ot true. So it was no matter of
surprise to her when in the following March her arms were empty, and a
waxen form lay lifeless in the baby's cot.

My brother and I were allowed to see him just before he was placed in
his coffin; I can see him still, so white and beautiful, with a black
spot in the middle of the fair, waxen forehead, and I remember the
deadly cold which startled me when I was told to kiss my little
brother. It was the first time that I had touched Death. That black
spot made a curious impression on me, and long afterwards, asking what
had caused it, I was told that at the moment after his death my mother
had passionately kissed the baby brow. Pathetic thought, that the
mother's kiss of farewell should have been marked by the first sign of
corruption on the child's face!

I do not mention these stories because they are in any fashion
remarkable or out of the way, but only to show that the sensitiveness
to impressions other than physical ones, that was a marked feature in
my own childhood, was present also in the family to which I belonged.
For the physical nature is inherited from parents, and sensitiveness
to psychic impressions is a property of the physical body; in our
family, as in so many Irish ones, belief in "ghosts" of all
descriptions was general, and my mother has told me of the banshee
that she had heard wailing when the death-hour of one of the family
was near. To me in my childhood, elves and fairies of all sorts were
very real things, and my dolls were as really children as I was myself
a child. Punch and Judy were living entities, and the tragedy in which
they bore part cost me many an agony of tears; to this day I can
remember running away when I heard the squawk of the coming Punch, and
burying my head in the pillows that I might shut out the sound of the
blows and the cry of the ill-used baby. All the objects about me were
to me alive, the flowers that I kissed as much as the kitten I petted,
and I used to have a splendid time "making believe" and living out all
sorts of lovely stories among my treasured and so-called inanimate
playthings. But there was a more serious side to this dreamful fancy
when it joined hands with religion.

CHAPTER II.

EARLY CHILDHOOD.

And now began my mother's time of struggle and of anxiety. Hitherto,
since her marriage, she had known no money troubles, for her husband
was earning a good income; he was apparently vigorous and well: no
thought o