and early in the mornings from
this lapis lake a great red sun would rise upon a sky of molten gold.
In the rooms so near me were my darling brothers, from whom I
often had to part. Beauty and Joy, and Love and Pain--these made
up life.

At ten I twice narrowly escaped death. From Paris we were to take
the second or later half of the train to Marseilles. Late the night
before my father suddenly said, "I have changed my mind; I feel we
must go by the first train." This was with some difficulty arranged.

On reaching an immense bridge across a deep ravine I suddenly
became acutely aware that the bridge was about to give way. In a
terrible state of alarm I called out this fearful fact to my family. I
burst into tears. I suffered agonies. My mother scolded me, and
when we safely reached the other side of the bridge I was severely
taken to task for my behaviour. The bridge broke with the next train
over it--the train in which we should have been. Some four hundred
people perished. It was the most terrible railway disaster that had
ever occurred in France.

A few weeks later, death came nearer still. Having escaped from our
tutor, with a party of other children we ran to two great reservoirs to
fish for frogs. Laughing and talking and full of childish joy, we
fished there for an hour, when all at once I was impelled, under an
extraordinary sense of pressure, to call out, "If anyone falls into the
water, no one must jump in to save them, but must immediately run
to those long sticks" (I had never noticed them until I spoke) "and
draw one out and hold it to whoever has fallen in." I spoke
automatically, and felt as much surprised as my companions that I
should speak of such a thing.

Within five minutes I had fallen in myself. My brother remembered
my words, but before he could reach me with the stick I was under
the water for the third and last time. It was all that they could do to
drag my weight up to the ledge, for the water was a yard below it.
Had my brother jumped in, as he said he most surely would have
done had I not forewarned him, we must both have been drowned,
for they would have had neither the strength nor the time to pull us
both out alive. I was not at all frightened or upset till I heard
someone say that I was dead; then I wept--it was so sad to be dead!
The pressure put upon me to speak as I did had been so great that I
have never forgotten the strange impression of it to this day. On both
these occasio