tan and the white St. Nicholas,
were much further down) and rising northward to the Ultima Thule of
Twenty-third Street, only second then in the supposedly ample scheme of
the regular ninth "wide" street. I can't indeed have moved much on that
night of revelations and yet of enigmas over which I still hang
fascinated; I must have kept intensely still in my corner, all wondering
and all fearing--fearing notice most; and in a definite way I but
remember the formidable interest of my so convincing dowager (to hark
back for a second to _her_) and the fact that a great smooth white cloth
was spread across the denuded room, converted thus into a field of
frolic the prospect of which much excited my curiosity. I but recover
the preparations, however, without recovering the performance; Mrs. L.
and I must have been the only persons not shaking a foot, and premature
unconsciousness clearly in my case supervened. Out of it peeps again the
riddle, the so quaint _trait de moeurs_, of my infant participation.
But I set that down as representative and interesting, and have done
with it.

The manners of the time had obviously a _bonhomie_ of their
own--certainly so on our particularly indulgent and humane little field;
as to which general proposition the later applications and
transformations of the bonhomie would be interesting to trace. It has
lingered and fermented and earned other names, but I seem on the track
of its prime evidence with that note of the sovereign ease of all the
young persons with whom we grew up. In the after-time, as our view took
in, with new climes and new scenes, other examples of the class, these
were always to affect us as more formed and finished, more tutored and
governessed, warned and armed at more points for, and doubtless often
against, the social relation; so that this prepared state on their part,
and which at first appeared but a preparation for shyness or silence or
whatever other ideal of the unconversable, came to be for us the normal,
since it was the relative and not the positive, still less the
superlative, state. No charming creatures of the growing girl sort were
ever to be natural in the degree of these nearer and remoter ornaments
of our family circle in youth; when after intervals and absences the
impression was renewed we saw how right we had been about it, and I feel
as if we had watched it for years under the apprehension and the vision
of some inevitable change, wondering with an af