I Had Not Forgotten The Young Man Tied To The Post In The Barn Who Had Killed Some One, And Would Perhaps, I Had Been Told, Be Killed Himself As A Punishment.

I knew, in fact, that there was good and evil in the world, good and bad men, and the bad men - murderers, thieves, and liars - would all have to die, just like animals; but that there was any life after death I did not know.

All the others, myself and my own people included, were good and would never taste death. How it came about that I had got no further in my system or philosophy of life I cannot say; I can only suppose that my mother had not yet begun to give me instruction in such matters on account of my tender years, or else that she had done so and that I had understood it in my own way. Yet, as I discovered later, she was a religious woman, and from infancy I had been taught to kneel and say a little prayer each evening: "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep"; but who the Lord was or what my soul was I had no idea. It was just a pretty little way of saying in rhyme that I was going to bed. My world was a purely material one, and a most wonderful world it was, but how I came to be in it I didn't know; I only knew (or imagined) that I would be in it always, seeing new and strange things every day, and never, never get tired of it.

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