| Page | |
| A PRELUDE TO LIFE | 3 |
| ESTHER KAHN | 57 |
| CHRISTIAN TREVALGA | 91 |
| THE CHILDHOOD OF LUCY NEWCOME | 125 |
| THE DEATH OF PETER WAYDELIN | 157 |
| AN AUTUMN CITY | 189 |
| SEAWARD LACKLAND | 213 |
| EXTRACTS FROM THE JOURNAL OF HENRY LUXULYAN | 253 |
I am afraid I must begin a good way back if I am to explain myself tomyself at all satisfactorily. I can see how the queer child I was laidthe foundation of the man I became, and yet I remember singularly littleof my childhood. My parents were never very long in one place, and Ihave never known what it was to have a home, as most children know it; ahome that has been lived in so long that it has got into the ways, thebodily creases, of its inhabitants, like an old, comfortable garment,warmed through and through by the same flesh. I left the town where Iwas born when I was one year old, and I have never seen it since. I donot even remember in what part of England my eyes first became consciousof the things about them. I remember the hammering of iron on wood, whena great ship was launched in a harbour; the terrifying sound of cannons,as they burst into smoke on a great plain near an ancient castle, whilethe soldiers rode in long lines across the grass; the clop-clop of acripple with a wooden leg; with my intense terror at the toppling wagonsof hay, as I passed them in the road. I remember absolutely nothing elseout of my very early childhood; I have not even been told many thingsabout it, except that I once wakened my mother, as I lay in a little cotat her side, to listen to the nightingales, and that Victor Hugo oncestopped the nurse to smile at me, as she walked with me in her arms atFermain Bay, in Guernsey. If I have been a vagabond, and have never beenable to root myself in any one place in the world, it is because I haveno early memories of any one sky or soil. It has freed me from manyprejudices in giving me its own unresting kind of freedom; but it hascut me off from whatever is stable, of long growth in the world.
I could not read until I was nine years