paid him in a livelier field still that I knew myself merely mother'd
and brother'd. It had been his fate to be but scantly the latter and
never at all the former--our aunt Janet had not survived his birth; but
on this day of our collective pilgrimage to Sing-Sing, where he was at a
"military" school and clad in a fashion that represented to me the very
panoply of war, he shone with a rare radiance of privation. Ingenuous
and responsive, of a social disposition, a candour of gaiety, that
matched his physical activity--the most beautifully made athletic little
person, and in the highest degree appealing and engaging--he not only
did us the honours of his dazzling academy (dazzling at least to me) but
had all the air of showing us over the great State prison which even
then flourished near at hand and to which he accompanied us; a party of
a composition that comes back to me as wonderful, the New York and
Albany cousinships appearing to have converged and met, for the happy
occasion, wit