repeat, but
the state of easy wonder, is what most comes back: the stops too
repeated, but perversely engaging; the heat and the glare too great, but
the river, by the window, making reaches and glimpses, so that the
great swing of picture and force of light and colour were themselves a
constant adventure; the uncles, above all, too pre-eminent, too
recurrent, to the creation of a positive soreness of sympathy, of
curiosity, and yet constituting by their presence half the enlargement
of the time. For the presence of uncles, incoherent Albany uncles, is
somehow what most gives these hours their stamp for memory. I scarce
know why, nor do I much, I confess, distinguish occasions--but I see
what I see: the long, the rattling car of the old open native form and
the old harsh native exposure; the sense of arrival forever postponed,
qualified however also by that of having in my hands a volume of M.
Arsene Houssaye, Philosophes et Comediennes, remarkably submitted by one
of my relatives to my judgment. I see them always, the relatives, in
slow circulation; restless and nervous and casual their note, not less
than strikingly genial, but with vaguenesses, lapses, eclipses, that
deprived their society of a tactless weight. They cheered us on, in
their way; born optimists, clearly, if not logically determined ones,
they were always reassuring and sustaining, though with a bright brevity
that must have taken immensities, I think, for granted. They wore their
hats slightly toward the nose, they strolled, they hung about, they
reported of progress and of the company, they dropped suggestions, new
magazines, packets of the edible deprecated for the immature; they
figured in fine to a small nephew as the principal men of their time
and, so far as the two younger and more familiar were concerned, the
most splendid as to aspect and apparel. It was none the less to the
least shining, though not essentially the least comforting, of this
social trio that, if I rightly remember, I owed my introduction to the
_chronique galante_ of the eighteenth century.

There tags itself at any rate to the impression a flutter as of some
faint, some recaptured, grimace for another of his kindly offices (which
I associate somehow with the deck of a steamboat:) his production for
our vague benefit of a literary classic, the Confessions, as he called
our attention to them, of the celebrated "Rosseau" I catch again the
echo of the mirth excited, to my surpris