the feeling that the
stars were outside there in the dark, though I could not see them.

I did firmly believe that I came from some other country to this; I had
a vague notion that we were all here on a journey,--that this was not
the place where we really belonged. Some of the family have told me
that before I could talk plainly, I used to run about humming the
sentence--

"My father and mother
Shall come unto the land,"

sometimes varying it with,

"My brothers and sisters
Shall come unto the land;"

Nobody knew where I had caught the words, but I chanted them so
constantly that my brother wrote them down, with chalk, on the under
side of a table, where they remained for years. My thought about that
other land may have been only a baby's dream; but the dream was very
real to me. I used to talk, in sober earnest, about what happened
"before I was a little girl, and came here to live"; and it did seem to
me as if I remembered.

But I was hearty and robust, full of frolicsome health, and very fond
of the matter-of-fact world I lived in. My sturdy little feet felt the
solid earth beneath them. I grew with the sprouting grass, and enjoyed
my life as the buds and birds seemed to enjoy theirs. It was only as if
the bud and the bird and the dear warm earth knew, in the same dumb way
that I did, that all their joy and sweetness came to them out of the
sky.

These recollections, that so distinctly belong the baby Myself, before
she could speak her thoughts, though clear and vivid, are difficult to
put into shape. But other grown-up children, in looking back, will
doubtless see many a trailing cloud of glory, that lighted their
unconscious infancy from within and from beyond.

I was quite as literal as I was visionary in my mental renderings of
the New Testament, read at Aunt Hannah's knee. I was much taken with
the sound of words, without any thought of their meaning--a habit not
always outgrown with childhood. The "sounding brass and tinkling
cymbals," for instance, in the Epistle to the Corinthians, seemed to me
things to be greatly desired. "Charity" was an abstract idea. I did not
know what it meant. But "tinkling cymbals" one could make music with. I
wished I could get hold of them. It never occurred to me that the
Apostle meant to speak of their melody slightingly.

At meeting, where I began to go also at two years of age, I made my own
private interpretations of the Bible readings. They were absurd