usin J. J. as dimly aware
of this while composing the light melodies that preluded to his
extinction, and which that catastrophe so tried to admonish us to think
of as promising; but his image is more present to me still as the great
incitement, during the few previous years, to our constant dream of
"educational" relief, of some finer kind of social issue, through
Europe.

It was to Europe J. J. had been committed; he was over there forging the
small apologetic arms that were so little to avail him, but it was quite
enough for us that he pointed the way to the Pension Sillig, at Vevey,
which shone at us, from afar, as our own more particular solution. It
was true that the Pension Sillig figured mainly as the solution in cases
of recognised wildness; there long flourished among New York parents
whose view of such resources had the proper range a faith in it for that
complaint; and it was as an act of faith that, failing other remedies,
our young wifeless uncle, conscious himself of no gift for control or
for edification, had placed there his difficult son. He returned with
delight from this judicious course and there was an hour when we
invoked, to intensity, a similar one in our own interest and when the
air of home did little but reflect from afar the glitter of blue Swiss
lakes, the tinkle of cattle-bells in Alpine pastures, the rich
_bonhomie_ that M. Sillig, dispensing an education all of milk and honey
and edelweiss and ranz-des-vaches, combined with his celebrated firmness
for tough subjects. Poor J. J. came back, I fear, much the same subject
that he went; but he had verily performed his scant office on earth,
that of having brought our then prospect, our apparent possibility, a
trifle nearer. He seemed to have been wild even beyond M. Sillig's
measure--which was highly disappointing; but if we might on the other
hand be open to the reproach of falling too short of it there were
establishments adapted to every phase of the American predicament; so
that our general direction could but gain in vividness. I think with
compassion, altogether, of the comparative obscurity to which our
eventual success in gathering the fruits, few and scant though they
might be, thus relegates those to whom it was given but to toy so
briefly with the flowers. They make collectively their tragic trio: J.
J. the elder, most loved, most beautiful, most sacrificed of the Albany
uncles; J. J. the younger--they were young together, they wer