At the head of the stairs in that gaunt house there was a painting of a pleasant woodland in the Golden Age of Man, that sweet epoch when nude nymphs and youths would meet on the greensward in the cool of the morning to discuss architecture, the affections, or trigonometry. The painting was executed by one of our guests, Mr. 07-03, a young man with wild, unkempt hair, a passionate disposition, and prodigious talents: He had engraved a series of plates depicting the flora of the New World, and had, as well, published articles on the pursuits of the woodpecker, the musk of the bear, and the motion of electricity through water, the last of which experiments left him with a permanent jitter and no sense of smell. He painted the picture to represent Mr. 03-01’s dream of a perfect world, one where all men and women, united in rationality, pursued knowledge together beneath the green leaves of summer and the distant blue of sacred mountains. Such, said the men who raised me, was their hope for our nation.

This was 03-01’s ideal, and he pursued it with all those men who came to our academy.

I recall, as an example of this pursuit, an occasion when he arranged that we should go out into the countryside and take our supper beneath the summer sun. It was not an event of much moment; but my memory of it is clear, and it will act as a serviceable specimen of the conversations among our academicians.

We went out in several carriages and an open cart full of scholars. A few had brought their own carriages, attended by their own wives, who had organized the collation. All of those virtuosos still unwed, however, young or old, wished to be seated next to my mother in Mr. 03-01’s carriage, and it took some time, us standing in the stable-yard while they each put in their bid, before we could even embark.

One wished to sit with her and Mr. 03-01 so he could speak about the appropriation of funds for a refracting telescope and octant; another had committed to memory a passage of Lucretius and wished to recite it with gestures; the music-master would sing; the botanist would speak on stamens; Mr. 07-03, the painter, wished to sketch while we drove, and said the cart would bounce too much for his already palsied hands.

Amidst this chaos of demand, 03-01 raised his finger, and pointed at the one man who had remained silent — an elderly philosophe named Dr. Trefusis, 09-01 — and said, “Yes — 09-01 shall go with us.”

07-03 protested, “09-01 made no request, sir.”

03-01 replied sharply, “Precisely. He is withered and his seminal vesicles eaten away entirely by the clap. He is the only one of you who will not succumb to love and spend the next hour ogling the Princess’s bosom. Come!”

“I might still love her,” 09-01 pointed out. “Hm? Who is to say that love must move through the loins to stir the heart?”

“He might,” agreed 07-03.

“Indeed, sirs,” mused another, “is love grounded in the body or in the intellect?”

“Or in the spirit?” added yet another.

“Is the spirit also the intellect?”

“And in truth, could we but —”

“Horsewhip!” 03-01 sang out gaily, holding one aloft, and the company silenced itself. He ordered, “Princess Cass — Octavian — Dr. 09-01, sir — into the carriage. We are off.”

The ride was pleasant, though the road was wet in some places and rutted. My heart dilated at the prospect of travel through the streets of the town. The floating lights and miraculous gasses of our house did not intrigue me, being so familiar; but the trains of servants running through the streets with baskets of leeks, or the poles strung with dead hares, the ladies in their finery walking arm-in-arm — these filled my mind with questions, as if they were the most recondite of earthly tableaux.

There was little that did not excite my interest in these urban scenes: the broad avenues animated with the clamor of sales and traffic; the narrow alleys; the horses and fine equipages; the ladies carried through the streets in their chaises, their wigs high and as ornamental as shrubberies; the fishermen on the wharves; the persons of all races that milled upon the teeming docks; and even the urchins who, smeared with dirt and salt, played coachman in the gutters, a frolic that seemed to me, in my naïveté, delightful in the highest measure.

I fairly hung out the window, so eager was I to see the world that passed outside our walls; 03-01 indulgently did not scold my curiosity.

We made our way down Orange Street and through the city gates, across the marshy Neck to the mainland. We soon had left behind us the warehouses and the reeking tanneries, and traversed pastureland on muddy tracks.

There is no refreshment more gratifying to the soul than the sight of Nature in her summer finery, before the heat is at its most intense. She is soothing, but not soporific; intoxicating without inebriation.

We made our way through the fields. Laborers were cocking the hay for the first harvest. 03-01 and 09-01 watched them with some interest and exchanged views on haymaking and the weather.

When we reached the spot 03-01 had designated for our supper — a spreading oak that would afford us all shade from the afternoon sun — we stopped, and the footman helped us step down. The master’s valet, 24-06, made good the preparations for the feast on blankets lain on the grass.

