done to accentuate prophetically
his resemblance, save for the spectacles, to some hero of Victor
Cherbuliez, and who, in fine, was conscious, not unimpressively, of his
authorship of a volume of meditative verse sympathetically mentioned by
the Sainte-Beuve of the Causeries in a review of the young poets of the
hour ("M. Lerambert too has loved, M. Lerambert too has suffered, M.
Lerambert too has sung!" or words to that effect:) this subtle
personality, really a high form of sensibility I surmise, and as
qualified for other and intenser relations as any Cherbuliez figure of
them all, was naturally not to be counted on to lead us gapingly forth
as good Mr. Thompson had done; so that my reminiscence of warm
somniferous mornings by the windows that opened to the clattery, plashy
court is quite, so far as my record goes, relievingly unbroken.

The afternoons, however, glimmer back to me shamelessly different, for
our circle had promptly been joined by the all-knowing and all-imposing
Mademoiselle Danse aforesaid, her of the so flexible _taille_ and the so
salient smiling eyes, than which even those of Miss Rebecca Sharp, that
other epic governess, were not more pleasingly green; who provided with
high efficiency for our immediate looser needs--mine and Wilky's and
those of our small brother Bob (l'ingenieux petit Robertson as she was
to dub him,) and of our still smaller sister at least--our first fine
_flaneries_ of curiosity. Her brave Vaudoise predecessor had been
bequeathed by us in London to a higher sphere than service with mere
earnest nomads could represent; but had left us clinging and weeping
and was for a long time afterwards to write to us, faithfully, in the
most beautiful copper-plate hand, out of the midst of her "rise"; with
details that brought home to us as we had never known it brought the
material and institutional difference between the nomadic and the
solidly, the spreadingly seated. A couple of years later, on an occasion
of our being again for a while in London, she hastened to call on us,
and, on departing, amiably invited me to walk back with her, for a
gossip--it was a bustling day of June--across a long stretch of the
town; when I left her at a glittering portal with the impression of my
having in our transit seen much of Society (the old London "season"
filled the measure, had length and breadth and thickness, to an extent
now foregone,) and, more particularly, achieved a small psychologic
stu