As I look back upon my childhood, it seems as if the world were an illusion and as if everything were magic that passed before my eyes. True, we children learned our lessons in our arithmetics and geographies and readers, but we only learned by and said them from our lips; they had no application to our lives,—they were only tasks which we must get through before our foolish parents and unkind teachers would leave us free to live. We seem to have breathed an air, and to see nothing as it really was. And still, can I be sure of this? Are the heartbeats of the young less natural and spontaneous than those of later life? Are the vision and hearing and emotions of youth less trustworthy than the dulled and feelings of maturer years? Certain it is we children lived in a world that was all our own,—a world into which grown-up people could not come, from which in fact they had long since passed out never to return.  
But we had our illusions and our dreams. Time and distance and proportion did not exist for us. Time is ever to young and old alike; it is no sooner come than it is gone. The past is regretted, the present disappointing; the future alone is trusted, and thought to be worth our pains. Childhood is the happiest time of life, because the past is so wholly forgotten, the present so , and the future so endlessly long. But how little I really knew of time, of youth and of age, when I was young! We children thought that old age lay just beyond the time when childish sports would not amuse. We could see nothing in life beyond thirty that would make it worth living, excepting for a very few who were the of the world. True, we dreamed of our future great achievements, but these were still far off, and to be reached in strange fantastic ways. The present and the near future were only for our childish joys. We looked at older people half in pity, half in fear. I distinctly remember that when a child at the 146district school I thought the boys and girls at the Academy were getting old.
 
As to my parents, they always seemed old; and when I was not about things they would not let me do, I felt sad to think their days of sport were past and gone. I well remember the terrible day when they laid my mother in her grave, and the one I felt was that she had lived a long life and that her natural time had come. Even now, as I look back on the vague remembrances of my mother, I have no thought of any time when she was not old. Yet last year I went to see the little headstone that marks her modest grave. I read her name, and the commonplace lines that said she had been a good wife and a loving mother; and this I have no doubt was true, even though I found it on a churchyard stone. Poor soul! she never had a chance to be anything else or more. But when I looked to see her age, I felt a shock as of one waking from a dream; for there, in the marble stone and already growing green with , I read that she had died at forty-eight. And here I stood looking at my old mother’s grave, and my last birthday was my forty-sixth. Was my mother then so young when she lay down to sleep?—and all my life I had thought that she was old! I felt and knew, as I sadly looked upon the stone, that my career was all before me still, and that I had only been wandering and blundering in a path through childhood and youth, to begin the career I was about to run. True, as I drew close to the marble to read the smaller letters that told of the of the dead, I put on a pair of gold-rimmed glasses to spell the chiselled words. And these glasses were my second pair! Only a few days before, I had visited an and told him that my old ones somehow did not focus as they should, but warned him not to give me a new pair that magnified the letters any more than the ones I had. After several trials he found a pair through which I could see much clearer than before, and he assured me on his honor that they were no stronger than the ones I was about to lay aside,—only they were ground in a different way. And although I had lived on the earth for six and forty years, I believed he told the truth. I remembered, too, that only a few days before an college 148football hero gave me a seat in the street-car while he stood up. But then college boys were always thoughtless and ill-mannered, and boastful of their strength. I recovered from the shock that came upon me as I realized that my mother had died while she was really young; and then my mind recalled a day that had been buried in oblivion for many, many years,—a day when I rested upon the same spot where I was sitting now, and when the tremendous thought of eternal sleep dawned upon my mind. No doubt it was my mother’s stone that so long ago me to conscious life. I remember that on that far-off day I was fifteen years of age, and that I consoled myself by thinking that at any rate I should live until I was sixty, which was so far away that I could not even dream that it would ever come. And now I was here again, and forty-six. Well, my health was good, my ancestors were long-lived,—all except my mother, who came to an untimely grave,—and I should live to be ninety at the very least. And then—there might be another world. No one can prove that there is not.
 
But I am lingering too long around the old of my childhood home, and if I do not go out into the living, moving world, no one will ever read my book. And still I fancy that I am like all the other men and wome............