s I can. You may be able
to piece the disjointed strands together, when I cannot."

"Go on," she said, settling herself to listen.

"You know, Mother," he began, "that I have always known and remembered
one thing from my past. I know you are not my real mother. Kindest and
truest and dearest of mothers and friends you have been to me; my true
mother, whoever and wherever she may be, could have loved and tended me
no better than you. That much I know: but as to other matters my
recollection is far more uncertain. Some persons and things I recall
clearly; others are mixed together, and here and there, as if in a
dream, some person, or more frequently some action of such a person,
stands out vividly, like a picture, from the general haze. Now, for
instance, I can remember that there was somebody called `Mother Isel':
but whether she were my mother, or yours, or who she was, that I do not
know. Again, I recollect a man, who must have been rather stern to my
childish freaks, I suppose, for he brings with him a sense of fear.
This man does not come into my life till I was some few years old; there
is another whom I remember better, an older friend, a man with light
hair and grave, kindly blue eyes. There are some girls, too, but I
cannot clearly recall them--they seem mixed together in my memory,
though the house in which I and they lived I recollect perfectly. But I
do not know how it is--I never see you there. I clearly recall a big
book, which the man with the blue eyes seems to be constantly reading:
and when he reads, a woman sits by him with a blue check apron, and I
sit on her lap. Perhaps such a thing happened only once, but it appears
to me as if I can remember it often and often. There is another man
whose face I recall--I doubt if he lived in the house; I think he came
in now and then: a man with brown hair and a pleasant, lively face, who
often laughed and had many a merry saying. I cannot certainly remember
any one else connected with that house, except one other--a woman: a
woman with a horrible chattering tongue, who often left people in tears
or very cross: a woman whom I don't like at all."

"And after, Ralph?" suggested the mother in a low voice, when the young
man paused.

"After? Ah, Mother, that is harder to remember still. A great tumult,
cross voices, a sea of faces which all looked angry and terrified me,
and then it suddenly changes like a dream to a great lonely expanse of
shiverin