[Aquí está encerrada el alma del licenciado Pedro Garcias.

If I should ever make a little book out of these papers, which I hope you
are not getting tired of, I suppose I ought to save the above sentence
for a motto on the title-page. But I want it now, and must use it. I
need not say to you that the words are Spanish, nor that they are to be
found in the short Introduction to “Gil Blas,” nor that they mean, “Here
lies buried the soul of the licentiate Pedro Garcias.”

I warned all young people off the premises when I began my notes
referring to old age. I must be equally fair with old people now. They
are earnestly requested to leave this paper to young persons from the age
of twelve to that of fourscore years and ten, at which latter period of
life I am sure that I shall have at least one youthful reader. You know
well enough what I mean by youth and age;—something in the soul, which
has no more to do with the color of the hair than the vein of gold in a
rock has to do with the grass a thousand feet above it.

I am growing bolder as I write. I think it requires not only youth, but
genius, to read this paper. I don’t mean to imply that it required any
whatsoever to talk what I have here written down. It did demand a
certain amount of memory, and such command of the English tongue as is
given by a common school education. So much I do claim. But here I have
related, at length, a string of trivialities. You must have the
imagination of a poet to transfigure them. These little colored patches
are stains upon the windows of a human soul; stand on the outside, they
are but dull and meaningless spots of color; seen from within, they are
glorified shapes with empurpled wings and sunbright aureoles.

My hand trembles when I offer you this. Many times I have come bearing
flowers such as my garden grew; but now I offer you this poor, brown,
homely growth, you may cast it away as worthless. And yet—and yet—it is
something better than flowers; it is a seed-capsule. Many a gardener
will cut you a bouquet of his choicest blossoms for small fee, but he
does not love to let the seeds of his rarest varieties go out of his own
hands.

It is by little things that we know ourselves; a soul would very probably
mistake itself for another, when once disembodied, were it not for
individual experiences which differ from those of others only in details
seemingly trifling. All of us have been thirsty thousands of times, and
felt, with Pindar, that water was the best of things. I alone, as I
think, of all mankind, remember one particular pailful of water, flavored
with the white-pine of which the pail was made, and the brown mug out of
which one Edmund, a red-faced and curly-haired boy, was averred to have
bitten a fragment in his haste to drink; it being then high summer, and
little full-blooded boys feeling very warm and porous in the
low-“studded” school-room where Dame Prentiss, dead and gone, ruled over
young children, many of whom are old ghosts now, and have known Abraham
for twenty or thirty years of our mortal time.

Thirst belongs to humanity, everywhere, in all ages; but that white-pine
pail, and that brown mug belong to me in particular; and just so of my
special relationships with other things and with my rice. One could
never remember himself in eternity by the mere fact of having loved or
hated any more than by that of having thirsted; love and hate have no
more individuality in them than single waves in the ocean;—but the
accidents or trivial marks which distinguished those whom we loved or
hated make their memory our own forever, and with it that of our own
personality also.

Therefore, my aged friend of five-and-twenty, or thereabouts, pause at
the threshold of this particular record, and ask yourself seriously
whether you are fit to read such revelations as are to follow. For
observe, you have here no splendid array of petals such as poets offer
you,—nothing but a dry shell, containing, if you will get out what is in
it, a few small seeds of poems. You may laugh at them, if you like. I
shall never tell you what I think of you for so doing. But if you can
read into the heart of these things, in the light of other memories as
slight, yet as dear to your soul, then you are neither more nor less than
a POET, and can afford to write no more verses during the rest of your
natural life,—which abstinence I take to be one of the surest marks of
your meriting the divine name I have just bestowed upon you.

May I beg of you who have begun this paper nobly trusting to your own
imagination and sensibilities to give it the significance which it does
not lay claim to without your kind assistance,—may I beg of you, I say,
to pay particular attention to the brackets which enclose certain
paragraphs? I want my “asides,” you see, to whisper loud to you who read
my notes, and sometimes I talk a page or two to you without pretending
that I said a word of it to our boarders. You will find a very long
“aside” to you almost as soon as you begin to read. And so, dear young
friend, fall to at once, taking such things as I have provided for you;
and if you turn them, by the aid of your powerful imagination, into a
fair banquet, why, then, peace be with you, and a summer by the still
waters of some quiet river, or by some yellow beach, where, as my friend
the Professor, says, you can sit with Nature’s wrist in your hand and
count her ocean-pulses.]

