Thus courting the influence of sea and sky and variable weather, I was bound to have dreams, hints, imaginings.  It was no more than this, perhaps:  that the world as I knew it was not large enough to contain all that I saw and felt; that the thoughts that flashed through my mind, not half understood, unrelated to my utterable thoughts, concerned something for which I had as yet no name.  Every imaginative growing child has these flashes of intuition, especially one that becomes intimate with some one aspect of nature.  With me it was the growing time, that idle summer by the sea, and I grew all the faster because I had been so cramped before.  My mind, too, had so recently been worked upon by the impressive experience of a change of country that I was more than commonly alive to impressions, which are the seeds of ideas.

Let no one suppose that I spent my time entirely, or even chiefly, in inspired solitude.  By far the best part of my day was spent in play—­frank, hearty, boisterous play, such as comes natural to American children.  In Polotzk I had already begun to be considered too old for play, excepting set games or organized frolics.  Here I found myself included with children who still played, and I willingly returned to childhood.  There were plenty of playfellows.  My father’s energetic little partner had a little wife and a large family.  He kept them in the little cottage next to ours; and that the shanty survived the tumultuous presence of that brood is a wonder to me to-day.  The young Wilners included an assortment of boys, girls, and twins, of every possible variety of age, size, disposition, and sex.  They swarmed in and out of the cottage all day long, wearing the door-sill hollow, and trampling the ground to powder.  They swung out of windows like monkeys, slid up the roof like flies, and shot out of trees like fowls.  Even a small person like me couldn’t go anywhere without being run over by a Wilner; and I could never tell which Wilner it was because none of them ever stood still long enough to be identified; and also because I suspected that they were in the habit of interchanging conspicuous articles of clothing, which was very confusing.

You would suppose that the little mother must have been utterly lost, bewildered, trodden down in this horde of urchins; but you are mistaken.  Mrs. Wilner was a positively majestic little person.  She ruled her brood with the utmost coolness and strictness.  She had even the biggest boy under her thumb, frequently under her palm.  If they enjoyed the wildest freedom outdoors, indoors the young Wilners lived by the clock.  And so at five o’clock in the evening, on seven days in the week, my father’s partner’s children could be seen in two long rows around the supper table.  You could tell them apart on this occasion, because they all had their faces washed.  And this is the time to count them:  there are twelve little Wilners at table.