nd say I was the plague and pet of his life, being as full of
mischief as a goat. He must have been an old child himself, for I have
clear recollection of how, immediately after confessing my mother, he
would go down on all fours with me on the floor and play at
hide-and-seek around the legs of the big bed, amid squeals and squeaks
of laughter. I remember, too, that he wore a long sack coat which
buttoned close at the neck and hung loose at the skirts, where there
were two large vertical pockets, and that these pockets were my
cupboards and drawers, for I put my toys and my doll and even the
remnants of my cakes into them to be kept in safe custody until wanted
again.

My mother called me Mally veen (Mary dear) and out of love of her only
child she must have weaned me late, for I have vague memories of her
soft white breasts filled with milk. I slept in a little wickerwork cot
placed near her bed, so that she could reach me if I uncovered myself in
the night. She used to say I was like a bird, having something birdlike
in my small dark head and the way I held it up. Certainly I remember
myself as a swift little thing, always darting to and fro on tiptoe, and
chirping about our chill and rather cheerless house.

If I was like a bird my mother was like a flower. Her head, which was
small and fair, and her face, which was nearly always tinged with
colour, drooped forward from her delicate body like a rose from its
stalk. She was generally dressed in black, I remember, but she wore a
white lace collar as well as a coif such as we see in old pictures, and
when I call her back to my mind, with her large liquid eyes and her
sweet soft mouth, I think it cannot be my affection alone, or the magic
of my childish memory, which makes me think, after all these years and
all the countries I have travelled in, and all the women I have seen,
that my darling mother, though so little known and so little loved, was
the most beautiful woman in the world.

Even yet I cannot but wonder that other people, my father especially,
did not see her with my eyes. I think he was fond of her after his own
fashion, but there was a kind of involuntary contempt in his affection,
which could not conceal itself from my quick little eyes. She was
visibly afraid of him, and was always nervous and timid when he came
into our room with his customary salutation,

"How now, Isabel? And how's this child of yours?"

From my earliest childhood I noticed that h