'Etoile?) and among them a passionate
lady in tears over the news, fresh that morning, of the assault on
Sumner by the South Carolina ruffian of the House. The wounded Senator,
injured in health, had come to Europe later on to recuperate, and he
offered me my first view, to the best of my belief, not only of a
"statesman," but of any person whomsoever concerned in political life. I
distinguish in the earlier twilight of Fourteenth Street my father's
return to us one November day--we knew he had been out to vote--with the
news that General Winfield Scott, his and the then "Whig" candidate, had
been defeated for the Presidency; just as I rescue from the same limbo
my afterwards proud little impression of having "met" that high-piled
hero of the Mexican War, whom the Civil War was so soon and with so
little ceremony to extinguish, literally met him, at my father's side,
in Fifth Avenue, where he had just emerged from a cross-street. I remain
vague as to what had then happened and scarce suppose I was, at the age
probably of eight or nine, "presented"; but we must have been for some
moments face to face while from under the vast amplitude of a dark blue
military cloak with a big velvet collar and loosened silver clasp, which
spread about him like a symbol of the tented field, he greeted my
parent--so clear is my sense of the time it took me to gape _all_ the
way up to where he towered aloft.

V

The not very glorious smoke of the Mexican War, I note for another
touch, had been in the air when I was a still smaller boy, and I have an
association with it that hovers between the definite and the dim, a
vision of our uncle (Captain as he then was) Robert Temple, U.S.A., in
regimentals, either on his way to the scene of action or on the return
from it. I see him as a person half asleep sees some large object across
the room and against the window-light--even if to the effect of my now
asking myself why, so far from the scene of action, he was in panoply of
war. I seem to see him cock-hatted and feathered too--an odd vision of
dancing superior plumes which doesn't fit if he was only a captain.
However, I cultivate the wavering shade merely for its value as my
earliest glimpse of any circumstance of the public order--unless indeed
another, the reminiscence to which I owe to-day my sharpest sense of
personal antiquity, had already given me the historic thrill. The scene
of this latter stir of consciousness is, for memory,