had all gone around the edge of the hill to the village cemetery,
and I alone remained alive in the deserted world. I always stood
in the same spot in the blacksmith shop, darkly pondering as to
how to begin, and never once did I know how, although I fully
realized that the affairs of the world could not be resumed until
at least one wheel should be made and something started. Every
victim of nightmare is, I imagine, overwhelmed by an excessive
sense of responsibility and the consciousness of a fearful
handicap in the effort to perform what is required; but perhaps
never were the odds more heavily against "a warder of the world"
than in these reiterated dreams of mine, doubtless compounded in
equal parts of a childish version of Robinson Crusoe and of the
end-of-the-world predictions of the Second Adventists, a few of
whom were found in the village. The next morning would often
find me, a delicate little girl of six, with the further
disability of a curved spine, standing in the doorway of the
village blacksmith shop, anxiously watching the burly,
red-shirted figure at work. I would store my mind with such
details of the process of making wheels as I could observe, and
sometimes I plucked up courage to ask for more. "Do you always
have to sizzle the iron in water?" I would ask, thinking how
horrid it would be to do. "Sure!" the good-natured blacksmith
would reply, "that makes the iron hard." I would sigh heavily and
walk away, bearing my responsibility as best I could, and this of
course I confided to no one, for there is something too
mysterious in the burden of "the winds that come from the fields
of sleep" to be communicated, although it is at the same time too
heavy a burden to be borne alone.

My great veneration and pride in my father manifested itself in