The stars brought me the same feeling. I remember the surprise they were to me, seen for the first time. One evening, just before I was put to bed, I was taken in somebody's arms—my sister's, I think—outside the door, and lifted up under the dark, still, clear sky, splendid with stars, thicker and nearer earth than they have ever seemed since. All my little being shaped itself into a subdued delighted "Oh!" And then the exultant thought flitted through the mind of the reluctant child, as she was carried in, "Why, that is the roof of the house I live in." After that I always went to sleep happier for the feeling that the stars were outside there in the dark, though I could not see them.

I did firmly believe that I came from some other country to this; I had a vague notion that we were all here on a journey,—that this was not the place where we really belonged. Some of the family have told me that before I could talk plainly, I used to run about humming the sentence—

"My father and mother
Shall come unto the land,"

sometimes varying it with,

"My brothers and sisters
Shall come unto the land;"

Nobody knew where I had caught the words, but I chanted them so constantly that my brother wrote them down, with chalk, on the under side of a table, where they remained for years. My thought about that other land may have been only a baby's dream; but the dream was very real to me. I used to talk, in sober earnest, about what happened "before I was a little girl, and came here to live"; and it did seem to me as if I remembered.

But I was hearty and robust, full of frolicsome health, and very fond of the matter-of-fact world I lived in. My sturdy little feet felt the solid earth beneath them. I grew with the sprouting grass, and enjoyed my life as the buds and birds seemed to enjoy theirs. It was only as if the bud and the bird and the dear warm earth knew, in the same dumb way that I did, that all their joy and sweetness came to them out of the sky.

These recollections, that so distinctly belong the baby Myself, before she could speak her thoughts, though clear and vivid, are difficult to put into shape. But other grown-up children, in looking back, will doubtless see many a trailing cloud of glory, that lighted their unconscious infancy from within and from beyond.

I was quite as literal as I was visionary in my mental renderings of the New Testament, read at Aunt Hannah's knee. I was much taken with the sound of words, without any thought of their meaning—a habit not always outgrown with childhood. The "sounding brass and tinkling cymbals," for instance, in the Epistle to the Corinthians, seemed to me things to be greatly desired. "Charity" was an abstract idea. I did not know what it meant. But "tinkling cymbals" one could make music with. I wished I could get hold of them. It never occurred to me that the Apostle meant to speak of their melody slightingly.

At meeting, where I began to go also at two years of age, I made my own private interpretations of the Bible readings. They were absurd enough, but after getting laughed at a few times at home for making them public, I escaped mortification by forming a habit of great reserve as to my Sabbath-day thoughts.

When the minister read, "Cut it down: why cumbereth it the ground?"? I thought he meant to say "cu-cumbereth." These vegetables grew on the ground, and I had heard that they were not very good for people to eat. I honestly supposed that the New Testament forbade the cultivation of cucumbers.

And "Galilee" I understood as a mispronunciation of "gallery." "Going up into Galilee" I interpreted into clattering up the uncarpeted stairs in the meeting-house porch, as the boys did, with their squeaking brogans, looking as restless as imprisoned monkeys after they had got into those conspicuous seats, where they behaved as if they thought nobody could see their pranks. I did not think it could be at all nice to "go up into Galilee."

I had an "Aunt Nancy," an uncle's wife, to whom I was sometimes sent for safe-keeping when house-cleaning or anything unusual was going on at home. She was a large-featured woman, with a very deep masculine voice, and she conducted family worship herself, kneeling at prayer, which was not the Orthodox custom.

She always began by saying,—

"Oh Lord, Thou knowest that we are all groveling worms of the dust." I thought she meant that we all looked like wriggling red earthworms, and tried to make out the resemblance in my mind, but could not. I unburdened my difficulty at home, telling the family that "Aunt Nancy got down on the floor and said we were all grubbelin' worms," begging to know whether everybody did sometimes have to crawl about in the dust.

A little later, I was much puzzled as to whether I was a Jew or Gentile. The Bible seemed to divide people into these two classes only. The Gentiles were not well spoken of: I did not want to be one of them. The talked about Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and the rest, away back to Adam, as if they were our forefathers (there was a time when I thought that Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were our four fathers); and yet I was very sure that I was not a Jew. When I ventured to ask, I was told that we were all Christians or heathen now. That did not help me for I thought that only grown-up persons could be Christians, from which it followed that all children must be heathen. Must I think of Myself as a heathen, then, until I should be old enough to be a Christian? It was a shocking conclusion, but I could see no other answer to my question, and I felt ashamed to ask again. My self-invented theory about the human race was that Adam and Eve were very tall people, taller than the tallest trees in the Garden of Eden, before they were sent out of it; but that they then began to dwindle; that their children had ever since been getting smaller and smaller, and that by and by the inhabitants of the world would be no bigger than babies. I was afraid I should stop growing while I was a child, and I used to stand on the footstool in the pew, and try to stretch myself up to my mother's height, to imagine how it would seem to be a woman. I hoped I should be a tall one. I did not wish to be a diminishing specimen of the race;—an anxiety which proved to be entirely groundless.

The Sabbath mornings in those old times had a peculiar charm. They seemed so much cleaner than other mornings! The roads and the grassy footpaths seemed fresher, and the air itself purer and more wholesome than on week-days. Saturday afternoon and evening were regarded as part of the Sabbath (we were taught that it was heathenish to call the day Sunday); work and playthings were laid aside, and every body, as well as every thing, was subjected to a rigid renovation. Sabbath morning would not have seemed like itself without a clean house, a clean skin, and tidy and spotless clothing.

The Saturday's baking was a great event, the brick oven being heated to receive the flour bread, the flour-and-Indian, and the rye-and-Indian bread, the traditional pot of beans, the Indian pudding, and the pies; for no further cooking was to be done until Monday. We smaller girls thought it a great privilege to be allowed to watch the oven till the roof of it should be "white-hot," so that the coals could be shoveled out.

Then it was so still, both out of doors and within! We were not allowed to walk anywhere except in the yard or garden. I remember wondering whether it was never Sabbath-day over the fence, in the next field; whether the field was not a kind of heathen field, since we could only go into it on week-days. The wild flowers over there were perhaps Gentile blossoms. Only the flowers in the garden were well-behaved Christians. It was Sabbath in the house, and possibly even on the doorstep; but not much farther. The town itself was so quiet that it scarcely seemed to breathe. The sound of wheels was seldom heard in the streets on that day; if we heard it, we expected some