Page:Following darkness (IA followingdarknes00reid).pdf/19



my earliest childhood I can form no consecutive picture; I shall therefore pass over it quickly. Certain incidents stand out with extraordinary vividness, but the chain uniting them is wanting, and it is even impossible for me to be quite sure as to the order in which they occurred. Some are so trivial that I do not know why I should remember them; others, at the time, doubtless, more important, have now lost their significance; and countless others, again, I must have completely forgotten. But it occurs to me, on looking back deliberately, that I have changed very little from what I was in those first years. I have developed, but what I was then I am now, what I cared for then I care for now. In other words, like everybody else, I came into this world a mere bundle of inherited instincts, for the activity of which I was no more responsible than for the falling of last night's rain.

Of the dawning of consciousness I have no recollection whateverwhatsoever [sic]. Back farther than anything else there reach two impressions—one, of being set to dance naked on a table, amid the laughter of women, and the rhythmic clapping of their hands; the other, probably later in date, of what must have been a house-cleaning, stamped on my mind by an inexplicable fear of those flakey collections of dust which gather under furniture that has not been moved for a long time. By then I had certainly learned to talk,