CHAPTER VI.



Before I finish writing of the confused memories I have of the
commencement of my life I wish to speak of another ray of sunshine--a
sad ray this time,--that has left an ineffaceable impression upon me,
and the meaning of which will never be clear to me.

Upon a Sunday, after we had returned from church, the ray appeared to
me. It came through a half-open window and fell into the stairway, and
as it lengthened itself upon the whiteness of the wall it took on a
peculiar, weird shape.

I had returned from church with my mother and as I mounted the stairs I
took her hand. The house was filled with a humming silence peculiar
to the noontime of very hot summer days (it was August or September).
Following the habit of our country the shutters were half closed making
indoors, during the heated period of the day, a sort of twilight.

As I entered the house there came to me an appreciation of the stillness
of Sunday that in the country and in peaceful byways of little towns
is like the peace of death. But when I saw the ray of sunlight fall
obliquely through the staircase window, I had a feeling more poignant
than ordinary sorrow; I had a feeling altogether incomprehensible and
absolutely new in which there seemed infused a conception of the brevity