mean, seemed the strangeness; mere brute quantity and
number being so much less in one case than the other. These latter were
what I should have _liked_ to go in for, had I but had the intrinsic
faculties; that more than ever came home to me on those occasions when,
as I could move further and stay out longer, I accompanied my parents on
afternoon visits to Chatelaine and the Campagne Roediger, a scene that
has remained with me as nobly placid and pastoral. The great trees stood
about, casting afternoon shadows; the old thick-walled green-shuttered
villa and its dependances had the air of the happiest home; the big
bearded bonhomie of M. Roediger among his little polyglot charges--no
petits pays chauds these--appeared to justify, and more, the fond New
York theory of Swiss education, the kind _a la portee_ of young New
Yorkers, as a beautifully genialised, humanised, civilised, even
romanticised thing, in which, amid lawny mountain slopes, "the
languages" flowed into so many beaming recipients on a stream of milk
and honey, and "the relation," above all, the relation from master to
pupil and back again, was of an amenity that wouldn't have been of this
world save for the providential arrangement of a perfect pedagogic
Switzerland. "Did you notice the relation--how charming it was?" our
parents were apt to say to each other after these visits, in reference
to some observed show of confidence between instructor and instructed;
while, as for myself, I was lost in the wonder of _all_ the
relations--my younger brother seemed to live, and to his own ingenuous
relish as well, in such a happy hum of them. The languages had reason to
prosper--they were so copiously represented; the English jostled the
American, the Russian the German, and there even trickled through a
little funny French.

A great Geneva school of those days was the Institution Haccius, to
which generations of our young countrymen had been dedicated and our own
faces first turned--under correction, however, by the perceived truth
that if the languages were in question the American reigned there almost
unchallenged. The establishment chosen for our experiment must have
appealed by some intimate and insinuating side, and as less patronised
by the rich and the sophisticated--for even in those days some Americans
were rich and several sophisticated; little indeed as it was all to
matter in the event, so short a course had the experiment just then to
run. What it mai