sibly
have been when my weight was so fantastically far from hinting at later
developments. But the romance of the hour was particularly in what I
have called the eccentric note, the fact that the children, my
entertainers, riveted my gaze to stockingless and shoeless legs and
feet, conveying somehow at the same time that they were not poor and
destitute but rich and provided--just as I took their garden-feast for a
sign of overflowing food--and that their state as of children of nature
was a refinement of freedom and grace. They were to become great and
beautiful, the household of that glimmering vision, they were to figure
historically, heroically, and serve great public ends; but always, to my
remembering eyes and fond fancy, they were to move through life as with
the bare white feet of that original preferred fairness and wildness.
This is rank embroidery, but the old surface itself insists on
spreading--it waits at least with an air of its own. The rest is
silence; I can--extraordinary encumbrance even for the most doating of
parents on a morning call--but have returned with my father to "our
hotel"; since I feel that I must not only to this but to a still further
extent face the historic truth that we were for considerable periods,
during our earliest time, nothing less than hotel children. Between the
far-off and the later phases at New Brighton stretched a series of
summers that had seen us all regularly installed for a couple of months
at an establishment passing in the view of that simpler age for a vast
caravansery--the Hamilton House, on the south Long Island shore, so
called from its nearness to the Fort of that name, which had Fort
Lafayette, the Bastille of the Civil War, out in the channel before it
and which probably cast a stronger spell upon the spirit of our
childhood, William's and mine at least, than any scene presented to us
up to our reaching our teens.

I find that I draw from the singularly unobliterated memory of the
particulars of all that experience the power quite to glory in our
shame; of so entrancing an interest did I feel it at the time to _be_ an
hotel child, and so little would I have exchanged my lot with that of
any small person more privately bred. We were private enough in all
conscience, I think I must have felt, the rest of the year; and at what
age mustn't I quite have succumbed to the charm of the world seen in a
larger way? For there, incomparably, was the chance to dawdle an