o be there. I don't remember their going, nor any
pangs of parting; I remember only knowing with wonderment that they had
gone, that obscurity had somehow engulfed them; and how afterwards, in
the light of later things, memory and fancy attended them, figured their
history as the public complication grew and the great intersectional
plot thickened; felt even, absurdly and disproportionately, that they
had helped one to "know Southerners." The slim, the sallow, the
straight-haired and dark-eyed Eugene in particular haunted my
imagination; he had not been my comrade of election--he was too much my
senior; but I cherished the thought of the fine fearless young
fire-eater he would have become and, when the War had broken out, I know
not what dark but pitying vision of him stretched stark after a battle.

All of which sounds certainly like a meagre range--which heaven knows it
was; but with a plea for the several attics, already glanced at, and the
positive aesthetic reach that came to us through those dim resorts, quite
worth making. They were scattered and they constituted on the part of
such of our friends as had license to lead us up to them a ground of
authority and glory proportioned exactly to the size of the field. This
extent was at cousin Helen's, with a large house and few inmates, vast
and free, so that no hospitality, under the eaves, might have matched
that offered us by the young Albert--if only that heir of all the ages
had had rather more imagination. He had, I think, as little as was
possible--which would have counted in fact for an unmitigated blank had
not W. J., among us, on that spot and elsewhere, supplied this motive
force in any quantity required. He imagined--that was the point--the
comprehensive comedies we were to prepare and to act; comprehensive by
the fact that each one of us, even to the God-fearing but
surreptitiously law-breaking Wards, was in fairness to be enabled to
figure. Not one of us but was somehow to be provided with a part, though
I recall my brother as the constant comic star. The attics were thus in
a word our respective temples of the drama--temples in which the stage,
the green-room and the wardrobe, however, strike me as having consumed
most of our margin. I remember, that is, up and down the street--and the
association is mainly with its far westward reaches--so much more
preparation than performance, so much more conversation and costume than
active rehearsal, and, on the par