his time to re-announce a basis for
faith and joy.

That basis presently shrank to the scale of a small house hard by the
hotel, at the entrance of Berkeley Square--expeditiously lighted on, it
would thus appear, which again has been expensively superseded, but to
the ancient little facts of which I fondly revert, since I owe them what
I feel to have been, in the far past, the prime faint revelation, the
small broken expression, of the London I was afterwards to know. The
place wears on the spot, to this day, no very different face; the house
that has risen on the site of ours is still immediately neighboured at
the left by the bookseller, the circulating-librarian and news-agent,
who modestly flourished in our time under the same name; the great
establishment of Mr. Gunter, just further along, is as soberly and
solidly seated; the mews behind the whole row, from the foot of Hay Hill
at the right, wanders away to Bruton Street with the irregular grace
that spoke to my young fancy; Hay Hill itself is somehow less sharply
precipitous, besides being no longer paved, as I seem to recall its
having been, with big boulders, and I was on the point of saying that
its antique charm in some degree abides. Nothing, however, could be
further from the truth; its antique charm quite succumbed, years ago, to
that erection of lumpish "mansions" which followed the demolition of the
old-world town-residence, as the house-agents say, standing, on the
south side, between court and I suppose garden, where Dover Street gives
way to Grafton; a house of many histories, of vague importances and cold
reserves and deep suggestions, I used to think after scaling the steep
quite on purpose to wonder about it. A whole chapter of life was
condensed, for our young sensibility, I make out, into the couple of
months--they can scarce have been more--spent by us in these quarters,
which must have proved too narrow and too towny; but it can have had no
passage so lively as the occurrences at once sequent to my father's
having too candidly made known in some public print, probably The Times,
that an American gentleman, at such an address, desired to arrange with
a competent young man for the tuition at home of his three sons. The
effect of his rash failure to invite application by letter only was the
assault of an army of visitors who filled us with consternation; they
hung about the door, cumbered the hall, choked the staircase and sat
grimly individual in