Perhaps he, too, thought that I had been a snob, a thing that I had not needed the instruction of Thackeray to teach me the nature of; but I hope I was not so bad as that; I hope there was nothing meaner in me than youth flattered out of remembrance of old kindness by the new kindness in which it basked. I will confess here that I have always loved the world and the pleasures which other sages pretend are so vapid. If I could make society over, or make it over a little, so that it would be inclusive rather than exclusive, I believe I would still like to go into it, supposing it always sent a motor to fetch and carry me and did not insist upon any sort of personal exertion from me. But when I was between twenty and twenty-three and lived in Columbus I was willing to be at almost any trouble for it. All up and down the wide shady streets which ran from High eastward, and were called Rich and Town and State and Broad, there were large pleasant houses of brick, with or without limestone facings, standing in lawns more ample or less, and showing through their trees the thrilling light of evening parties that burst with the music of dancing from every window. Or if this was not the case with every house, beautiful girls were waiting in every other to be called upon, beside the grates with their fires of soft coal, which no more discriminated between winter and summer than the door-yard trees which seem to have been full-foliaged the whole year round. It may be that with the passage of time there began to be shadows in the picture otherwise too bright. It seems to me that in time the calls and balls may have begun to pall and a subtle _Weltschmerz_, such as we had then, to pierce the heart; but scarcely any sense of that remains. What is certain is that the shadow of incredible disaster which was soon to fill the whole heaven still lurked below the horizon, or if it showed itself there, took the form of retreating clouds which we had but to keep on laughing and singing in order to smile altogether out of sight. The slavery question which was not yet formidably a question of disunion was with most of the older men a question of politics, though with men like Dr. S. it was a question of ethics; with the younger men it was a partisan question, a difference between Democrats and Republicans; with me it was a question of emotions, of impassioned preoccupations, and in my newspaper work a question of copy, of material for joking, for firing the Southern heart. It might be brought home to us in some enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, as in the case of the mother who killed her children in Cincinnati rather than let them be taken back with her to Kentucky; or in the return of an escaping slave seized in our own railroad station; and there was at first the horror of revolted humanity and then the acquiescence of sickened patience. It was the law, it was the law; and the law was constitutional and must be obeyed till it was repealed.