I should like to make a few intimate revelations relating especially to
my early life, if I thought you would like to hear them.

[The schoolmistress turned a little in her chair, and sat with her face
directed partly towards me.—Half-mourning now;—purple ribbon. That
breastpin she wears has gray hair in it; her mother’s, no doubt;—I
remember our landlady’s daughter telling me, soon after the
schoolmistress came to board with us, that she had lately “buried a
payrent.” That’s what made her look so pale,—kept the poor dying thing
alive with her own blood. Ah! long illness is the real vampyrism; think
of living a year or two after one is dead, by sucking the life-blood out
of a frail young creature at one’s bedside! Well, souls grow white, as
well as cheeks, in these holy duties one that goes in a nurse may come
out an angel.—God bless all good women!—to their soft hands and pitying
hearts we must all come at last!—The schoolmistress has a better color
than when she came.—Too late! “It might have been.”—Amen!—How many
thoughts go to a dozen heart-beats, sometimes! There was no long pause
after my remark addressed to the company, but in that time I had the
train of ideas and feelings I have just given flash through my
consciousness sudden and sharp as the crooked red streak that springs out
of its black sheath like the creese of a Malay in his death-race, and
stabs the earth right and left in its blind rage.

I don’t deny that there was a pang in it,—yes, a stab; but there was a
prayer, too,—the “Amen” belonged to that.—Also, a vision of a four-story
brick house, nicely furnished,—I actually saw many specific
articles,—curtains, sofas, tables, and others, and could draw the
patterns of them at this moment,—a brick house, I say, looking out on the
water, with a fair parlor, and books and busts and pots of flowers and
bird-cages, all complete; and at the window, looking on the water, two of
us.—“Male and female created He them.”—These two were standing at the
window, when a smaller shape that was playing near them looked up at me
with such a look that I — — poured out a glass of water, drank it all
down, and then continued.]

I said I should like to tell you some things, such as people commonly
never tell, about my early recollections. Should you like to hear them?

Should we like to hear them?—said the schoolmistress;—no, but we should
love to.

[The voice was a sweet one, naturally, and had something very pleasant in
its tone, just then.—The four-story brick house, which had gone out like
a transparency when the light behind it is quenched, glimmered again for
a moment; parlor, books, busts, flower-pots, bird-cages, all
complete,—and the figures as before.]

We are waiting with eagerness, Sir,—said the divinity-student.

[The transparency went out as if a flash of black lightning had struck
it.]

If you want to hear my confessions, the next thing—I said—is to know
whether I can trust you with them. It is only fair to say that there are
a great many people in the world that laugh at such things. I think
they are fools, but perhaps you don’t all agree with me.

Here are children of tender age talked to as if they were capable of
understanding Calvin’s “Institutes,” and nobody has honesty or sense
enough to tell the plain truth about the little wretches: that they are
as superstitious as naked savages, and such miserable spiritual
cowards—that is, if they have any imagination—that they will believe
anything which is taught them, and a great deal more which they teach
themselves.

I was born and bred, as I have told you twenty times, among books and
those who knew what was in books. I was carefully instructed in things
temporal and spiritual. But up to a considerable maturity of childhood I
believed Raphael and Michael Angelo to have been superhuman beings. The
central doctrine of the prevalent religious faith of Christendom was
utterly confused and neutralized in my mind for years by one of those too
common stories of actual life, which I overheard repeated in a
whisper.—Why did I not ask? you will say.—You don’t remember the rosy
pudency of sensitive children. The first instinctive movement of the
little creatures is to make a cache, and bury in it beliefs, doubts,
dreams, hopes, and terrors. I am uncovering one of these caches. Do
you think I was necessarily a greater fool and coward than another?

I was afraid of ships. Why, I could never tell. The masts looked
frightfully tall,—but they were not so tall as the steeple of our old
yellow meeting-house. At any rate I used to hide my eyes from the sloops
and schooners that were wont to lie at the end of the bridge, and I
confess that traces of this undefined terror lasted very long.—One other
source of alarm had a still more fearful significance. There was a great
wooden HAND,—a glove-maker’s sign, which used to swing and creak in the
blast, as it hung from a pillar before a certain shop a mile or two
outside of the city. Oh, the dreadful hand! Always hanging there ready
to catch up a little boy, who would come home to supper no more, nor yet
to bed,—whose porringer would be laid away empty thenceforth, and his
half-worn shoes wait until his small brother grew to fit them.

