have known, and my perfect if rueful sense of having myself
had no such quarrel with our conditions: embalmed for me did they even
to that shorter retrospect appear in a sort of fatalism of patience,
spiritless in a manner, no doubt, yet with an inwardly active,
productive and ingenious side.

It was just the fact of our having so walked and dawdled and dodged that
made the charm of memory; in addition to which what could one have asked
more than to be steeped in a medium so dense that whole elements of it,
forms of amusement, interest and wonder, soaked through to some
appreciative faculty and made one fail at the most of nothing but one's
lessons? My brother was right in so far as that my question--the one I
have just reproduced--could have been asked only by a person
incorrigible in throwing himself back upon substitutes for lost causes,
substitutes that might _temporarily_ have appeared queer and small; a
person so haunted, even from an early age, with visions of life, that
aridities, for him, were half a terror and half an impossibility, and
that the said substitutes, the economies and ingenuities that protested,
in their dumb vague way, against weakness of situation or of direct and
applied faculty, were in themselves really a revel of spirit and
thought. It _had_ indeed again an effect of almost pathetic incoherence
that our brave quest of "the languages," suffering so prompt and for the
time at least so accepted and now so inscrutably irrecoverable a check,
should have contented itself with settling us by that Christmas in a
house, more propitious to our development, in St. John's Wood, where we
enjoyed a considerable garden and wistful view, though by that windowed
privilege alone, of a large green expanse in which ladies and gentlemen
practised archery. Just _that_--and not the art even, but the mere
spectacle--might have been one of the substitutes in question; if not
for the languages at least for one or another of the romantic
connections we seemed a little to have missed: it was such a whiff of
the old world of Robin Hood as we could never have looked up from the
mere thumbed "story," in Fourteenth Street at any rate, to any soft
confidence of. More than I can begin to say, that is by a greater number
of queer small channels, did the world about us, thus continuous with
the old world of Robin Hood, steal into my sense--a constant state of
subjection to which fact is no bad instance of those refinements of