whereon he leaned,
he had scarcely recalled a ship at the old pier of Dieppe, and the
Little Trout standing beside her grandfather on the stringer,
frantically waving her hand as the ship left her moorings and the prow
nosed the first heavy channel sea that washed against the bulkhead and
half-drowned her wailing cry:

"Jean--mon Jean!"

The rest was a blank until he landed here almost on this very spot in
old Castle Garden and, holding hard by his father's hand, was bidden to
look up at the flag flying from the pole at the top of the queer round
building--a brave sight even for his young eyes: all the red and white
and blue straining in the freshening wind with an energy of motion that
made the boy dance in sympathetic joy at his father's side--

And what next?

Again a confusion of journeyings, and afterwards quiet settlement in a
red brick box of a house in a mill town on the Merrimac. He could still
hear the clang of the mill-gates, the ringing of the bells, the hum and
whir and roar of a hundred thousand spindles, the clacking crash of the
ponderous shifting frames. He could still see with the inner eye the
hundreds of windows blazing in the reflected fires of the western sun,
or twinkling with numberless lights that cast their long reflections on
the black waters of the canal. There on the bank, at the entrance to the
footbridge, the boy was wont to take his stand regularly at six o'clock
of a winter's day, and wait for the hoisting of the mill-gates and the
coming of his father and mother with the throng of toilers.

So he saw himself--himself as an identity emerging at last from the
confusion of time and place and circumstance; for there followed the
public school, the joys of rivalry, the eager outrush for the boy's Ever
New, the glory of scrimmage and school-boy sports, the battle royal for
the little Auvergnat when taunted with the epithet "Johnny Frog" by the
belligerent youth, American born, and the victorious outcome for the
"foreigner"; the Auvergne blood was up, and the temperament volcanic
like his native soil where subterranean heats evidence themselves in
hot, out-welling waters. And afterwards, at home, there were
congratulations and comfortings, plus applications of vinegar and brown
butcher's paper to the severely smitten nose of this champion of his new
Americanhood. But at school and in the street, henceforth there was due
respect and a general atmosphere of "let bygones be bygones."

Ah,