But I Remember Them, And If By
Some Strange Chance I Should Find Myself Once More In That Distant
Region, I Should Go Out In Search Of Them, And Seeing Them Again, Feel
That I Was Communing With Her Spirit.
These memories of my mother are a relief to me in recalling that
melancholy time, the years of my
Youth that were wasted and worse,
considering their effect and that the very thought of that period,
which is to others the fullest, richest, and happiest in life, has
always been painful to me. Yet to it I am now obliged to return for
the space of two or three pages to relate how I eventually came out of
it.
My case was not precisely like that of Cooper's Castaway, but rather
like that of a fugitive from his ship on some tropical coast who, on
swimming to the shore, finds himself in a mangrove swamp, waist-deep
in mire, tangled in rope-like roots, straining frantically to escape
his doom.
I have told how after my fifteenth anniversary, when I first began to
reflect seriously on my future life, the idea still persisted that my
perpetual delight in Nature was nothing more than a condition or phase
of my child's and boy's mind, and would inevitably fade out in time. I
might have guessed at an earlier date that this was a delusion, since
the feeling had grown in strength with the years, but it was only
after I took to reading at the beginning of my sixteenth year that I
discovered its true character.
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