nt it _has_ helped is another
matter, but so fine was the force of the suggestion that I think I have
never in all the years made certain returns upon my spirit without again
feeling the pang from the cool little voice of the Fourteenth Street
yard. Such was the moral exercise it at least allowed us room for. It
also allowed us room, to be just, for an inordinate consumption of hot
waffles retailed by a benevolent black "auntie" who presided, with her
husband's aid as I remember, at a portable stove set up in a passage or
recess opening from the court; to which we flocked and pushed, in a
merciless squeeze, with all our coppers, and the products of which, the
oblong farinaceous compound, faintly yet richly brown, stamped and
smoking, not crisp nor brittle, but softly absorbent of the syrup dabbed
upon it for a finish, revealed to me I for a long time, even for a very
long time supposed, the highest pleasure of sense. We stamped about, we
freely conversed, we ate sticky waffles by the hundred--I recall no
worse acts of violence unless I count as such our intermissional rushes
to Pynsent's of the Avenue, a few doors off, in the particular interest
of a confection that ran the waffle close, as the phrase is, for
popularity, while even surpassing it for stickiness. Pynsent's was
higher up in the row in which Forest's had its front--other and dearer
names have dropped from me, but Pynsent's adheres with all the force of
the strong saccharine principle. This principle, at its highest, we
conceived, was embodied in small amber-coloured mounds of chopped
cocoanut or whatever other substance, if a finer there be; profusely,
lusciously endued and distributed on small tin trays in the manner of
haycocks in a field. We acquired, we appropriated, we transported, we
enjoyed them, they fairly formed perhaps, after all, our highest
enjoyment; but with consequences to our pockets--and I speak of those
other than financial, with an intimacy, a reciprocity of contact at any,
or at every, personal point, that I lose myself in the thought of.

XVII

I lose myself, of a truth, under the whole pressure of the spring of
memory proceeding from recent revisitings and recognitions--the action
of the fact that time until lately had spared hereabouts, and may still
be sparing, in the most exceptional way, by an anomaly or a mercy of the
rarest in New York, a whole cluster of landmarks, leaving me to "spot"
and verify, right and left, the s