The Project Gutenberg EBook of Painted Windows, by Elia W. Peattie

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Title: Painted Windows

Author: Elia W. Peattie

Posting Date: November 3, 2008 [EBook #1875]
Release Date: September, 1999

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PAINTED WINDOWS ***

Produced by Judy Boss

PAINTED WINDOWS

By Elia W. Peattie

Will you come with me into the chamber of memory
and lift your eyes to the painted windows where the figures
and scenes of childhood appear? Perhaps by looking with
kindly eyes at those from out my past, long wished-for
visions of your own youth will appear to heal the wounds
from which you suffer, and to quiet your stormy and
restless heart.

CONTENTS

I NIGHT

II SOLITUDE

III FRIENDSHIP

IV FAME

V REMORSE

VI TRAVEL

PAINTED WINDOWS

I. NIGHT

YOUNG people believe very little that they hear about the compensations
of growing old, and of living over again in memory the events of the
past. Yet there really are these compensations and pleasures, and
although they are not so vivid and breathless as the pleasures of
youth, they have something delicate and fine about them that must be
experienced to be appreciated.

Few of us would exchange our memories for those of others. They have
become a part of our personality, and we could not part with them
without losing something of ourselves. Neither would we part with our
own particular childhood, which, however difficult it may have been at
times, seems to each of us more significant than the childhood of any
one else. I can run over in my mind certain incidents of my childhood
as if they were chapters in a much-loved book, and when I am wakeful
at night, or bored by a long journey, or waiting for some one in the
railway-station, I take them out and go over them again.

Nor is my book of memories without its illustrations. I can see little
villages, and a great city, and forests and planted fields, and familiar
faces; and all have this advantage: they are not fixed and without
motion, like the pictures in the ordinary book. P