nobody who had witnessed my
small affair could have recognized it as the same, had I not insisted
on my version with such fervid conviction. The truth is that
everything that happened to me really loomed great and shone splendid
in my eyes, and I could not, except by conscious effort, reduce my
visions to their actual shapes and colors. If I saw a pair of geese
leading about a lazy goose girl, they went through all sorts of antics
before my eyes that fat geese are not known to indulge in. If I met
poor Blind Munye with a frown on his face, I thought that a cloud of
wrath overspread his countenance; and I ran home to relate, panting,
how narrowly I had escaped his fury. I will not pretend that I was
absolutely unconscious of my exaggerations; but if you insist, I will
say that things as I reported them might have been so, and would have
been much more interesting had they been so.

The noble reader who never told a lie, or never confessed one, will be
shocked at these revelations of my childish depravity. What proof has
he, he will cry, that I am not lying on every page of this chronicle,
if, by my own confession, my childhood was spent in a maze of lies and
dreams? I shall say to the saint, when I am challenged, that the proof
of my conversion to veracity is engraven in his own soul. Do you not
remember, you spotless one, how you used to steal and lie and cheat
and rob? Oh, not with your own hand, of course! It was your remote
ancestor who lived by plunder, and was honored for the blood upon his
hairy hands. By and by he discovered that cunning was more effective
than violence, and less troublesome. Still later he became convinced
that the greatest cunning was virtue, and made him a moral code, and
subdued the world. Then, when you came along, stumbling through the
wilderness of cast-off errors, your wise ancestor gave you a thrust
that landed you in the clearing of modernity, at the same time
bellowing in your ear, "Now be good! It pays!"

This is the whole history of your saintliness. But all people do not
take up life at the same point of human development. Some are backward
at birth, and have to make up, in the brief space of their individual
history, the stages they missed on their way out of the black past.
With me, for example, it actually comes to this: that I have to
recapitulate in my own experience all the slow steps of the progress
of the race. I seem to learn nothing except by the prick of life on my
own