The whole thing seemed like yesterday; and as I write, I open my eyes and
start and cry, 'can it be twenty, five-and-twenty, aye, by Jove!
five-and-thirty, years since then?' How my days have flown! And I think
when another such yesterday shall have arrived, where shall I be?

The first ten years of my life were longer than all the rest put
together, and I think would continue to be so were my future extended to
an ante-Noachian span. It is the first ten that emerge from nothing, and
commencing in a point, it is during them that consciousness, memory--all
the faculties grow, and the experience of sense is so novel, crowded, and
astounding. It is this beginning at a point, and expanding to the immense
disk of our present range of sensuous experience, that gives to them so
prodigious an illusory perspective, and makes us in childhood, measuring
futurity by them, form so wild and exaggerated an estimate of the
duration of human life. But, I beg your pardon.

My journey was from London. When I had reached my lodgings, after my
little excursion up the Rhine, upon my table there lay, among the rest,
one letter--there generally _is_ in an overdue bundle--which I viewed
with suspicion. I could not in the least tell why. It was a broad-faced
letter, of bluish complexion, and had made inquisition after me in the
country--had asked for me at Queen's Folkstone; and, _vised_ by my
cousin, had presented itself at the Friars, in Shropshire, and thence
proceeded by Sir Harry's direction (there was the autograph) to Nolton
Hall; thence again to Ilchester, whence my fiery and decisive old aunt
sent it straight back to my cousin, with a whisk of her pen which seemed
to say, 'How the plague can I tell where the puppy is?--'tis your
business, Sir, not mine, to find him out!' And so my cousin despatched it
to my head-quarters in town, where from the table it looked up in my
face, with a broad red seal, and a countenance scarred and marred all