remember few either of
the inward pangs or the outward pains of a merely graceless state. I
recognise at the same time that it was perhaps a sorry business to be so
interested in one didn't know what. Such are, whether at the worst or at
the best, some of the aspects of that season as Mr. Jenks's image
presides; in the light of which I _may_ perhaps again rather wonder at
my imputation to the general picture of so much amenity. Clearly the
good man was a civiliser--whacks and all; and by some art not now to be
detected. He was a complacent classic--which was what my brother's claim
for him, I dare say, mostly represented; though that passed over the
head of my tenth year. It was a good note for him in this particular
that, deploring the facile text-books of Doctor Anthon of Columbia
College, in which there was even more crib than text, and holding fast
to the sterner discipline of Andrews and Stoddard and of that other more
conservative commentator (he too doubtless long since superseded) whose
name I blush to forget. I think in fine of Richard Pulling's small but
sincere academy as a consistent little protest against its big and easy
and quite out-distancing rival, the Columbia College school, apparently
in those days quite the favourite of fortune.

XVI

I must in some degree have felt it a charm there that we were not, under
his rule, inordinately prepared for "business," but were on the contrary
to remember that the taste of Cornelius Nepos in the air, even rather
stale though it may have been, had lacked the black bitterness marking
our next ordeal and that I conceive to have proceeded from some rank
predominance of the theory and practice of book-keeping. It had
consorted with this that we found ourselves, by I know not what
inconsequence, a pair of the "assets" of a firm; Messrs. Forest and
Quackenboss, who carried on business at the northwest corner of
Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue, having for the winter of 1854-5
taken our education in hand. As their establishment had the style, so I
was conscious at the time of its having the general stamp and sense, of
a shop--a shop of long standing, of numerous clients, of lively bustle
and traffic. The structure itself was to my recent recognition still
there and more than ever a shop, with improvements and extensions, but
dealing in other wares than those anciently and as I suppose then quite
freshly purveyed; so far at least as freshness was imputable to th