Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from scanned images of public domain material from the Google Print project.) BY HENRY JAMES A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS NOTES OF A SON AND BROTHER NOTES OF A SON AND BROTHER [Illustration: _Pencil-drawn portrait of William James by himself about 1866_] NOTES OF A SON AND BROTHER BY HENRY JAMES ILLUSTRATED NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1914 COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS Published March, 1914 ILLUSTRATIONS Pencil-drawn portrait of William James by himself, about 1866 _Frontispiece_ FACING PAGE Louis Osborne. Sketch from a letter of William James (page 18) 18 Portrait in oils of Miss Katherine Temple, 1861 96 A leaf from the letter quoted on page 129 130 Sketch of G. W. James brought home wounded from the assault on Fort Wagner 244 "The cold water cure at Divonne--excellent for melancholia."--From a letter of William James (page 447) 448 I It may again perhaps betray something of that incorrigible vagueness of current in our educational drift which I have elsewhere[1] so unreservedly suffered to reflect itself that, though we had come abroad in 1855 with an eye to the then supposedly supreme benefits of Swiss schooling, our most resolute attempt to tap that supply, after twenty distractions, waited over to the autumn of the fourth year later on, when we in renewed good faith retraced our steps to Geneva. Our parents began at that season a long sojourn at the old Hotel de l'Ecu, which now erects a somewhat diminished head on the edge of the rushing Rhone--its only rival then was the Hotel des Bergues opposite, considerably larger and commanding more or less the view of that profiled crest of Mont-Blanc which used to be so oddly likened to the head and face of a singularly supine Napoleon. But on that side the shooting blue flood was less directly and familiarly under the windows; in our position we lived with it and hung over it, and its beauty, just where we mainly congregated, was, I fear, my own sole happy impression during several of those months. It was of a Sunday that we congregated most; my two younger brothers had, in general, on that day their _sortie_ from the Pensionnat Maquelin, a couple of miles out of town, where they were then established, and W. J., following courses at the Academy, in its present enriched and amplified form the University, mingled, failing livelier recreation, in the family circle at the hotel. Livelier recreation, during the hours of completest ease, consisted mostly, as the period drew itself out, of those _courses_, along the lake and along the hills, which offer to student-life in whatever phase, throughout that blest country, the most romantic of all forms of "a little change"; enjoyed too in some degree, but much more restrictedly, by myself--this an