s, the memory of the slippery skins and rinds and
kernels with which the old dislocated flags were bestrown, is itself
endeared to me and contributes a further pictorial grace. We ate
everything in those days by the bushel and the barrel, as from stores
that were infinite; we handled watermelons as freely as cocoanuts, and
the amount of stomach-ache involved was negligible in the general
Eden-like consciousness.

The glow of this consciousness even in so small an organism was part of
the charm of these retreats offered me cityward upon our base of
provisions; a part of the rest of which, I disengage, was in my fond
perception of that almost eccentrically home-loving habit in my father
which furnished us with half the household humour of our
childhood--besides furnishing _him_ with any quantity of extravagant
picture of his so prompt pangs of anguish in absence for celebration of
his precipitate returns. It was traditional for us later on, and
especially on the European scene, that for him to leave us in pursuit of
some advantage or convenience, some improvement of our condition, some
enlargement of our view, was for him breathlessly to reappear, after the
shortest possible interval, with no account at all to give of the
benefit aimed at, but instead of this a moving representation, a far
richer recital, of his spiritual adventures at the horrid inhuman inns
and amid the hard alien races which had stayed his advance. He reacted,
he rebounded, in favour of his fireside, from whatever brief
explorations or curiosities; these passionate spontaneities were the
pulse of his life and quite some of the principal events of ours; and,
as he was nothing if not expressive, whatever happened to him for inward
intensity happened abundantly to us for pity and terror, as it were, as
well as for an ease and a quality of amusement among ourselves that was
really always to fail us among others. Comparatively late in life, after
his death, I had occasion to visit, in lieu of my brother, then in
Europe, an American city in which he had had, since his own father's
death, interests that were of importance to us all. On my asking the
agent in charge when the owner had last taken personal cognisance of his
property that gentleman replied only half to my surprise that he had
never in all his years of possession performed such an act. Then it was
perhaps that I most took the measure of his fine faith in human
confidence as an administrative funct