straight from Siberia, and it is distinct to me
that the purity was challenged by a friend of the house, and
without--pathetically enough!--provoking the only answer, the plea that
the missing Atticism would have been wasted on young barbarians. The
Siberian note, on our inmate's part, may perhaps have been the least of
her incongruities; she was above all too big for a little job, towered
over us doubtless too heroically; and her proportions hover but to lose
themselves--with the successors to her function awaiting us a little
longer.

Meanwhile, to revert an instant, if the depressed consciousness of our
still more or less quailing, educationally, beneath the female eye--and
there was as well the deeper depth, there was the degrading fact, that
with us literally consorted and contended Girls, that we sat and strove,
even though we drew the line at playing with them and at knowing them,
when not of the swarming cousinship, at home--if that felt awkwardness
didn't exactly coincide with the ironic effect of "Gussy's" appearances,
his emergence from rich mystery and his return to it, our state was but
comparatively the braver: he always had so much more to tell us than we
could possibly have to tell him. On reflection I see that the most
completely rueful period couldn't after all greatly have prolonged
itself; since the female eye last bent on us would have been that of
Lavinia D. Wright, to our connection with whom a small odd reminiscence
attaches a date. A little schoolmate displayed to me with pride, while
the connection lasted, a beautiful coloured, a positively iridescent and
gilded card representing the first of all the "great exhibitions" of our
age, the London Crystal Palace of 1851--his father having lately gone
out to it and sent him the dazzling memento. In 1851 I was eight years
old and my brother scarce more than nine; in addition to which it is
distinct to me in the first place that we were never faithful long, or
for more than one winter, to the same studious scene, and in the second
that among our instructors Mrs. Lavinia had no successor of her own sex
unless I count Mrs. Vredenburg, of New Brighton, where we spent the
summer of 1854, when I had reached the age of eleven and found myself
bewildered by recognition of the part that "attendance at school" was so
meanly to play in the hitherto unclouded long vacation. This was true at
least for myself and my next younger brother, Wilky, who, under the
pres