hich strikes me as long and during which
my personal hours of diligence were somehow more than anything else
hours of the pavement and the shopfront, or of such contemplative
exercise as the very considerable distance, for small legs, between
those regions and the westward Fourteenth Street might comprise.
Pedestrian gaping having been in childhood, as I have noted,
prevailingly my line, fate appeared to have kindly provided for it on no
small scale; to the extent even that it must have been really my sole
and single form of athletics. Vague heated competition and agitation in
the then enclosed Union Square would seem to point a little, among us
all, to nobler types of motion; but of any basis for recreation,
anything in the nature of a playground or a breathing-space, the
Institution itself was serenely innocent. This I take again for a note
extraordinarily mediaeval. It occupied the first and second floors, if I
rightly remember, of a wide front that, overhanging the endless
thoroughfare, looked out on bouncing, clattering "stages" and painfully
dragged carts and the promiscuous human shuffle--the violence of
repercussions from the New York pavement of those years to be further
taken into account; and I win it back from every side as, in spite of
these aspects of garish publicity, a dark and dreadful, and withal quite
absurd, scene. I see places of that general time, even places of
confinement, in a dusty golden light that special memories of small
misery scarce in the least bedim, and this holds true of our next and
quite neighbouring refuge; the establishment of M. Vergnes alone darkles
and shrinks to me--a sordidly _black_ interior is my main image for it;
attenuated only by its having very soon afterwards, as a suffered
ordeal, altogether lapsed and intermitted. Faintly, in the gloom, I
distinguish M. Vergnes himself--quite "old," very old indeed as I
supposed him, and highly irritated and markedly bristling; though of
nothing in particular that happened to me at his or at anyone's else
hands have I the scantest remembrance. What really most happened no
doubt, was that my brother and I should both come away with a mind
prepared for a perfect assimilation of Alphonse Daudet's chronicle of
"Jack," years and years later on; to make the acquaintance in that work
of the "petits pays chauds" among whom Jack learnt the first lessons of
life was to see the Institution Vergnes at once revive, swarming as it
did with small h