as if they loved them, and indulged, from the mere exuberance
of the gift, in the most unimposed little miracles of memory.
They not only popped out at me as tigers and as Romans,
but as Shakespeareans, astronomers, and navigators.
This was so singularly the case that it had presumably
much to do with the fact as to which, at the present day,
I am at a loss for a different explanation: I allude to my
unnatural composure on the subject of another school for Miles.
What I remember is that I was content not, for the time,
to open the question, and that contentment must have sprung
from the sense of his perpetually striking show of cleverness.
He was too clever for a bad governess, for a parson's daughter,
to spoil; and the strangest if not the brightest thread
in the pensive embroidery I just spoke of was the impression
I might have got, if I had dared to work it out, that he was
under some influence operating in his small intellectual life
as a tremendous incitement.

If it was easy to reflect, however, that such a boy could postpone school,
it was at least as marked that for such a boy to have been
"kicked out" by a schoolmaster was a mystification without end.
Let me add that in their company now--and I was careful almost
never to be out of it--I could follow no scent very far. We lived
in a cloud of music and love and success and private theatricals.
The musical sense in each of the children was of the quickest,
but the elder in especial had a marvelous knack of catching and repeating.
The schoolroom piano broke into all gruesome fancies; and when that failed
there were confabulations in corners, with a sequel of one of them going
out in the highest spirits in order to "come in" as something new.
I had had brothers myself, and it was no revelation to me that little