and picked to pieces by the old bogey made it impossible
for me to compose anything.

I loved, however, even at this time, to write for myself, but I did it
with the greatest secrecy. Not in the desk in my room that was profaned
by lessons and copy-books, but in the little old-fashioned one that was
part of the furniture of my museum, there was hidden away a unique thing
that represented my first attempt at a journal. It looked like a sibyl's
conjuring book, or an Assyrian manuscript; a seeming endless strip
of paper was rolled upon a reed; at the head of this there were two
varieties of the Egyptian sphinx and a cabalistic star drawn in red
ink,--and under these mysterious signs I wrote down, upon the full
length of the paper and in a cipher of my own invention, daily events
and reflections. A year later, however, because of the labor involved in
transcribing the cryptographic characters I had chosen I discarded them
and used the ordinary letters; but I continued my work with the greatest
secrecy, and I kept my manuscript under lock and key as if it were an
interdicted book. I inscribed there, not so much the events of my almost
colorless existence, as my incoherent impressions, the melancholy that
I felt at twilight, my regret for past summers, and my dreams of distant
countries. . . . I already had a longing to give my fugitive emotions a
determinative quality, I needed to wrestle against my own weaknesses
and frailties and to banish, if possible, the dream-like element that
I seemed to discover in all the things about me, and for that reason I
continued my journal until a few years ago. . . . But at that time the
mere idea that a day might come when someone would have a peep at it was
insupportable to me; so much so indeed that if I left home and went to
the Island or elsewhere for a few days, I always took care to seal up my
journal, and with the greatest solemnity I wrote upon the packet: "It is
my last wish that this book be burned without being read."

God knows, I have changed since then. But it would be going too far
beyond the limits of this story of my childhood to recount here through
what changes in my life's view-point it chances that I now sing aloud
of my woes, and cry out to the passers-by, for the purpose of drawing
to myself the sympathy of distant unknown ones; and I call out with the
greater anguish in proportion as I feel myself approaching nearer and
nearer to the final dust. . . . And who knows?