been a _calculated_ thing on the part of our dear
parents as little as on that of Mr. Jenks himself. Therefore let it be
recorded as still most odd that we should all have assented to such
deficiency of landscape, such exiguity of sport. I take the true
inwardness of the matter to have been in our having such short hours,
long as they may have appeared at the time, that the day left margin at
the worst for private inventions. I think we found landscape, for
ourselves--and wherever I at least found vision I found such sport as I
was capable of--even between the front and back rooms and the
conflicting windows; even by the stove which somehow scorched without
warming, and yet round which Mr. Coe and Mr. Dolmidge, the
drawing-master and the writing-master, arriving of a winter's day, used
notedly, and in the case of Mr. Coe lamentedly, to draw out their
delays. Is the dusty golden light of retrospect in this connection an
effluence from Mr. Dolmidge and Mr. Coe, whose ministrations come back
to me as the sole directly desired or invoked ones I was to know in my
years, such as they were, of pupilage?

I see them in any case as old-world images, figures of an antique stamp;
products, mustn't they have been, of an order in which some social
relativity or matter-of-course adjustment, some transmitted form and
pressure, were still at work? Mr. Dolmidge, inordinately lean,
clean-shaved, as was comparatively uncommon then, and in a
swallow-tailed coat and I think a black satin stock, was surely perfect
in his absolutely functional way, a pure pen-holder of a man, melancholy
and mild, who taught the most complicated flourishes--great scrolls of
them met our view in the form of surging seas and beaked and beady-eyed
eagles, the eagle being so calligraphic a bird--while he might just have
taught resignation. He was not at all funny--no one out of our immediate
family circle, in fact almost no one but W. J. himself, who flowered in
every waste, seems to have struck me as funny in those years; but he was
to remain with me a picture of somebody in Dickens, one of the Phiz if
not the Cruikshank pictures. Mr. Coe was another affair, bristling with
the question of the "hard," but somehow too with the revelation of the
soft, the deeply attaching; a worthy of immense stature and presence,
crowned as with the thick white hair of genius, wearing a great gathered
or puckered cloak, with a vast velvet collar, and resembling, as he
comes back to