al motion. When we wind up a clock that is out of order, to make
it go well for the future, we do not immediately set the hand to the
present instant, but we make it strike the round of all its hours,
before it can recover the regularity of its time. Such, thought I, shall
be my method this evening; and since it is that day of the year which
I dedicate to the memory of such in another life as I much delighted in
when living, an hour or two shall be sacred to sorrow and their memory,
while I run over all the melancholy circumstances of this kind which
have occurred to me in my whole life.

The first sense of sorrow I ever knew was upon the death of my father,
at which time I was not quite five years of age; but was rather amazed
at what all the house meant than possessed with a real understanding
why nobody was willing to play with me. I remember I went into the room
where his body lay, and my mother sat weeping alone by it. I had my
battledore in my band, and fell a-beating the coffin, and calling Papa;
for, I know not how, I had some slight idea that he was locked up there.
My mother catched me in her arms, and, transported beyond all patience
of the silent grief she was before in, she almost smothered me in her
embrace; and told me in a flood of tears, "Papa could not hear me, and
would play with me no more, for they were going to put him under ground,
whence he could never come to us again." She was a very beautiful woman,
of a noble spirit, and there was a dignity in her grief amidst all the
wildness of her transport which, methought, struck me with an instinct
of sorrow, which, before I was sensible of what it was to grieve, seized
my very soul, and has made pity the weakness of my heart ever since.
The mind in infancy is, methinks, like the body in embryo; and receives
impressions so forcible that they are as hard to be removed by reason
as any mark with which a child is born is to be taken away by any future
application. Hence it is that good-nature in me is no merit; but having
been so frequently overwhelmed with her tears before I knew the cause of
any affliction, or could draw defences from my own judgment, I imbibed
commiseration, remorse, and an unmanly gentleness of mind, which has
since ensnared me into ten thousand calamities; and from whence I can
reap no advantage, except it be that, in such a humour as I am now in,
I can the better indulge myself in the softness of humanity, and enjoy
that sweet anxiety