art--things with the veritable spirit of enduring life in them--are
destined to be born in sore travail and pain. Those who give them
birth yield up their own life to them.

It was at this period--say, about l850--that my own personal
recollections, in a shadowy and incoherent way, begin. The shadows are
exclusively of time's making; they were not of the heart. All through
the trials of my parents I retained a jocund equanimity (save for some
trifling childish ailments) and esteemed this world a friendly and
agreeable place. The Scarlet Letter dashed my spirits not a whit; I
knew not of its existence, by personal evidence, till full a dozen
years later; and even the death of my grandmother left me light of
heart, for the passing of the spirit from the body can but awaken the
transient curiosity of a child of four. For the rest, my physical
environment, in itself amusing and interesting enough to me, had its
chief importance from the material it afforded on which to construct
the imaginary scenes and characters of my play. My sister Una and
myself were forever enacting something or somebody not ourselves:
childish egoism oddly decking itself in the non-ego. We believed in
fairies, in magic, in angels, in transformations; Hans Christian
Andersen, Grimm, The Black Aunt (oh, delectable, lost volume) were our
sober history-books, and Robinson Crusoe was our autobiography. But I
did occasionally take note of concrete appearances, too; and some of
them I remember.

The house--the third which we had inhabited since my father became
surveyor--was on Mall Street, and was three stories in height, with a
yard behind and at one end; this yard, which was of importance to my
sister and myself, had access to the street by a swinging gate. There
were three or four trees in it, and space for play. The house was but