aken us away for a time turned to other, more
assimilable things. But there happened a little incident that laid hold
upon me; you forgot it, perhaps, in a week or less, but I shall never
forget it; and this incident it was that gathered up the fruits of those
moments beside my father's body and set me to write this book. It had
the effect of a little bright light held up against the vague dark
immensities of thought and feeling that filled my mind because of my
father's death.

Now that I come to set it down I see that it is altogether trivial, and
I cannot explain how it is that it is to me so piercingly significant. I
had to whip you. Your respect for the admirable and patient
Mademoiselle Potin, the protectress and companion of your public
expeditions, did in some slight crisis suddenly fail you. In the extreme
publicity of Kensington Gardens, in the presence of your two little
sisters, before a startled world, you expressed an opinion of her, in
two languages and a loud voice, that was not only very unjust, but
extremely offensive and improper. It reflected upon her intelligence and
goodness; it impeached her personal appearance; it was the kind of
outcry no little gentleman should ever permit himself, however deeply he
may be aggrieved. You then, so far as I was able to disentangle the
evidence, assaulted her violently, hurled a stone at her, and fled her
company. You came home alone by a route chosen by yourself, flushed and
wrathful, braving the dangers of Kensington High Street. This, after my
stern and deliberate edict that, upon pain of corporal punishment,
respect and obedience must be paid to Mademoiselle Potin. The logic of
the position was relentless.

But where your behavior was remarkable, where the affair begins to touch
my imagination, was that you yourself presently put the whole business
before me. Alone in the schoolroom, you seem to have come to some
realization of the extraordinary dreadfulness of your behavior. Such
moments happen in the lives of all small boys; they happened to me times
enough, to my dead father, to that grandfather of the portrait which is
now in my study, to his father and his, and so on through long series of
Strattons, back to inarticulate, shock-haired little sinners slinking
fearfully away from the awful wrath, the bellowings and limitless
violence of the hairy Old Man of the herd. The bottom goes out of your
heart then, you are full of a conviction of sin. So far you di