CHAPTER III

CUMÆ

41. IN my needful and fixed resolve to set the facts down continuously, leaving the reader to his reflections on them, I am slipping a little too fast over the surfaces of things; and it becomes at this point desirable that I should know, or at least try to guess, something of what the reader’s reflections are! and whether in the main he is getting at the sense of the facts I tell him.

Does he think me a lucky or unlucky youth, I wonder? Commendable, on the whole, and exemplary-or the reverse? Of promising gifts-or merely glitter of morning, to pass at noon? I ask him at this point, because several letters from pleased acquaintances have announced to me, of late, that they have obtained quite new lights upon my character from these jottings, and like me much better than they ever did before. Which was not the least the effect I intended to produce on them; and which moreover is the exact opposite of the effect on my own mind of meeting myself, by turning back, face to face.

42. On the contrary, I suffer great pain, and shame, in perceiving with better knowledge the little that I was, and the much that I lost-of time, chance, and-duty, (a duty missed is the worst of loss); and I cannot in the least understand what my acquaintances have found, in anything hitherto told them of my childhood, more amiable than they might have guessed of the author of Time and Tide, or Unto this Last. The real fact being, whatever they make of it, that hitherto, and for a year or two on, yet, I was simply a little floppy and soppy tadpole,-little more

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