accomplishment. And it was a bitter day for me when I
left them for America.

For during those six years I had seen my father at long intervals, and
had almost forgotten the earlier days when I was always with him. I used
to be the one little comfort of his perpetual wanderings, when I was a
careless child, and said things to amuse him. Not that he ever played
with me any more than he played with any thing; but I was the last of
his seven children, and he liked to watch me grow. I never knew it,
I never guessed it, until he gave his life for mine; but, poor little
common thing as I was, I became his only tie to earth. Even to me he
was never loving, in the way some fathers are. He never called me by pet
names, nor dandled me on his knee, nor kissed me, nor stroked down my
hair and smiled. Such things I never expected of him, and therefore
never missed them; I did not even know that happy children always have
them.

But one thing I knew, which is not always known to happier children:
I had the pleasure of knowing my own name. My name was an English
one--Castlewood--and by birth I was an English girl, though of England
I knew nothing, and at one time spoke and thought most easily in French.
But my longing had always been for England, and for the sound of English
voices and the quietude of English ways. In the chatter and heat and
drought of South France some faint remembrance of a greener, cooler,
and more silent country seemed to touch me now and then. But where in
England I had lived, or when I had left that country, or whether I had
relations there, and why I was doomed to be a foreign girl--all these
questions were but as curling wisps of cloud on memory's sky.

Of such things (much as I longed to know a good deal more about them) I
never had dared to ask my father; nor even could I, in a roundabout way,
such as clever children have, get second-hand information. In the
first place, I was not a clever child; for the next point, I never had
underhand skill; and finally, there was no one near me who knew any
thing about me. Like all other girls--and perhaps the very same tendency
is to be found in boys--I had strong though hazy ideas of caste. The
noble sense of equality, fraternity, and so on, seems to come later in
life than childhood, which is an age of ambition. I did not know who in
the world I was, but felt quite sure of being somebody.

One day, when the great tree had been sawn into lengths, and with the
aid