me increasingly: at Forest's the prolonged roll-call in
the morning, as I sit in the vast bright crowded smelly smoky room, in
which rusty black stove-shafts were the nearest hint of architecture,
bristles with names, Hoes and Havemeyers, Stokeses, Phelpses, Colgates
and others, of a subsequently great New York salience. It was sociable
and gay, it was sordidly spectacular, one was then, by an inch or two, a
bigger boy--though with crushing superiorities in that line all round;
and when I wonder why the scene was sterile (which was what I took it
for at the worst) the reason glooms out again in the dreadful blight of
arithmetic, which affected me at the time as filling all the air. The
quantity imposed may not in fact have been positively gross, yet it is
what I most definitely remember--not, I mean, that I have retained the
dimmest notion of the science, but only of the dire image of our being
in one way or another always supposedly addressed to it. I recall
strange neighbours and deskfellows who, not otherwise too objectionable,
were uncanny and monstrous through their possession, cultivation,
imitation of ledgers, daybooks, double-entry, tall pages of figures,
interspaces streaked with oblique ruled lines that weirdly "balanced,"
whatever that might mean, and other like horrors. Nothing in truth is
more distinct to me than the tune to which they were, without exception,
at their ease on such ground--unless it be my general dazzled,
humiliated sense, through those years, of the common, the baffling,
mastery, all round me, of a hundred handy arts and devices. Everyone did
things and had things--everyone knew how, even when it was a question of
the small animals, the dormice and grasshoppers, or the hoards of food
and stationery, that they kept in their desks, just as they kept in
their heads such secrets for how to do sums--those secrets that I must
even then have foreseen I should even so late in life as this have
failed to discover. I may have known things, have by that time learnt a
few, myself, but I didn't know _that_--what I did know; whereas those
who surrounded me were all agog, to my vision, with the benefit of their
knowledge. I see them, in this light, across the years, fairly grin and
grimace with it; and the presumable vulgarity of some of them, certain
scattered shades of baseness still discernible, comes to me as but one
of the appearances of an abounding play of genius. Who was it I ever
thought stupid?--