rs, the trees,
the waters did not exist for me in my youth. The world for me was
uninhabited, a great empty cage. People passed us, or stood at their
doorways watching us, but I never saw them. If by chance I descried
somebody coming whom it would be necessary to salute, or to whom I
might have to speak, I turned aside to avoid them. I was not only shy
to a fault, as a diffident child must be, but the world of sense
either did not exist for me or was thrust upon me to my discomfort.
And yet all the while, as I moved or sat, I was surrounded by a stream
of being, of infinite constituents, aware of them to this extent that
I could converse with them without sight or speech. I knew they were
there, I knew them singing, whispering, screaming. They filled my
understanding not my senses. I did not see them but I felt them. I
knew not what they said or sang, but had always the general sense of
their thronging neighbourhood.

[Footnote 1: And me also when I was enabled at a later day to perceive
them. I am thankful to remember and record for my own comfort that
that day came not too late for my enchantment to overtake his and
proceed in company.]

I enlarge upon this because I think it justifies me in adding that,
observing so little, what I did observe with my bodily eyes must
almost certainly have been observable. But now let the reader judge.

The first time I ever saw a creature which was really outside ordinary
experience was in the late autumn of my twelfth year. My brother, next
in age to me, was nine, my eldest sister eight. We three had been out
walking with our mother, and were now returning at dusk to our tea
through a wood which covered the top of a chalk down. I remember
vividly the scene. The carpet of drenched leaves under bare branches,
the thin spear-like shafts of the underwood, the grey lights between,
the pale frosty sky overhead with the sickle moon low down in it. I
remember, too, various sensations, such as the sudden chill which
affected me as the crimson globe of the sun disappeared; and again
how, when we emerged from the wood, I was enheartened by the sight of
the village shrouded under chimney smoke and by the one or two
twinkling lights dotted here and there about the dim wolds.

In the wood it was already twilight and very damp. Perhaps I had been
tired, more likely bored--as I always was when I was not being
somebody else. I remember that I had found the path interminable. I
had been silent,