me but an awkward,
unlucky boy; nothing to my parents but one of half a dozen children,
whose faces were to be washed and stockings mended on Saturday
afternoon. If I was very sick, I had medicine and the doctor; if I was a
little sick, I was exhorted unto patience; and if I was sick at heart, I
was left to prescribe for myself.

Now, all this was very well: what should a child need but meat, and
drink, and room to play, and a school to teach him reading and writing,
and somebody to take care of him when sick? Certainly, nothing.

But the feelings of grown-up children exist in the mind of little ones
oftener than is supposed; and I had, even at this early day, the same
keen sense of all that touched the heart wrong; the same longing for
something which should touch it aright; the same discontent, with
latent, matter-of-course affection, and the same craving for sympathy,
which has been the unprofitable fashion of this world in all ages. And
no human being possessing such constitutionals has a better chance of
being made unhappy by them than the backward, uninteresting, wrong-doing
child. We can all sympathize, to some extent, with _men_ and _women_;
but how few can go back to the sympathies of childhood; can understand
the desolate insignificance of not being one of the _grown-up_ people;
of being sent to bed, to be _out of the way_ in the evening, and to
school, to be out of the way in the morning; of manifold similar
grievances and distresses, which the child has no elocution to set
forth, and the grown person no imagination to conceive.

When I was seven years old, I was told one morning, with considerable
domestic acclamation, that Aunt Mary was coming to make us a visit; and
so, when the carriage that brought her stopped at our door, I pulled off
my dirty apron, and ran in among the crowd of brothers and sisters to
see what was coming. I shall not describe her first appearance, for, as
I think of her, I begin to grow somewhat sentimental, in spite of my
spectacles, and might, perhaps, talk a little nonsense.

Perhaps every man, whether married or unmarried, who has lived to the
age of fifty or thereabouts, has seen some woman who, in his mind, is
_the_ woman, in distinction from all others. She may not have been a
relative; she may not have been a wife; she may simply have shone on him
from afar; she may be remembered in the distance of years as a star that
is set, as music that is hushed, as beauty and loveline