be so in America
or in England; in either of those countries the whole street would go
mad in earnest and come to blows and bloodshed were the populace to
let themselves loose to the extent we see here. All this restraint is
self-imposed and quite apart from the presence of the soldiery."

This mood, we see, is far more gentle and sympathetic than the former
one; there is sunshine within as well as without; and, indeed, I
remember with what glee my father took part in the frolic, as well as
looked on at it; he laughed and pelted and was pelted; he walked down
the Corso and back again; he drove to and fro in a carriage; he mounted
to Mr. Motley's balcony and took long shots at the crowd below. The
sombre spirit of criticism had ceased, for a time, to haunt him.

[IMAGE: WILLIAM WETMORE STORY]

We went quite often to the studio of William Story, whom my father had
slightly known in Salem before he became a voluntary exile from America.
Mr. Story was at this time a small, wiry, nervous personage, smiling
easily, but as much through nervousness as from any inner source or
outward provocation of mirth, and as he smiled he would stroke his
cheeks, which were covered with a short, brown beard, with the fingers
and thumb of his right hand, while wrinkles would appear round his
bright, brown eyes. "He looks thin and worn already," wrote my father;
"a little bald and a very little gray, but as vivid as when I saw him
last; he cannot, methinks, be over thirty-seven." He was thirty-nine in
1858. "The great difficulty with him, I think, is a too facile power,"
my father goes on; "he would do better things if it were more difficult
for him to do merely good ones. Then, too, his sensibility is too quick;
being easily touched by his own thoughts, he cannot estimate what is
required to touch a colder and duller person, and so stops short of the
adequate expression." He commented on the vein of melancholy beneath
the sparkle of his surface, as if, in the midst of prosperity, he was
conscious of a "deadly shadow gliding close behind." Boys of twelve are
not troubled with insight, unless of that unconscious, intuitive kind
that tells them that a person is likeable, or the reverse, no matter
what the person may do or say. I liked Mr. Story, and thought him as
light of spirit as he seemed; not that he was not often earnest enough
in his talks with my father, to whom he was wont to apply himself with
a sort of intensity, suggesting ideas,