no intellectual interest in my
grandfather's remains at the time, but later on, when I sought for a
First Recollection, perhaps, elaborated the scene, and my part in it,
to something that satisfied my sense of dramatic fitness. If I really
committed such a fraud, I am now well punished, by being obliged, at
the very start, to discredit the authenticity of my memoirs.

The abode of our childhood, if not revisited in later years, is apt to
loom in our imagination as a vast edifice with immense chambers in
which our little self seems lost. Somehow I have failed of this
illusion. My grandfather's house, where I was born, stands, in my
memory, a small, one-story wooden building, whose chimneys touch the
sky at the same level as its neighbors' chimneys. Such as it was, the
house stood even with the sidewalk, but the yard was screened from the
street by a board fence, outside which I am sure there was a bench.
The gate into the yard swung so high from the ground that four-footed
visitors did not have to wait till it was opened. Pigs found their way
in, and were shown the way out, under the gate; grunting on their
arrival, but squealing on their departure.

[Illustration: MY GRANDFATHER'S HOUSE, WHERE I WAS BORN]

Of the interior of the house I remember only one room, and not so much
the room as the window, which had a blue sash curtain, and beyond the
curtain a view of a narrow, walled garden, where deep-red dahlias
grew. The garden belonged to the house adjoining my grandfather's,
where lived the Gentile girl who was kind to me.

Concerning my dahlias I have been told that they were not dahlias at
all, but poppies. As a conscientious historian I am bound to record
every rumor, but I retain the right to cling to my own impression.
Indeed, I must insist on my dahlias, if I am to preserve the garden at
all. I have so long believed in them, that if I try to see _poppies_
in those red masses over the wall, the whole garden crumbles away, and
leaves me a gray blank. I have nothing against poppies. It is only
that my illusion is more real to me than reality. And so do we often
build our world on an error, and cry out that the universe is falling
to pieces, if any one but lift a finger to replace the error by truth.

Ours was a quiet neighborhood. Across the narrow street was the
orderly front of the Korpus, or military academy, with straight rows
of unshuttered windows. It was an imposing edifice in the eyes of us
all, beca