tood how she must feel. Then
he would follow her, he said, in imagination through the long hall,
seeing himself stealing behind her, just touching her hand, wistfully
hoping that she might turn to him again--and yet fearing. He said no one
knew the agonies he suffered at seeing his mother's disappointment over
his apparent coldness and unresponsiveness.

"I think," he said, "it hastened her death." He would not go to the
funeral; he did not dare, he said. He cried and fought when they came to
take him away, and when the house was silent he ran up to her room and
buried his head in her pillows and ran in swift imagination to her
funeral. He said he could see himself in the country road, hurrying in
the cold rain--for it seemed raining--he said he could actually feel the
stones and ruts, although he could not tell how it was possible that he
should have seen himself at a distance and _felt_ in his own feet the
stones of the road. He said he saw the box taken from the wagon--_saw_
it--and that he heard the sound of the clods thrown in, and it made him
shriek until they came running and held him.

As he grew older he said he came to live everything beforehand, and that
the event as imagined was so far more vivid and affecting that he had no
heart for the reality itself.

"It seems strange to you," he said, "but I am telling you exactly what
my experience was."

It was curious, he said, when his father told him he must not do a
thing, how he went on and imagined in how many different ways he could
do it--and how, afterward, he imagined he was punished by that "worm,"
his father, whom he seemed to hate bitterly. Of those early days, in
which he suffered acutely--in idleness, apparently--and perhaps that was
one of the causes of his disorder--he told us at length, but many of the
incidents were so evidently worn by the constant handling of his mind
that they gave no clear impression.

Finally, he ran away from home, he said. At first he found that a wholly
new place and new people took him out of himself ("surprised me," he
said, "so that I could not live everything beforehand"). Thus he fled.
The slang he used, "chased himself all over the country," seemed
peculiarly expressive. He had been in foreign countries; he had herded
sheep in Australia (so he said), and certainly from his knowledge of the
country he had wandered with the gamboleros of South America; he had
gone for gold to Alaska, and worked in the lumber camps