"My father and mother
Shall come unto the land,"

sometimes varying it with,

"My brothers and sisters
Shall come unto the land;"

Nobody knew where I had caught the words, but I chanted them so
constantly that my brother wrote them down, with chalk, on the
under side of a table, where they remained for years. My thought
about that other land may have been only a baby's dream; but the
dream was very real to me. I used to talk, in sober earnest,
about what happened "before I was a little girl, and came here to
live"; and it did seem to me as if I remembered.


But I was hearty and robust, full of frolicsome health, and very
fond of the matter-of-fact world I lived in. My sturdy little
feet felt the solid earth beneath them. I grew with the sprouting
grass, and enjoyed my life as the buds and birds seemed to enjoy
theirs. It was only as if the bud and the bird and the dear warm
earth knew, in the same dumb way that I did, that all their joy
and sweetness came to them out of the sky.

These recollections, that so distinctly belong the baby Myself,
before she could speak her thoughts, though clear and vivid, are
difficult to put into shape. But other grown-up children, in
looking back, will doubtless see many a trailing cloud of glory,