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Rh month of Falgoon. I still see the calm moon in the clear sky. I see a night made bright by the lights and the merriment of the bridal fête. But the full moon and the bridal song did not record numbers. Ask me not for the year, because years are to us only numbers, formless things following each other silently, and like a sage meditating on the Being without form or quality, so has the woman to stop and think and count backward and forward and backward again when she wants to trace the year in which a certain event occurred. But there is one thing the great God in His mercy has made impossible for her. She cannot, however hard she may try, count backward to the day of her birth. That event is happily shrouded in oblivion.

It is all a great riddle, a mystery—this birth of man. The constellations are busily at work at a certain moment to prepare a future for him, but he who is most concerned is oblivious to it all. So after all it is no fault of mine if I know not the year in which my life commenced. I seem to remember 1882 or 1883, but how far these figures are