This dim half-memory, which perhaps comes to all children, I had
felt when younger still, almost before I could walk. Sitting on
the floor in a square of sunshine made by an open window, the
leaf-shadows from great boughs outside dancing and wavering
around me, I seemed to be talking to them and they to me in
unknown tongues, that left within me an ecstasy yet unforgotten.
These shadows had brought a message to me from an unseen
Somewhere, which my baby heart was to keep forever. The wonder of
that moment often returns. Shadow-traceries of bough and leaf
still seem to me like the hieroglyphics of a lost language.

The stars brought me the same feeling. I remember the surprise
they were to me, seen for the first time. One evening, just
before I was put to bed, I was taken in somebody's arms--my
sister's, I think--outside the door, and lifted up under the
dark, still, clear sky, splendid with stars, thicker and nearer
earth than they have ever seemed since. All my little being
shaped itself into a subdued delighted "Oh!" And then the
exultant thought flitted through the mind of the reluctant child,
as she was carried in, "Why, that is the roof of the house I live
in." After that I always went to sleep happier for the feeling
that the stars were outside there in the dark, though I could not
see them.

I did firmly believe that I came from some other country to this;
I had a vague notion that we were all here on a journey,--that
this was not the place where we really belonged. Some of the
family have told me that before I could talk plainly, I used to
run about humming the sentence--