Many times, lying in my bed after a disgraceful debauch of days' or weeks'
duration, has my memory winged its way through the realms of darkness in
the mournful and lonesome past, back through years of horror and suffering
to the green and holy morning of life, as it at this moment seems to me,
and rested for an instant on some quiet hour in that dawn which broke
tempestuously, heralding the storms which would later gather and break
about me. At such times I could distinctly remember the names and features
of all the persons who dwelt in the vicinity of my father's house, although
many of them died long ago or passed away from the neighborhood. I could at
this time repeat word for word conversations which took place twenty-five
years ago. I do not so much attribute this to a retentive memory as to the
habit I have had of thinking, when my mind was in a condition to think, of
all that was a part of my early life. Again and again, as the years gather
up around me, and the valley of life deepens its shadows toward the tomb,
do I go back in memory to the days that were. Again and again do I awaken
to the beauty, the love, the faces and friends of those days. They are all
dear and sacred to me now, though I know they can come no more, and that
the hollow spaces of time between the Here and There--the Now and
Then--will reverberate forever with the echoes of many-voiced sorrows.
Could those who meet me look down into the depths of my ghastly and bitter
desolation, they would behold more appalling pictures of human agony than
ever mortal eye gazed upon since the opening of the day of time--since the
roses of Eden first bloomed and knew not the blight so soon to darken the
earthly paradise by the rivers of the east. But I wander from my subject.

I lived and worked on my father's farm until I was eighteen years of age.
As I have already said, even when a child I found myself sad and much
depressed at times. I could not bear the society of my companions, and at
such times would wander away alone to meditate and brood over my misery. At