Mantis,
4 quoted lines
"there is a long, stony island which used, at about the time
I imagined myself visiting Dr. Van Ness, a [sic] harbor a hermit called Crazy Pete."
Heh-heh. That picnic takes place in 1915 (according to Schuyler; those who believe Dan French [a character in PEACE who provides one of the few year date anchors] might put it at 1925), forty-nine years before our narrator Pete becomes a hermit on the island.
But the point here is that Weer is anchoring the hermit to his imagined visits to Dr Van Ness, not to the picnic. And as Weer puts it, "I consult Dr Black as a boy (though with a stroke), but Dr Van Ness as a man". During their consultation, Van Ness opines that Weer is "about sixty", which fits in a whole lot better with the dates in Changeling.
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Matt Freestone II zzz. /,`.-'`' -. ;-;;,. matthew at matthewf.demon.co.uk II |,4- ) )-,. ,\ ( `'-' www.matthewf.demon.co.uk/ II '---''(/--' `-'\)