I stood on the steps of a house—­a white wooden house, with a green-painted verandah—­the very house I had seen that afternoon in the faded photograph in Jane’s little sitting-room.  But I didn’t think of it at first as the house in the old picture:  I thought of it as home—­our own place—­the cottage.  The steps seemed to me very high, as in childish recollection.  A lady walked about on the verandah and called to me:  a lady in a white gown, like the lady in the photograph, only younger and prettier, and dressed much more daintily.  But I didn’t think of her as that either:  I called her mamma to myself:  I looked up into her face, oh, ever so much above me:  I must have been very small indeed when that picture first occurred to me.  There was a gentleman, too, in a white linen coat, who pinched my mamma’s ear, and talked softly and musically.  But I didn’t think of him quite so:  I knew he was my papa:  I played about his knees, a little scampering child, and looked up in his face, and teased him and laughed at him.  My papa looked down at me, and called me a little kitten, and rolled me over on my back, and fondled me and laughed with me.  There were trees growing all about, big trees with long grey leaves:  the same sort of trees as the ones in the photograph.  But I didn’t remember that at first:  in my dream, and in the first few minutes of my waking thought, I knew them at once as the big blue-gum-trees.

I awoke in the midst of it:  and the picture persisted.

Then, with a sudden burst of intuition, the truth flashed upon me all at once.  My dream was no mere dream, but a revelation in my sleep.  It was my intellect working unconsciously and spontaneously in an automatic condition.  For the very first time in my life, since the night of the murder, I had really remembered something that occurred before it.

This was a scene of my First State.  In all probability it was my earliest true childish recollection.

I sat up in bed, appalled.  I dared not call aloud or ring for Jane to come to me.  But if I’d seen a ghost, it could hardly have affected me more profoundly than this ghost of my own dead life thus brought suddenly back to me.  Gazing away across some illimitable vista of dim years, I remembered this one scene as something that once occurred, long ago, to my very self, in my own experience.  Then came a vast gulf, an unbridged abyss:  and after that, with a vividness as of yesterday, the murder.

I held my ears and crouched low, sitting up in my bed in the dark.  But the dream seemed to go on still:  it remained with me distinctly.

The more I thought it over, the more certain it appeared as part of my own experience.  Putting two and two together, I made sure in my own mind this was a genuine recollection of my life in Australia.  I was born there, I knew:  that I had learned from everybody.  But I could distinctly remember having lived there now.  It came back to me as memory.  The dream had reinstated it.