newborn baby again. Only with this important difference. They say
our minds at birth are like a sheet of white paper, ready to take
whatever impressions may fall upon them. Mine was like a sheet all
covered and obscured by one hateful picture. It was weeks, I fancy,
before I knew or was conscious of anything else but that. The
Picture and a great Horror divided my life between them.

Recollect, I didn't even remember the murdered man was my father. I
didn't recognise the room as one in our own old house at Woodbury. I
didn't know anything at all except what I tell you here. I saw the
corpse, the blood, the box on the table, the wires by the side, the
bottles and baths and plates of an amateur photographer's kit,
without knowing what they all meant. I saw even the books not as
books but as visible points of colour. It had something the effect
on me that it might have upon anyone else to be dropped suddenly on
the stage of a theatre at the very moment when a hideous crime was
being committed, and to believe it real, or rather, to know it by
some vague sense as hateful and actual.

Here my history began. I date from that Picture. My second babyhood
was passed in the shadow of the abiding Horror.






CHAPTER II.

BEGINNING LIFE AGAIN