for ever afterwards what is flight, even
though he finds no great historic distances to prove his wings by.

There is a long and mysterious moment in long and mysterious childhood,
which is the extremest distance known to any human fancy. Many other
moments, many other hours, are long in the first ten years. Hours of
weariness are long--not with a mysterious length, but with a mere length
of protraction, so that the things called minutes and half-hours by the
elderly may be something else to their apparent contemporaries, the
children. The ancient moment is not merely one of these--it is a space
not of long, but of immeasurable, time. It is the moment of going to
sleep. The man knows that borderland, and has a contempt for it: he has
long ceased to find antiquity there. It has become a common enough
margin of dreams to him; and he does not attend to its phantasies. He
knows that he has a frolic spirit in his head which has its way at those
hours, but he is not interested in it. It is the inexperienced child who
passes with simplicity through the marginal country; and the thing he
meets there is principally the yet further conception of illimitable
time.

His nurse's lullaby is translated into the mysteries of time. She sings
absolutely immemorial words. It matters little what they may mean to
waking ears; to the ears of a child going to sleep they tell of the
beginning of the world. He has fallen asleep to the sound of them all
his life; and "all his life" means more than older speech can well
express.

Ancient custom is formed in a single spacious year. A child is beset
with long traditions. And his infancy is so old, so old, that the mere
adding of years in the life to follow will not seem to throw it further
back--it is already so far. That is, it looks as remote to the memory of
a man of thirty as to that of a man of seventy. What are a mere forty
years of added later life in the contemplation of such a distance? Pshaw!

Footnotes:

{1} It is worth noting that long after the writing of this paper, and
the ascription of a Stevenson-like character to the quoted phrase, a
letter of Stevenson's was published, and proved that he had read Lucy
Hutchinson's writings, and that he did not love her. "I have possessed
myself of Mrs. Hutchinson, whom, of course, I admire, etc. . . I
sometimes wish the old Colonel had got drunk and beaten her, in the
bitterness of my spirit. . . The way in which s