ore
down-towny, on the supposition at least that our young gravitation in
that sense for most of the larger joys consorted with something of the
general habit? The joy that had to be fished out, like Truth, from the
very bottom of the well was attendance at Trinity Church, still in that
age supereminent, pointedly absolute, the finest feature of the
southward scene; to the privilege of which the elder Albany cousins were
apt to be treated when they came on to stay with us; an indulgence
making their enjoyment of our city as down-towny as possible too, for I
seem otherwise to see them but as returning with the familiar Stewart
headache from the prolonged strain of selection.

The great reward dispensed to us for our sessions in the house of
pain--as to which it became our subsequent theory that we had been
regularly dragged there on alternate Saturdays--was our being carried on
the return to the house of delight, or to one of them, for there were
specifically two, where we partook of ice-cream, deemed sovereign for
sore mouths, deemed sovereign in fact, all through our infancy, for
everything. Two great establishments for the service of it graced the
prospect, one Thompson's and the other Taylor's, the former, I perfectly
recall, grave and immemorial, the latter upstart but dazzling, and
having together the effect that whichever we went to we wondered if we
hadn't better have gone to the other--with that capacity of childhood
for making the most of its adventures after a fashion that may look so
like making the least. It is in our father's company indeed that, as I
press the responsive spring, I see the bedizened saucers heaped up for
our fond consumption (they bore the Taylor-title painted in blue and
gilded, with the Christian name, as parentally pointed out to us,
perverted to "Jhon" for John, whereas the Thompson-name scorned such
vulgar and above all such misspelt appeals;) whence I infer that still
other occasions for that experience waited on us--as almost any would
serve, and a paternal presence so associated with them was not in the
least conceivable in the Wall Street _repaire_. That presence is in fact
not associated for me, to any effect of distinctness, with the least of
our suffered shocks or penalties--though partly doubtless because our
acquaintance with such was of the most limited; a conclusion I form even
while judging it to have been on the whole sufficient for our virtue.
This sounds perhaps as if we