even Days. It seems
as if time had not yet been created, for all are connected with emotion
and place and without sequence.

I remember sitting upon somebody's knee, looking out of a window at a wall
covered with cracked and falling plaster, but what wall I do not remember,
and being told that some relation once lived there. I am looking out of
another window in London. It is at Fitzroy Road. Some boys are playing in
the road and among them a boy in uniform, a telegraph boy perhaps. When I
ask who the boy is, a servant tells me that he is going to blow the town
up, and I go to sleep in terror.

After that come memories of Sligo, where I live with my grandparents. I am
sitting on the ground looking at a mastless toy boat, with the paint
rubbed and scratched, and I say to myself in great melancholy, "it is
further away than it used to be," and while I am saying it I am looking at
a long scratch in the stern, for it is especially the scratch which is
further away. Then one day at dinner my great-uncle William Middleton
says, "we should not make light of the troubles of children. They are
worse than ours, because we can see the end of our trouble and they can
never see any end," and I feel grateful for I know that I am very unhappy
and have often said to myself, "when you grow up, never talk as grown-up
people do of the happiness of childhood." I may have already had the night
of misery when, having prayed for several days that I might die, I had
begun to be afraid that I was dying and prayed that I might live. There
was no reason for my unhappiness. Nobody was unkind, and my grandmother
has still after so many years my gratitude and my reverence. The house was
so big that there was always a room to hide in, and I had a red pony and a
garden where I could wander, and there were two dogs to follow at my
heels, one white with some black spots on his head and the other with long
black hair all over him. I used to think about God and fancy that I was
very wicked, and one day when I threw a stone and hit a duck in the yard
by mischance and broke its wing, I was full of wonder when I was told that
the duck would be cooked for dinner and that I should not be punished.

Some of my misery was loneliness and some of it fear of old William
Pollexfen my grandfather. He was never unkind, and I cannot remember that
he ever spoke harshly to me, but it was the custom to fear and admire him.
He had won the freedom of some Spanish city for