d gape;
there were human appearances in endless variety and on the
exhibition-stage of a piazza that my gape measured almost as by miles;
it was even as if I had become positively conscious that the social
scene so peopled would pretty well always say more to me than anything
else. What it did say I of course but scantly understood; but I none the
less knew it spoke, and I listened to its voice, I seem to recall, very
much as "young Edwin," in Dr. Beattie's poem, listened to the roar of
tempests and torrents from the nobler eminence of beetling crags and in
exposure to still deeper abysses. I cling for the moment, however, to
the small story of our Vredenburg summer, as we were for long afterwards
invidiously to brand it; the more that it so plays its part in
illustration, under the light of a later and happier age, of the growth,
when not rather of the arrest, of manners and customs roundabout our
birthplace. I think we had never been so much as during these particular
months disinherited of the general and public amenities that reinforce
for the young private precept and example--disinherited in favour of
dust and glare and mosquitoes and pigs and shanties and rumshops, of no
walks and scarce more drives, of a repeated no less than of a strong
emphasis on the more sordid sides of the Irish aspect in things. There
was a castellated residence on the hill above us--very high I remember
supposing the hill and very stately the structure; it had towers and
views and pretensions and belonged to a Colonel, whom we thought very
handsome and very costumed, (as if befrogged and high-booted, which he
couldn't have been at all, only _ought_ to have been, would even
certainly have been at a higher pitch of social effect,) and whose son
and heir, also very handsome and known familiarly and endearingly as
Chick, had a velvet coat and a pony and I think spurs, all luxuries we
were without, and was cousin to boys, the De Coppets, whom we had come
to know at our school of the previous winter and who somehow--doubtless
partly as guests of the opulent Chick--hovered again about the field of
idleness.

The De Coppets, particularly in the person of the first-born Louis, had
been a value to us, or at any rate to me--for though I was, in common
with my elders then, unacquainted with the application of that word as I
use it here, what was my incipient sense of persons and things, what
were my first stirred observant and imaginative reactions,