hing of the Zoological Gardens, almost
close at hand and with which we took in that age of lingering forms no
liberty of abbreviation; to say nothing either of Madame Tussaud's, then
in our interminable but so amiable Baker Street, the only shade on the
amiability of which was just that gruesome association with the portal
of the Bazaar--since Madame Tussaud had, of all her treasures, most
vividly revealed to me the Mrs. Manning and the Burke and Hare of the
Chamber of Horrors which lurked just within it; whom, for days after
making their acquaintance (and prolonging it no further than our
conscientious friend thought advisable) I half expected, when alone, to
meet quite dreadfully on the staircase or on opening a door. All this
experience was valuable, but it was not the languages--save in so far
indeed as it was the English, which we hadn't in advance so much aimed
at, yet which more or less, and very interestingly, came; it at any rate
perhaps broke our fall a little that French, of a sort, continued to be
with us in the remarkably erect person of Mademoiselle Cusin, the Swiss
governess who had accompanied us from Geneva, whose quite sharply
extrusive but on the whole exhilarating presence I associate with this
winter, and who led in that longish procession of more or less similar
domesticated presences which was to keep the torch, that is the accent,
among us, fairly alight. The variety and frequency of the arrivals and
departures of these ladies--whose ghostly names, again, so far as I
recall them, I like piously to preserve, Augustine Danse, Amelie Fortin,
Marie Guyard, Marie Bonningue, Felicie Bonningue, Clarisse
Bader--mystifies me in much the same degree as our own academic
vicissitudes in New York; I can no more imagine why, sociable and
charitable, we so often changed governesses than I had contemporaneously
grasped the principle of our succession of schools: the whole group of
phenomena reflected, I gather, as a rule, much more the extreme
promptitude of the parental optimism than any disproportionate habit of
impatience. The optimism begot precipitation, and the precipitation had
too often to confess itself. What is instructive, what is historic, is
the probability that young persons offering themselves at that time as
guides and communicators--the requirements of our small sister were for
long modest enough--quite conceivably lacked preparedness, and were so
thrown back on the extempore, which in turn lacked