while the rest of us went about on tiptoe, and only the birds dared sing.
Even the mosquitoes that infested the place were too much in awe
of him to sting him; they certainly never did sting him, and I naturally
concluded it must be because he had forbidden such familiarities.
Although I had played there for so many years since his death, my memory
skipped them all, and went back to the days when it was exclusively his.
Standing on the spot where his armchair used to be, I felt how well I
knew him now from the impressions he made then on my child's mind,
though I was not conscious of them for more than twenty years.
Nobody told me about him, and he died when I was six, and yet within
the last year or two, that strange Indian summer of remembrance
that comes to us in the leisured times when the children have been
born and we have time to think, has made me know him perfectly well.
It is rather an uncomfortable thought for the grown-up, and especially
for the parent, but of a salutary and restraining nature, that though
children may not understand what is said and done before them,
and have no interest in it at the time, and though they may forget
it at once and for years, yet these things that they have seen
and heard and not noticed have after all impressed themselves
for ever on their minds, and when they are men and women come
crowding back with surprising and often painful distinctness,
and away frisk all the cherished little illusions in flocks.

I had an awful reverence for my grandfather.
He never petted, and he often frowned, and such people are
generally reverenced. Besides, he was a just man, everybody said;
a just man who might have been a great man if he had chosen,
and risen to almost any pinnacle of worldly glory.
That he had not so chosen was held to be a convincing proof
of his greatness; for he was plainly too great to be great in