d excitement of skating. My recollections are all of flowers, and
roses, and trees in leaf, and hours spent in the garden. In the very
hot summer weather my father and mother used to dine out in the garden,
and it seems now to me as if they must have done so all the year round;
I can remember going to bed, with my window open on to the lawn, and
hearing the talk, and the silence, and then the soft clink of the
things being removed as I sank into sleep. It is a great mystery, that
faculty of the mind for forgetting all the shadows and remembering
nothing but the sunlight; it is so deeply rooted in humanity that it is
hard not to believe that it means something; one dares to hope that if
our individual life continues after death, this instinct--if memory
remains--will triumph over the past, even in the case of lives of
sordid misery and hopeless pain.

Then, too, one wonders what the strong instinct of permanence means, in
creatures that inhabit the world for so short and troubled a space; why
instinct should so contradict experience; why human beings have not
acquired in the course of centuries a sense of the fleetingness of
things. All our instincts seem to speak of permanence; all our
experience points to swift and ceaseless change. I cannot fathom it.

As I wandered about Woodcote my thoughts took a sombre tinge, and the
lacrimae rerum, the happy days gone, the pleasant groups broken up to
meet no more, the old faces departed, the voices that are silent--all
these thoughts began to weigh on my mind with a sad bewilderment. One
feels so independent, so much the master of one's fate; and yet when
one returns to an old home one begins to wonder whether one has any
power of choice at all. There is this strange fence of self and
identity drawn for me round one tiny body; all that is outside of it
has no existence for me apart from consciousness. These are fruitless
thoughts, but one cannot always resist them; and why one is here, what
these vivid feelings mean, what one's heart-hunger for the sweet world
and for beloved people means--all this is dark and secret; and the
strong tide bears us on, out of the little harbour of childhood into
unknown seas.

Dear Woodcote, dear remembered days, beloved faces and voices of the
past, old trees and fields! I cannot tell what you mean and what you
are; but I can hardly believe that, if I have a life beyond, it will
not somehow comprise you all; for indeed you are my own for ever;