rs of our father's house in especial I
mean--which made an excellent, in some cases almost an incomparable,
_fond_ for a thicker civility to mix with when growing experience should
begin to take that in. It was also quaint, among us, I may be reminded,
to have _begun_ with the inward life; but we began, after the manner of
all men, as we could, and I hold that if it comes to that we might have
begun much worse.

I was in my seventeenth year when the raid and the capture of John
Brown, of Harper's Ferry fame, enjoyed its sharp reverberation among us,
though we were then on the other side of the world; and I count this as
the very first reminder that reached me of our living, on our side, in
a political order: I had perfectly taken in from the pages of "Punch,"
which contributed in the highest degree to our education, that the
peoples on the other side so lived. As there was no American "Punch,"
and to this time has been none, to give small boys the sense and the
imagination of living with their public administrators, Daniel Webster
and Charles Sumner had never become, for my fancy, members of a class, a
class which numbered in England, by John Leech's showing, so many other
members still than Lords Brougham, Palmerston and John Russell. The war
of Secession, soon arriving, was to cause the field to bristle with
features and the sense of the State, in our generation, infinitely to
quicken; but that alarm came upon the country like a thief at night, and
we might all have been living in a land in which there seemed at least
nothing save a comparatively small amount of quite private property to
steal. Even private property in other than the most modest amounts
scarce figured for our particular selves; which doubtless came partly
from the fact that amid all the Albany issue there was ease, with the
habit of ease, thanks to our grandfather's fine old ability--he had
decently provided for so large a generation; but our consciousness was
positively disfurnished, as that of young Americans went, of the
actualities of "business" in a world of business. As to that we all
formed together quite a monstrous exception; business in a world of
business was the thing we most agreed (differ as we might on minor
issues) in knowing nothing about. We touched it and it touched us
neither directly nor otherwise, and I think our fond detachment, not to
say our helpless ignorance and on occasion (since I can speak for one
fine instance) our settl