Day after day, as we sailed on, reminiscences of the same sort
crowded thicker and thicker upon me. Never reminiscences of my later
life, but always early scenes brought up by distinct suggestion
of that Australian voyage. When we passed a ship, it burst upon me
how we'd passed such ships before: when there was fire-drill on
deck, I remembered having assisted years earlier at just such
fire-drill. The whole past came back like a dream, so that I could
reconstruct now the first five or six years of my life almost
entirely. And yet, even so there was a gap, a puzzle, a difficulty
somehow. I couldn't make the chronology of this slow-returning
memory fit in as it ought with the chronology of the facts given to
me by Aunt Emma and the Moores of Torquay. There was a constant
discrepancy. It seemed to me that I must be a year or two older at
least than they made me out. I remembered the voyage home far too
well for my age. I fancied I went back further in my Australian
recollections than would be possible from the dates Aunt Emma
assigned me.

Slowly, as I compared these mental pictures of my first childhood
one with the other, a strange fact seemed to loom forth,
incomprehensible, incredible. When first it struck me, all unnerved
as I was, my reason staggered before it. But it was true, none the
less: quite true, I felt certain. Had I had two papas, then?--for
the pictures differed so. Was one, clean-shaven, trim, and in a
linen coat, the same as the other, older, graver, and sterner, with
much hair on his face, and a rough sort of look, whom I saw more
persistently in my later childish memories? I could hardly believe
it. One man couldn't alter so greatly in a few short years. Yet I
thought of them both alike quite unquestioningly as papa: I thought
of them too, I fancied, in a dim sort of way, as one and the same