reserve close over my
mouth, like a yashmak. To my father I could not speak, to my mother I
did not; the others, being my juniors all, hardly existed. Who is to
declare the motives of a child's mind? What was the nature of this
reticence? Was it that my real habit was reverie? Was it, as I
suspect, that constitutional timidity made me diffident? I was a
coward, I am very sure, for I was always highly imaginative. Was it,
finally, that I was dimly conscious of matters which I despaired of
putting clearly? Who can say? And who can tell me now whether I was
cursed or blessed? Certainly, if it had been possible to any person my
senior to share with me my daily adventures, I might have conquered
the cowardice from which I suffered such terrible reverses. But it was
not. I was the eldest of a large family, and apparently the easiest to
deal with of any of it. I was what they call a tractable child, being,
in fact, too little interested in the world as it was to resent any
duties cast upon me. It was not so with the others. They were
high-spirited little creatures, as often in mischief as not, and
demanded much more pains then I ever did. What they demanded they got,
what I did not demand I got not: "Lo, here is alle! What shold I more
seye?"

How it was that, taking no interest in my actual surroundings, I
became aware of unusual things behind them I cannot understand. It is
very difficult to differentiate between what I imagined and what I
actually perceived. It was a favourite string of my poor father's
plaintive lyre that I had no eyes. He was a great walker, a poet, and
a student of nature. Every Sunday of his life he took me and my
brother for a long tramp over the country, the intense spiritual
fatigue of which exercise I should never be able to describe. I have a
sinking of the heart, even now, when I recall our setting out.
Intolerable labour! I saw nothing and said nothing. I did nothing but
plug one dull foot after the other. I felt like some chained slave
going to the hulks, and can well imagine that my companions must have
been very much aware of it. My brother, whose nature was much happier
than mine, who dreamed much less and observed much more, was the life
of these woeful excursions. Without him I don't think that my father
could have endured them. At any rate, he never did. I amazed,
irritated, and confounded him at most times, but in nothing more than
my apathy to what enchanted him.[1] The birds, the flowe