"Mamma, why do you never beat me like other mammas do?" I
once asked her

She laughed, kissed me, and said, "Because God has punished you
hard enough as it is, poor orphan mine."

I scarcely remembered my father, yet I missed him keenly. I was
ever awake to the fact that other little boys had fathers and that I
was a melancholy exception; that most married women had
husbands, while my mother had to bear her burden unaided. In my
dim childish way I knew that there was a great blank in our family
nest, that it was a widow's nest; and the feeling of it seemed to
color all my other feelings. When I was a little older and would no
longer sleep with my mother, a rusty old coat of my deceased
father's served me as a quilt. At night, before falling asleep, I
would pull it over my head, shut my eyes tight, and evoke a flow
of fantastic shapes, bright, beautifully tinted, and incessantly
changing form and color. While the play of these figures and hues
was going on before me I would see all sorts of bizarre visions,
which at times seemed to have something to do with my father's
spirit

"Is papa in heaven now? Is he through with hell?" I once inquired
of my mother. Some things or ideas would assume queer forms in
my mind. God, for example, appealed to me as a beardless man
wearing a quilted silk cap; holiness was something burning,
forbidding, something connected with fire while a day had the
form of an oblong box

I was a great dreamer of day dreams. One of my pastimes was to