CHAPTER I.


MRS. DAY BEGINS THE STORY.

I am old, else, I think, I should not have the courage to tell the story
I am going to tell. All those concerned in it about whose feelings I am
careful, are gone where, thank God, there are no secrets! If they know
what I am doing, I know they do not mind. If they were alive to read as I
record, they might perhaps now and again look a little paler and wish the
leaf turned, but to see the things set down would not make them unhappy:
they do not love secrecy. Half the misery in the world comes from trying
to look, instead of trying to be, what one is not. I would that not God
only but all good men and women might see me through and through. They
would not be pleased with everything they saw, but then neither am I, and
I would have no coals of fire in my soul's pockets! But my very nature
would shudder at the thought of letting one person that loved a secret
see into it. Such a one never sees things as they are--would not indeed
see what was there, but something shaped and coloured after his own
likeness. No one who loves and chooses a secret can be of the pure in
heart that shall see God.

Yet how shall I tell even who I am? Which of us is other than a secret to
all but God! Which of us can tell, with poorest approximation, what he or
she is! Not to touch the mystery of life--that one who is not myself has
made me able to say _I_, how little can any of us tell about even those
ancestors whose names we know, while yet the nature, and still more the
character, of hundreds of them, have shared in determining what _I_ means
every time one of us utters the word! For myself, I remember neither