rattling the heels of my garden shoes on the tiles of the hall below
with rather unnecessary emphasis. A loud slamming of the library
door--which shook the pendants of the gasaliers and caused a momentary
quaking of the whole house--announced my exit into the side garden,
where I threaded my way among trees and flowerbeds to a vine-covered
summer-house that stood at the end of the lawn. Arrived here, I flung
myself upon one of the rustic benches that lined the walls, and
throwing my arms at full length across the small table that stood
beside me, I laid my face down upon them and burst into tears. After
all, I was only a child, though so obstinate and impulsive: only a
child, and yet I was very miserable. Reader, have you ever been
persuaded to a popular, though strange belief, that our happiest are
our youngest days? Are you able to look regretfully back upon your
long-vanished yesterdays and wish that destiny might, for one short
moment of time, let you hold them in your hands, to live them all over
again? If so, indeed your youth must have been an exceptionally happy
one: for whether I speak from a personal experience or from
observation, I cannot agree that the paths of childhood are flooded
with Life's sunshine, or overgrown with Fortune's flowers. If we look
back upon our earliest sorrows (and who are they that have none to
look upon?), and take into consideration the narrow limits of our
capacity for either pleasure or pain when we are young, we must admit
that a broken doll or a lost penny are, after all, as fruitful of
genuine and hopeless misery in their way, as are, in after-life, a
broken heart or a lost friend.

I do believe that on that June morning, when full of an untold sorrow,
I stole away to the most secret and secluded spot I could find, I was
not less miserable than I have been many a June morning since, though
the best of life's hard lessons have been learned in the meantime. It