ult manifestation, except in the violent ward of an insane
retreat, or perhaps among savages,--the infants of the world,--equals,
in exquisite concentration and rapture of fury, that child's trick of
flinging himself flat down, and, with kicks and poundings and howls,
banging his head upon the ground? Without fear or knowledge, his whole
being centres in the one faculty of anger; he hurls the whole of himself
slap against the whole world, as readily as at a kitten or a playmate.
He would fain scrabble down through the heart of the earth and kill it,
rend it to pieces, if he could! If human wickedness can be expressed in
such a mad child, you have the whole of it,--perfectly ignorant,
perfectly furious, perfectly feeble, perfectly useless.

And as to the sunny hours, I believe those delights are like the
phantasmal glories of elf-land. When the glamour is taken away, the
splendid feasts and draperies, and gold and silver, and gallant knights
and lovely ladies, are seen to have been a squalid misery of poor roots
and scraps, tatters and pebbles and bark and dirt, misshapen dwarfs and
old hags. Or else, the deceitful vision vanishes all away, and was only
empty, unconscious time. Or am I indeed unfortunate, and inferior to
other men in innate qualities, in social faculty, in truthfulness of
remembrance?

Let me see. Let me "set it out," as an attorney would say. Let me state
and judge those primeval, or preliminary, or forming years of my life.

How many were they? More at the North, than in the hot, hurrying South.
As a rule, the Northerner should be twenty-five years old before
assuming to be a man. For my own part, I have always had an unpleasant
consciousness, which I am only now escaping from, of non-precocity,
anti-precocity, in fact, _post_cocity. I have been relatively immature.
In important particulars I have been, somehow, ten years behind
men--boys if you like--of my own age. The particulars I mean are those
of intercourse with other people.

The first ten years of my life seem to me now to have been almost
totally empty. I can conjure up, not without some effort, a scanty
platoon of small, dim images from school and Sunday school and church
and home; but they are few and faint.

I remember a little dirty-faced rampant girl at an infant school in
Pine Street, who was wont to scratch us with such fell and witch-like
malignity and persistence, that the teacher was fain to sew up her small
fists in unbleached