of knowledge latterly acquired, I attribute these actions to the then
prevalent weather, for even now I recall how stiflingly the room smelt
of flowers--particularly of magnolia blossoms--and of rubber and of
wet umbrellas. For my own part, I was not at all sorry, though of
course I pretended to be, since I had always known that as a rule my
father whipped me because he had just quarreled with my mother, and
that he then enjoyed whipping me.

I desired, in fine, that he should stay dead and possess his crown of
glory in Heaven, which was reassuringly remote, and that my mother
should stop crying. So I slipped my note into the Apocrypha....

I felt that somewhere in the room was God and that God was watching
me, but I was not afraid. Yet I entertained, in common with most
children, a nebulous distrust of this mysterious Person, a distrust of
which I was particularly conscious on winter nights when the gas had
been turned down to a blue fleck, and the shadow of the mantelpiece
flickered and plunged on the ceiling, and the clock ticked louder and
louder, in prediction (I suspected) of some terrible event very close
at hand.

Then you remembered such unpleasant matters as Elisha and his bears,
and those poor Egyptian children who had never even spoken to Moses,
and that uncomfortably abstemious lady, in the fat blue-covered
_Arabian Nights_, who ate nothing but rice, grain by grain--in the
daytime.... And you called Mammy, and said you were very thirsty and
wanted a glass of water, please.

To-day, though, while acutely conscious of that awful inspection, and
painstakingly careful not to look behind me, I was not, after all,