His name is _William Ambrose_, and it
is worth your while to make his disreputable acqaintance.
* * * * *
One fact at once awakened in me a fellow-feeling for Mr. BERTRAM
SMITH--the discovery of his appreciation (shared by myself, the elder
STEVENSON, and other persons of discernment) for the romantic
possibilities of the map. There is an excellent map in the beginning of
Days of Discovery (CONSTABLE), showing the peculiar domain of
childhood, the garden, in terms that will hardly fail to win your
sympathy. But not in this alone does Mr. SMITH show that he has the
heart of the matter in him; every page of these reminiscences of
nursery life proclaims a genuine memory, not a make-believe childhood
faked up for literary ends. Who that has once been young can read
unstirred by envy the chapter on "Devices and Contrivances," with its
entrancing triumph of the chain of mirrors arranged (during the
providential absence of those in authority) from the night nursery,
down two flights of stairs, to the store-room in the basement? I know a
reviewer whom nothing, but moral cowardice restrained from testing the
possibility of this delightful plan by personal experiment. Fireworks
too--Mr. SMITH has remembered them with a proper regard that is, of
course, wholly different from that of those who understand them only in
their pyrotechnic aspect, not as objects loved for themselves alone,
for their shape and feel, and the glamour of weeks of hoarding and
barter.
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