which his real nature displayed itself, and
your own sense of humor as a master and central power of the human soul,
playing about the very essence of the man, will do more than forgive
anything of this kind which may crop out here and there, like the smile
of wild-flowers in grass, or by the wayside.

My first recollection of my father, my first impression, not only of his
character, but of his eyes and face and presence, strange as it may
seem, dates from my fifth year. Doubtless I had looked at him often
enough before that, and had my own childish thoughts about him; but this
was the time when I got my fixed, compact idea of him, and the first
look of him which I felt could never be forgotten. I saw him, as it
were, by a flash of lightning, sudden and complete. A child begins by
seeing bits of everything; it knows in part--here a little, there a
little; it makes up its wholes out of its own littles, and is long of
reaching the fulness of a whole; and in this we are children all our
lives in much. Children are long of seeing, or at least of looking at
what is above them; they like the ground, and its flowers and stones,
its "red sodgers" and lady-birds, and all its queer things; their world
is about three feet high, and they are more often stooping than gazing
up. I know I was past ten before I saw, or cared to see, the ceilings of
the rooms in the manse at Biggar.

On the morning of the 28th May, 1816, my eldest sister Janet and I were
sleeping in the kitchen-bed with Tibbie Meek,[9] our only servant. We
were all three awakened by a cry of pain--sharp, insufferable, as if one
were stung. Years after we two confided to each other, sitting by the
burnside, that we thought that "great cry" which arose at midnight in
Egypt must have been like it. We all knew whose voice it was, and, in
our night-clothes, we ran into the passage, and into the little parlor
to the left hand, in which was a closet-bed. We found my father standing
before us, erect, his hands clenched in his black hair, his eyes full of
misery and amazement, his face white as that of the dead. He frightened
us. He saw this, or else his intense will had mastered his agony, for,
taking his hands from his head, he said, slowly and gently, "Let us give
thanks," and turned to a little sofa in the room; there lay our mother,
dead.[10] She had long been ailing. I remember her sitting in a
shawl,--an Indian one with little dark green spots on a light
ground,--and wa