impelled my actions, to reveal in some degree the amazing mixture of good
and evil which has made me what I am to-day: to avoid the tricks of
memory and resist the inherent desire to present myself other and better
than I am. Your American romanticist is a sentimental spoiled child who
believes in miracles, whose needs are mostly baubles, whose desires are
dreams. Expediency is his motto. Innocent of a knowledge of the
principles of the universe, he lives in a state of ceaseless activity,
admitting no limitations, impatient of all restrictions. What he wants,
he wants very badly indeed. This wanting things was the corner-stone of
my character, and I believe that the science of the future will bear me
out when I say that it might have been differently built upon. Certain it
is that the system of education in vogue in the 70's and 80's never
contemplated the search for natural corner-stones.

At all events, when I look back upon the boy I was, I see the beginnings
of a real person who fades little by little as manhood arrives and
advances, until suddenly I am aware that a stranger has taken his
place....

I lived in a city which is now some twelve hours distant from the
Atlantic seaboard. A very different city, too, it was in youth, in my
grandfather's day and my father's, even in my own boyhood, from what it
has since become in this most material of ages.

There is a book of my photographs, preserved by my mother, which I have
been looking over lately. First is presented a plump child of two, gazing
in smiling trustfulness upon a world of sunshine; later on a lean boy in
plaided kilts, whose wavy, chestnut-brown hair has been most carefully
parted on the side by Norah, his nurse. The face is still childish. Then
appears a youth of fourteen or thereabout in long trousers and the