e in number,
Johnny and Charley and Freddy, with castigating elders, even to the
second and third generation back, dimly discerned through closed
window-panes, they didn't at all haunt the halls of Ferrero--it was a
part of their homely grace and their social tone, if not of their want
of the latter, that this couldn't in the least be in question for them;
on the other hand they frequented, Charley and Freddy at least, the Free
School, which was round in Thirteenth Street--Johnny, the eldest, having
entered the Free Academy, an institution that loomed large to us and
that I see as towered or castellated or otherwise impressively
embellished in vague vignettes, in stray representations, perhaps only
of the grey schoolbook order, which are yet associated for me with those
fond images of lovely ladies, "hand-painted," decorating at either end
the interior of the old omnibusses. We must have been in relation with
no other feeders at the public trough of learning--I can't account
otherwise for the glamour as of envied privilege and strange experience
that surrounded the Wards; they mixed, to the great sharpening of the
edge of their wit, in the wild life _of_ the people, beside which the
life at Mr. Pulling Jenks's and even at the Institution Vergnes was
colourless and commonplace. Somehow they were of the people, and still
were full of family forms--which seemed, one dimly made out through the
false perspective of all the cousinships, the stronger and clearer note
of New England; the note that had already determined a shy yearning
under perusal of the Rollo and Franconia chronicles. The special mark of
these friends was perhaps however that of being socially young while
they were annually old; little Freddy in particular, very short, very
inured and very popular, though less curiously wrinkled about eyes and
mouth than Charley, confessed to monstrous birthdays even while
crouching or hopping, even while racing or roaring, as a high
superiority in the games of the street prescribed. It was to strike me
later on, when reading or hearing of young Americans of those parts who
had turned "hard" or reckless by reaction from excessive discipline,
theologic and economic, and had gone to sea or to California or to the
"bad," that Freddy and Charley were typical of the race, even if their
fortunes had taken, as I hoped, a happier form. That, I said to myself
for the interest of it, _that_, the stuff of the Wards, their homely
grace, w