As for all manner of superstitious observances, I used once to think I
must have been peculiar in having such a list of them, but I now believe
that half the children of the same age go through the same experiences.
No Roman soothsayer ever had such a catalogue of omens as I found in
the Sibylline leaves of my childhood. That trick of throwing a stone at
a tree and attaching some mighty issue to hitting or missing, which you
will find mentioned in one or more biographies, I well remember.
Stepping on or over certain particular things or spots—Dr. Johnson’s
especial weakness I got the habit of at a very early age.—I won’t swear
that I have not some tendency to these not wise practices even at this
present date. [How many of you that read these notes can say the same
thing!]

With these follies mingled sweet delusions, which I loved so well I would
not outgrow them, even when it required a voluntary effort to put a
momentary trust in them. Here is one which I cannot help telling you.

The firing of the great guns at the Navy-yard is easily heard at the
place where I was born and lived. “There is a ship of war come in,” they
used to say, when they heard them. Of course, I supposed that such
vessels came in unexpectedly, after indefinite years of absence,—suddenly
as falling stones; and that the great guns roared in their astonishment
and delight at the sight of the old war-ship splitting the bay with her
cutwater. Now, the sloop-of-war the Wasp, Captain Blakely, after
gloriously capturing the Reindeer and the Avon, had disappeared from the
face of the ocean, and was supposed to be lost. But there was no proof
of it, and, of course, for a time, hopes were entertained that she might
be heard from. Long after the last real chance had utterly vanished, I
pleased myself with the fond illusion that somewhere on the waste of
waters she was still floating, and there were years during which I
never heard the sound of the great guns booming inland from the Navy-yard
without saying to myself, “The Wasp has come!” and almost thinking I
could see her, as she rolled in, crumpling the water before her,
weather-beaten, barnacled, with shattered spars and threadbare canvas,
welcomed by the shouts and tears of thousands. This was one of those
dreams that I nursed and never told. Let me make a clean breast of it
now, and say, that, so late as to have outgrown childhood, perhaps to
have got far on towards manhood, when the roar of the cannon has struck
suddenly on my ear, I have started with a thrill of vague expectation and
tremulous delight, and the long-unspoken words have articulated
themselves in the mind’s dumb whisper, The Wasp has come!

—Yes, children believe plenty of queer things. I suppose all of you have
had the pocket-book fever when you were little?—What do I mean? Why,
ripping up old pocket-books in the firm belief that bank-bills to an
immense amount were hidden in them.—So, too, you must all remember some
splendid unfulfilled promise of somebody or other, which fed you with
hopes perhaps for years, and which left a blank in your life which
nothing has ever filled up.—O. T. quitted our household carrying with him
the passionate regrets of the more youthful members. He was an ingenious
youngster; wrote wonderful copies, and carved the two initials given
above with great skill on all available surfaces. I thought, by the way,
they were all gone; but the other day I found them on a certain door
which I will show you some time. How it surprised me to find them so
near the ground! I had thought the boy of no trivial dimensions. Well,
O. T., when he went, made a solemn promise to two of us. I was to have a
ship, and the other a martin-house (last syllable pronounced as in the
word tin). Neither ever came; but, oh, how many and many a time I have
stolen to the corner,—the cars pass close by it at this time,—and looked
up that long avenue, thinking that he must be coming now, almost sure, as
I turned to look northward, that there he would be, trudging toward me,
the ship in one hand and the martin-house in the other!

[You must not suppose that all I am going to say, as well as all I have
said, was told to the whole company. The young fellow whom they call
John was in the yard, sitting on a barrel and smoking a cheroot, the
fumes of which came in, not ungrateful, through the open window. The
divinity-student disappeared in the midst of our talk. The poor relation
in black bombazine, who looked and moved as if all her articulations were
elbow-joints, had gone off to her chamber, after waiting with a look of
soul-subduing decorum at the foot of the stairs until one of the male
sort had passed her and ascended into the upper regions. This is a
famous point of etiquette in our boarding-house; in fact, between
ourselves, they make such an awful fuss about it, that I, for one, had a
great deal rather have them simple enough not to think of such matters at
all. Our landlady’s daughter said, the other evening, that she was going
to “retire”; whereupon the young fellow called John took up a lamp and
insisted on lighting her to the foot of the staircase. Nothing would
induce her to pass by him, until the schoolmistress, saying in good p