When I was
seriously indisposed, at the age of three, he brought me a black doll,
which I heard my mother say she thought would alarm me, as it was very
ugly, and I had never seen a negro. I remember the much-knowing smile
with which my father's face was indefinitely lighted up as he stood
looking at me, while I, half unconscious to most of the things of
this world, was nevertheless clutching his gift gladly to my heart.
The hideous darky was soon converted by my nurse Fanny (my mother
called her Fancy, because of her rare skill with the needle and her
rich decorations of all sorts of things) into a beautifully dressed
footman, who was a very large item in my existence for years. I
thought my father an intensely clever man to have hit upon Pompey, and
to have understood so well that he would make an angel. All his
presents to us Old People, as he called us, were either unusual or of
exquisite workmanship. The fairy quality was indispensable before he
chose them. We children have clung to them even to our real old age.
The fairies were always just round the corner of the point of sight,
with me, and in recognition of my keen delight of confidence in the
small fry my father gave me little objects that were adapted to them:
delicate bureaus with tiny mirrors that had reflected fairy faces a
moment before, and little tops that opened by unscrewing them in an
unthought-of way and held minute silver spoons. Once he brought home
to Julian a china donkey's head in a tall gray hat such as negroes and
politicians elect to wear, and its brains were composed entirely of
borrowed brilliancy in the shape of matches.
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