the scene revisited, I
was to be struck rather as by their weird immobility: there on the north
side, still untenanted after sixty years, a tremendous span in the life
of New York, was the vacant lot, undiminished, in which a friendly goat
or two used to browse, whom we fed perversely with scraps of paper, just
as perversely appreciated indeed, through the relaxed wooden palings.
There hovers for me an impression of the glass roofs of a florist, a
suffered squatter for a while; but florists and goats have alike
disappeared and the barrenness of the place is as sordid as only
untended gaps in great cities can seem. One of its boundaries, however,
still breathes associations--the home of the Wards, the more eastward of
a pair of houses then and still isolated has remained the same through
all vicissitudes, only now quite shabbily mellow and, like everything
else, much smaller than one had remembered it; yet this too without
prejudice to the large, the lustrous part played in our prospect by that
interesting family. I saddle their mild memory a bit "subjectively"
perhaps with the burden of that character--making out that they were
interesting really in spite of themselves and as unwittingly as M.
Jourdain expressed himself in prose; owing their wild savour as they did
to that New England stamp which we took to be strong upon them and no
other exhibition of which we had yet enjoyed. It made them different,
made them, in their homely grace, rather aridly romantic: I pored in
those days over the freshness of the Franconia Stories of the brothers
Abbott, then immediately sequent to the sweet Rollo series and even more
admired; and there hung about the Wards, to my sense, that atmosphere of
apples and nuts and cheese, of pies and jack-knives and "squrruls," of
domestic Bible-reading and attendance at "evening lecture," of the fear
of parental discipline and the cultivated art of dodging it, combined
with great personal toughness and hardihood, an almost envied liability
to warts on hard brown hands, a familiarity with garments domestically
wrought, a brave rusticity in short that yet hadn't prevented the
annexation of whole tracts of town life unexplored by ourselves and
achieved by the brothers since their relatively recent migration from
Connecticut--which State in general, with the city of Hartford in
particular, hung as a hazy, fruity, rivery background, the very essence
of Indian summer, in the rear of their discourse. Thre