a long time
the most beautiful thing I knew. It is strange that I cannot remember
what became of them, for I am sure I neither broke nor lost them,--perhaps
it was done for me: Arthur came afterward, the tomb of many of my early
joys, and the maker of so many new ones. He, dearest, is the one, the only
one, who has seen the tears that belong truly to you: and he blesses me
with such wonderful patience when I speak your name, allowing that perhaps
I know better than he. And after the wax babies I had him for my third
birthday.

LETTER LXX.

Beloved: I think that small children see very much as animals must do:
just the parts of things which have a direct influence on their lives, and
no memory outside that. I remember the kindness or frowns of faces in
early days far more than the faces themselves: and it is quite a distinct
and later memory that I have of standing within a doorway and watching my
mother pass downstairs unconscious of my being there,--and _then_, for the
first time, studying her features and seeing in them a certain solitude
and distance which I had never before noticed:--I suppose because I had
never before thought of looking at her when she was not concerned with me.

It was this unobservance of actual features, I imagine, which made me
think all gray-haired people alike, and find a difficulty in recognizing
those who called, except generically as callers--people who kissed me,
and whom therefore I liked to see.

One, I remember, for no reason unless because she had a brown face, I
mistook from a distance for my Aunt Dolly, and bounded into the room
where she was sitting, with a cry of rapture. And it was my earliest
conscious test of politeness, when I found out my mistake, not to cry over
it in the kind but very inferior presence to that one I had hoped for.

I suppose, also, that many sights which have no meaning to children go,
happily, quite out of memory; and that what our early years leave for us
in the mind's lavender are just the tit-bits of life, or the first blows
to our intelligence--things which did matter and mean much.

Corduroys come early into my life,--their color and the queer earthy
smell of those which particularly concerned me: because I was picked up
from a fall and tenderly handled by a rough working-man so clothed, whom
I regarded for a long time afterward as an adorable object. He and I
lived to my recognition of him as a wizened, scrubby, middle-aged man,
but r