fancy could assimilate. One's record becomes, under memories of
this order--and that is the only trouble--a tale of assimilations small
and fine; out of which refuse, directly interesting to the
subject-victim only, the most branching vegetations may be conceived as
having sprung. Such are the absurdities of the poor dear inward
life--when translated, that is, and perhaps ineffectually translated,
into terms of the outward and trying at all to flourish on the lines of
the outward; a reflection that might stay me here weren't it that I
somehow feel morally affiliated, tied as by knotted fibres, to the
elements involved.

One of these was assuredly that my father had again, characteristically,
suffered me to dangle; he having been called to Linwood by the dire
trouble of his sister, Mrs. Temple, and brought me with him from Staten
Island--I make the matter out as of the summer of '54. We had come up,
he and I, to New York; but our doings there, with the journey following,
are a blank to me; I recover but my sense, on our arrival, of being for
the first time in the presence of tragedy, which the shining scene,
roundabout, made more sinister--sharpened even to the point of my
feeling abashed and irrelevant, wondering why I had come. My aunt, under
her brother's roof, had left her husband, wasted with consumption, near
death at Albany; gravely ill herself--she had taken the disease from him
as it was taken in those days, and was in the event very scantly to
survive him--she had been ordered away in her own interest, for which
she cared no scrap, and my father, the person in all his family most
justly appealed and most anxiously listened to, had been urged to come
and support her in a separation that she passionately rejected. Vivid to
me still, as floating across verandahs into the hot afternoon stillness,
is the wail of her protest and her grief; I remember being scared and
hushed by it and stealing away beyond its reach. I remember not less
what resources of high control the whole case imputed, for my
imagination, to my father; and how, creeping off to the edge of the
eminence above the Hudson, I somehow felt the great bright harmonies of
air and space becoming one with my rather proud assurance and
confidence, that of my own connection, for life, for interest, with
such sources of light. The great impression, however, the one that has
brought me so far, was another matter: only that of the close,
lamp-tempered, outer eve