so many cuffs
and blows on me that she has left me no energy or disposition
to kick anything--even myself.

The trouble is that I know so little about it. Did
I write this book? What then made me do it?

In reading a volume of Fors Clavigera I once came
upon a passage which sounded well but left me in a
mist, and it relieved me to find a footnote to it in which
the author says: "This passage was written many
years ago and what I was thinking about at the time
has quite escaped my memory. At all events, though
I let it stand, I can find no meaning in it now."

Little men may admire but must not try to imitate
these gestures of the giants. And as a result of a little
quiet thinking it over I seem able to recover the idea
I had in my mind when I composed this child's story
and found a title for it in Blake. Something too of the
semi-wild spirit of the child hero in the lines:

"Naught loves another as itself....
And, father, how can I love you
Or any of my brothers more?
I love you like the little birds
That pick up crumbs about the door."

There nature is, after picking up the crumbs to fly
away.

A long time ago I formed a small collection of children's
books of the early years of the nineteenth century;
and looking through them, wishing that some of
them had fallen into my hands when I was a child I
recalled the books I had read at that time--especially
two or three. Like any normal child I delighted in
such stories as the Swiss Family Robinson, but they
were not the books I prized most; they omitted the very
quality I liked best--the little thrills that nature itself
gave me, which half frightened and fascinated at the
same time, the wonder and mystery of it all. Once in a
while I got a book with something of this rare element
in it, contained perhaps in some perfectly absurd
narrative of animals taking human shape or using human
speech, with such like transformations and vagaries;
they could never be too extravagant, fantastic and incredible,
so long as they expressed anything of the feeling
I myself experienced when out of sight and sound
of my fellow beings, whether out on the great level
plain, with a glitter of illusory water all round me, or
among the shadowy trees with their bird and insect
sounds, or by t