thing that has gone is the mystery of it all.  Then, every road was a little ribbon of familiar ground stretching out to the unknown; all the fields and woods which lay between the roads and paths were wonderful secret places, not to be visited.  I find I had no idea of the lie of the ground, and, what is more remarkable, I don’t seem ever to have seen the views of the distance with which the place now abounds.  I suppose that when one is a small creature, palings and hedges are lofty obstacles; and I suppose also that the little busy eyes are always searching the nearer scene for things to find, and do not concern themselves with what is far.  The sight of the Lodge itself, with its long white front among the shrubberies and across the pastures was almost too much for me; the years seemed all obliterated in a flash, and I felt as if it was all there unchanged.

I suppose I had a very happy childhood; but I certainly was not in the least conscious of it at the time.  I was a very quiet, busy child, with all sorts of small secret pursuits of my own to attend to, to which lessons and social engagements were sad interruptions; but now it seems to me like a golden, unruffled time full of nothing but pleasure.  Curiously enough, I can’t remember anything but the summer days there; I have no remembrance of rain or cold or winter or leafless trees—­except days of snow when the ponds were frozen and there was the wild excitement of skating.  My recollections are all of flowers, and roses, and trees in leaf, and hours spent in the garden.  In the very hot summer weather my father and mother used to dine out in the garden, and it seems now to me as if they must have done so all the year round; I can remember going to bed, with my window open on to the lawn, and hearing the talk, and the silence, and then the soft clink of the things being removed as I sank into sleep.  It is a great mystery, that faculty of the mind for forgetting all the shadows and remembering nothing but the sunlight; it is so deeply rooted in humanity that it is hard not to believe that it means something; one dares to hope that if our individual life continues after death, this instinct—­if memory remains—­will triumph over the past, even in the case of lives of sordid misery and hopeless pain.

Then, too, one wonders what the strong instinct of permanence means, in creatures that inhabit the world for so short and troubled a space; why instinct should so contradict experience; why human beings have not acquired in the course of centuries a sense of the fleetingness of things.  All our instincts seem to speak of permanence; all our experience points to swift and ceaseless change.  I cannot fathom it.