you or any man. What he knew, you know, any man knows. But he most
aptly stated it in his passage that begins "Not in utter nakedness, not
in entire forgetfulness. . ."

Ah, truly, shades of the prison-house close about us, the new-born
things, and all too soon do we forget. And yet, when we were new-born we
did remember other times and places. We, helpless infants in arms or
creeping quadruped-like on the floor, dreamed our dreams of air-flight.
Yes; and we endured the torment and torture of nightmare fears of dim and
monstrous things. We new-born infants, without experience, were born
with fear, with memory of fear; and _memory is experience_.

As for myself, at the beginnings of my vocabulary, at so tender a period
that I still made hunger noises and sleep noises, yet even then did I
know that I had been a star-rover. Yes, I, whose lips had never lisped
the word "king," remembered that I had once been the son of a king.
More--I remembered that once I had been a slave and a son of a slave, and
worn an iron collar round my neck.

Still more. When I was three, and four, and five years of age, I was not
yet I. I was a mere becoming, a flux of spirit not yet cooled solid in
the mould of my particular flesh and time and place. In that period all
that I had ever been in ten thousand lives before strove in me, and
troubled the flux of me, in the effort to incorporate itself in me and
become me.

Silly, isn't it? But remember, my reader, whom I hope to have travel far
with me through time and space--remember, please, my reader, that I have
thought much on these matters, that through bloody nights and sweats of
dark that lasted years-long, I have been alone with my many selves to
consult and contemplate my many selves. I have gone through the hells of
all existences to bring you news which you will share with me in a casual
comfortable hour over my printed page.

So, to return, I say, during the ages of three and four and five, I was
not yet I. I was merely becoming as I took form in the mould of my body,
and all the mighty, indestructible past wrought in the mixture of me to
determine what the form of that becoming would be. It was not my voice
that cried out in the night in fear of things known, which I, forsooth,
did not and could not know. The same with my childish angers, my loves,
and my laughters. Other voices screamed through my voice, the voices of
men and women aforetime, of all shadowy hosts of p