F
RAILROAD TRACKS BELOW 298

THE NATURAL HISTORY CLUB HAD FREQUENT FIELD EXCURSIONS 328

BATES HALL, WHERE I SPENT MY LONGEST HOURS IN THE
LIBRARY 342

THE FAMOUS STUDY, THAT WAS FIT TO HAVE BEEN PRESERVED AS A
SHRINE 346

THE TIDE HAD RUSHED IN, STEALING AWAY OUR SEAWEED
CUSHIONS 362

INTRODUCTION

I was born, I have lived, and I have been made over. Is it not time to
write my life's story? I am just as much out of the way as if I were
dead, for I am absolutely other than the person whose story I have to
tell. Physical continuity with my earlier self is no disadvantage. I
could speak in the third person and not feel that I was masquerading.
I can analyze my subject, I can reveal everything; for _she_, and not
_I_, is my real heroine. My life I have still to live; her life ended
when mine began.

A generation is sometimes a more satisfactory unit for the study of
humanity than a lifetime; and spiritual generations are as easy to
demark as physical ones. Now I am the spiritual offspring of the
marriage within my conscious experience of the Past and the Present.
My second birth was no less a birth because there was no distinct
incarnation. Surely it has happened before that one body served more
than one spiritual organization. Nor am I disowning my father and
mother of the flesh, for they were also partners in the generation of
my second self; copartners with my entire line of ancestors. They gave
me body, so that I have eyes like my father's and hair like my
mother's. The spirit also they gave me, so that I reason like my
father and endure like my mother. But did they set me down in a
sheltered garden, where the sun should warm me, and no winter should
hurt, while they fed me from their hands? No; they early let me run in
the fields--perhaps because I would not be held--and eat of the wild
fruits and drink of the dew. Did they teach me from books, and tell me
what to believe? I soon chose my own books, and built me a world of my
own.

In these discriminations _I_ emerged, a new being, something that had
not been before. And when I discovered my own friends, and ran home
with them to convert my parents to a belief in their excellence, did I
not begin to make my father and mother, as truly as they ha