I always went back to bed as bold as a lion, and slept, if not
the sleep of the just, at least that of the comforted.

I recall an incident which must have occurred before I was seven
years old, for the mill in which my father transacted his business
that day was closed in 1867. The mill stood in the neighboring
town adjacent to its poorest quarter. Before then I had always
seen the little city of ten thousand people with the admiring eyes
of a country child, and it had never occurred to me that all its
streets were not as bewilderingly attractive as the one which
contained the glittering toyshop and the confectioner. On that day
I had my first sight of the poverty which implies squalor, and
felt the curious distinction between the ruddy poverty of the
country and that which even a small city presents in its shabbiest
streets. I remember launching at my father the pertinent inquiry
why people lived in such horrid little houses so close together,
and that after receiving his explanation I declared with much
firmness when I grew up I should, of course, have a large house,
but it would not be built among the other large houses, but right
in the midst of horrid little houses like those.

That curious sense of responsibility for carrying on the world's
affairs which little children often exhibit because "the old man
clogs our earliest years," I remember in myself in a very absurd
manifestation. I dreamed night after night that every one in the
world was dead excepting myself, and that upon me rested the
responsibility of making a wagon wheel. The village street
remained as usual, the village blacksmith shop was "all there,"
even a glowing fire upon the forge and the anvil in its customary
place near the door, but no human being was within sight. They