idence!)

Louis De Coppet, though theoretically American and domiciled, was
_naturally_ French, and so pressed further home to me that "sense of
Europe" to which I feel that my very earliest consciousness waked--a
perversity that will doubtless appear to ask for all the justification I
can supply and some of which I shall presently attempt to give. He
opened vistas, and I count ever as precious anyone, everyone, who
betimes does that for the small straining vision; performing this office
never so much, doubtless, as when, during that summer, he invited me to
collaborate with him in the production of a romance which _il se fit
fort_ to get printed, to get published, when success, or in other words
completion, should crown our effort. Our effort, alas, failed of the
crown, in spite of sundry solemn and mysterious meetings--so much
devoted, I seem to remember, to the publishing question that others more
fundamental dreadfully languished; leaving me convinced, however, that
my friend would have got our fiction published if he could only have got
it written. I think of my participation in this vain dream as of the
very first gage of visiting approval offered to the exercise of a
gift--though quite unable to conceive my companion's ground for
suspecting a gift of which I must at that time quite have failed to
exhibit a single in the least "phenomenal" symptom. It had none the less
by his overtures been handsomely _imputed_ to me; that was in a manner a
beginning--a small start, yet not wholly unattended with bravery. Louis
De Coppet, I must add, brought to light later on, so far as I know, no
compositions of his own; we met him long after in Switzerland and
eventually heard of his having married a young Russian lady and settled
at Nice. If I drop on his memory this apology for a bay-leaf it is from
the fact of his having given the earliest, or at least the most
personal, tap to that pointed prefigurement of the manners of "Europe,"
which, inserted wedge-like, if not to say peg-like, into my young
allegiance, was to split the tender organ into such unequal halves. His
the toy hammer that drove in the very point of the golden nail.

It was as if there had been a mild magic in that breath, however scant,
of another world; but when I ask myself what element of the pleasing or
the agreeable may have glimmered through the then general, the outer and
enveloping conditions, I recover many more of the connections in which
forms and c