a happy and friendly,
though slightly nebulous, conception of our resources. Delighting ever
in the truth while generously contemptuous of the facts, so far as we
might make the difference--the facts having a way of being many and the
truth remaining but one--he held that there would always be enough;
since the truth, the true truth, was never ugly and dreadful, and we
didn't and wouldn't depart from it by any cruelty or stupidity (for he
wouldn't have had us stupid,) and might therefore depend on it for due
abundance even of meat and drink and raiment, even of wisdom and wit and
honour. It is too much to say that our so preponderantly humanised and
socialised adolescence was to make us look out for these things with a
subtle indirectness; but I return to my proposition that there may still
be a charm in seeing such hazards at work through a given, even if not
in a systematised, case. My cases are of course given, so that economy
of observation after the fact, as I have called it, becomes inspiring,
not less than the amusement, or whatever it may be, of the question of
what might happen, of what in point of fact did happen, to several very
towny and domesticated little persons, who were confirmed in their
towniness and fairly enriched in their sensibility, instead of being
chucked into a scramble or exposed on breezy uplands under the she-wolf
of competition and discipline. Perhaps any success that attended the
experiment--which was really, as I have hinted, no plotted thing at all,
but only an accident of accidents--proceeded just from the fact that the
small subjects, a defeated Romulus, a prematurely sacrificed Remus, had
in their very sensibility an asset, as we have come to say, a principle
of life and even of "fun." Perhaps on the other hand the success would
have been greater with less of that particular complication or
facilitation and more of some other which I shall be at a loss to
identify. What I find in my path happens to be the fact of the
sensibility, and from the light it sheds the curious, as also the
common, things that did from occasion to occasion play into it seem each
to borrow a separate and vivifying glow.

As at the Institution Vergnes and at Mr. Pulling Jenks's, however this
might be, so at "Forest's," or in other words at the more numerous
establishment of Messrs. Forest and Quackenboss, where we spent the
winter of 1854, reality, in the form of multitudinous mates, was to have
swarmed about