y
mind, not half understood, unrelated to my utterable thoughts,
concerned something for which I had as yet no name. Every imaginative
growing child has these flashes of intuition, especially one that
becomes intimate with some one aspect of nature. With me it was the
growing time, that idle summer by the sea, and I grew all the faster
because I had been so cramped before. My mind, too, had so recently
been worked upon by the impressive experience of a change of country
that I was more than commonly alive to impressions, which are the
seeds of ideas.

Let no one suppose that I spent my time entirely, or even chiefly, in
inspired solitude. By far the best part of my day was spent in
play--frank, hearty, boisterous play, such as comes natural to
American children. In Polotzk I had already begun to be considered too
old for play, excepting set games or organized frolics. Here I found
myself included with children who still played, and I willingly
returned to childhood. There were plenty of playfellows. My father's
energetic little partner had a little wife and a large family. He kept
them in the little cottage next to ours; and that the shanty survived
the tumultuous presence of that brood is a wonder to me to-day. The
young Wilners included an assortment of boys, girls, and twins, of
every possible variety of age, size, disposition, and sex. They
swarmed in and out of the cottage all day long, wearing the door-sill
hollow, and trampling the ground to powder. They swung out of windows
like monkeys, slid up the roof like flies, and shot out of trees like
fowls. Even a small person like me couldn't go anywhere without being
run over by a Wilner; and I could never tell which Wilner it was
because none of them ever stood still long enough to be identified;
and also because I suspected that they were in the habit of
interchanging conspicuous articles of clothing, which was very
confusing.

You would suppose that the little mother must have been utterly lost,
bewildered, trodden down in this horde of urchins; but you are
mistaken. Mrs. Wilner was a positively majestic little person. She
ruled her brood with the utmost coolness and strictness. She had even
the biggest boy under her thumb, frequently under her palm. If they
enjoyed the wildest freedom outdoors, indoors the young Wilners lived
by the clock. And so at five o'clock in the evening, on seven days in
the week, my father's partner's children could be seen in two long