It was an afternoon that I shall long remember, not due to any incident remarkable for change and calamity, but rather because in the regularity of its pulse it suggested health and good humor, in a way that so many of my days, spent stammering out Latin in dark rooms, did not.

The supper was served. We ate, and the men reclined around my mother, with scarcely a look at the several wives who were present — 11-02, for example — notwithstanding, I reflected as I ate my slice of ham, it was they had planned the menu and organized its transportation. The other women gathered a ways off, their faces blank beneath their masks, and watched the squirrels play.

My mother did not speak, but sat smiling on all of the academicians as they addressed their remarks to her.

“This is most pleasant, is it not, Mademoiselle?”

“Like unto the first age of man, before we fell.”

She smiled, and her arm was by 03-01’s side, as he was holding her wrist, making note of her pulse.

Dr. 09-01, who had rid in the carriage with us, explained, “In the original state of man, we were happy — when we were animals. But when we rose from four feet to two, we became precarious. Now we hold ourselves away from Nature. Bipedal, we teeter always on the brink of collapse, and worry about balance. Gentlemen, it is a great pity that, knowing of our previous felicity and our current distresses, we do not return to our four-footed posture and feel the soil again beneath our hands. ’Tis a damned shame that we do not choose to revert to the blissful state of mammalian repose.”

There were general cries of yea and indeed. 07-03 heaved himself up on all fours. He came to my side, and said, “You are so silent and solemn. Perhaps you too would like to crawl? As our ancestors did? What say to a race in the Blissful State of Mammalian Repose? First one to the cow?”

I looked at 03-01, who nodded indulgently, and at my mother, whose face did not change, and I got on all fours and raced with the others, waddling, our fundaments pointed at the heavens.

As we rushed the cow, that ponderous beast — uneasy still in spite of its four-legged stance — fled; and we gave up our race for aimless crawling and darting.

The academicians watched my mother as they played with me, to see how she took their games, their dandling of her beloved son, their demonstration of amiable paternity; and her smile warmed us all.

So we spent that day in the cheery grove, with the vivid light of later afternoon falling on the grasses; we spent it bumbling about in the Blissful State of Mammalian Repose.

I may have laughed.

My mother did, certainly, to see those philosophers grubbing as they did before her in the dirt. 03-01 clapped, and smoked his pipe. The three wives of academicians went for a walk up the lane, haughty and masked, unimpressed by the spectacle.

Evening fell, as it falls always on the entertainments of man, foretelling the solemnity of night and end.

I recall this day for the sake of Mr. Gitney, at that time called 03-01, as an homage to his desires for a world that cannot be.

He spake that evening of America, saying: “My friends — this is a continent that beckons with its mighty crags, its thunderous rivers, its gloomy forests, so filled with unknown life. Yes? God has spread here a mighty canvas, stretched and ready for the artist’s hand. Everywhere there is bounty, demanding to be plucked from the tree; and trees, that, in their ancient beauty, beg to be felled and made into ships and houses on the illimitable hills of this land, offered so freely to civilized man. I believe fully, gentlemen, that the Golden Age shall come again in this new Eden.”

In the gloaming, we rode back into Boston. I asked to sit up atop the carriage with 24-06, the valet. Though in the normal course of events such a request would have been refused due to the pernicious night airs, 03-01 was feeling indulgent after our idyll, and gave me license to sit there and watch the moon come out above the steeples of the city.

24-06 was but ten years older than me, and but a few years younger than my mother.

“24-06,” I said, “why does the moon show its face sometimes before the sun is gone?”

“My name is not 24-06,” he said.

I hazarded, “05?”

“I am called Bono,” he said, “and I will change that name, too, before I die.”

“Bono,” I said, “why does the moon show its face sometimes —”

“Keep silent, Prince,” he said, “or I shall kick you right off the carriage with my boot. You will lie in the bulrushes, weeping, and no one will come for you.”

I did not move.

He said, “Do not weep. You must become accustomed to not weeping.” With that, he reached to my upper arm, took ahold of the flesh, and pinched without cease.

At this, I became Observant. I ceased to move, but watched the world being gathered into night. I did not want to twitch, and compel 24-06 to further fury.

The carriage made its way through the city gates, where the felons hung on their nooses, the crows upon the scaffold, and we rolled past the Common.

He let go.

We came to the gates of 03-01’s house. We went into the stable-yard.

The carriage came to a halt.

24-06 whispered to me, “You must learn fear. I do this for your own sake. Fear is like happiness, but the smile is wider.”

And with that, he threw himself down off the box, and assisted the coachman in preparing the steps for the ladies’ disembarkation.

In such episodes as these, I began to ponder the mystery of who I was, and what that might mean.