“naw-vels.”  I remember her so well as she appeared at school and later, that I regret that she had not been faithfully given to canvas or marble in the day of her best looks.  None know her aspect who have not seen her living.  Margaret, as I remember her at school and afterwards, was tall, fair complexioned, with a watery, aqua-marine lustre in her light eyes, which she used to make small, as one does who looks at the sunshine.  A remarkable point about her was that long, flexile neck, arching and undulating in strange sinuous movements, which one who loved her would compare to those of a swan, and one who loved her not to those of the ophidian who tempted our common mother.  Her talk was affluent, magisterial, de haut en bas, some would say euphuistic, but surpassing the talk of women in breadth and audacity.  Her face kindled and reddened and dilated in every feature as she spoke, and, as I once saw her in a fine storm of indignation at the supposed ill-treatment of a relative, showed itself capable of something resembling what Milton calls the viraginian aspect.

Little incidents bear telling when they recall anything of such a celebrity as Margaret.  I remember being greatly awed once, in our school-days, with the maturity of one of her expressions.  Some themes were brought home from the school for examination by my father, among them one of hers.  I took it up with a certain emulous interest (for I fancied at that day that I too had drawn a prize, say a five-dollar one, at least, in the great intellectual life-lottery) and read the first words.

“It is a trite remark,” she began.

I stopped.  Alas!  I did not know what trite meant.  How could I ever judge Margaret fairly after such a crushing discovery of her superiority?  I doubt if I ever did; yet oh, how pleasant it would have been, at about the age, say, of threescore and ten, to rake over these ashes for cinders with her,—­she in a snowy cap, and I in a decent peruke!

After being five years at the Port School, the time drew near when I was to enter college.  It seemed advisable to give me a year of higher training, and for that end some public school was thought to offer advantages.  Phillips Academy at Andover was well known to us.  We had been up there, my father and myself, at anniversaries.  Some Boston boys of well-known and distinguished parentage had been scholars there very lately, Master Edmund Quincy, Master Samuel Hurd Walley, Master Nathaniel Parker Willis,—­all promising youth, who fulfilled their promise.

I do not believe there was any thought of getting a little respite of quiet by my temporary absence, but I have wondered that there was not.  Exceptional boys of fourteen or fifteen make home a heaven, it is true; but I have suspected, late in life, that I was not one of the exceptional kind.  I had tendencies in the direction of flageolets and octave flutes.  I had a pistol and a gun, and popped at everything that stirred, pretty nearly, except the house-cat.  Worse than this, I would buy a cigar and smoke it by instalments, putting it meantime in the barrel of my pistol, by a stroke of ingenuity which it gives me a grim pleasure to recall; for no maternal or other female eyes would explore the cavity of that dread implement in search of contraband commodities.