elling of his glorious childhood
among the rich fruit on the great estate, John has quietly
picked up a bunch of grapes, and his quick-witted father,
seeing the act, sneers a little at _such-like common baits of
children_. John, wishing to be manly, puts the grapes back
without a word, though evidently he will be glad enough to
return to them at the proper time.

Not a selfish child at all was John, for he meditated dividing
the grapes with Alice, and they would have been so sweet and
cooling while the children stood there listening to the story.

4. _Here the children fell a-crying and asked if their little
mourning which they had on was not for Uncle John, and they looked
up and prayed me not to go on about their uncle, but to tell them
some stories about their pretty dead mother._

How tender-hearted they both are, and yet until now they had hardly
realized that it was for Uncle John that they were wearing their
fresh mourning. This was a new grief too sad to them, but it turned
their gentle sympathies to their pretty dead mother, of whom they
were always glad to hear. The father has scarcely begun to speak
when he sees in Alice so much resemblance to his dead wife that he
almost thinks it is the mother who stands beside him. So violent is
his emotion that he gradually comes out of his reverie, and as he
does so the children fade away and recede into the distance,
saying, "_We are nothing; less than nothing, and dreams._"

Is it not a wonderful thing that with so few words a writer can put
his heart so much into yours that you believe almost as much as he
does in the reality of the vision?

In the sketch of Lamb we said that his character was very strongly
reflected in his writings, and this essay shows the fact
wonderfully well. Imagine the man, lonely, heartbroken, weary from
the awful task he had set himself, sitting in his bachelor armchair
by the fire, dreaming his evening away. Who are the people that
come to him in his dreams and what are the incidents? First his
grandmother Field, with whom he had spent a great deal of his
childhood; then his sweetheart Alice, now married to another, with
children of her own; then his brother, by no means a pleasing
character, but a lazy and selfish m