- end_line
- 5520
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.921Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 5468
- text
- V.
"I must have been nine, or ten, or eleven years old, when the
pleasant-looking woman carried me away from the large house. She was a
farmer's wife; and now that was my residence, the farm-house. They
taught me to sew, and work with wool, and spin the wool; I was nearly
always busy now. This being busy, too, this it must have been, which
partly brought to me the power of being sensible of myself as something
human. Now I began to feel strange differences. When I saw a snake
trailing through the grass, and darting out the fire-fork from its
mouth, I said to myself, That thing is not human, but I am human. When
the lightning flashed, and split some beautiful tree, and left it to rot
from all its greenness, I said, That lightning is not human, but I am
human. And so with all other things. I can not speak coherently here;
but somehow I felt that all good, harmless men and women were human
things, placed at cross-purposes, in a world of snakes and lightnings,
in a world of horrible and inscrutable inhumanities. I have had no
training of any sort. All my thoughts well up in me; I know not whether
they pertain to the old bewilderings or not; but as they are, they are,
and I can not alter them, for I had nothing to do with putting them in
my mind, and I never affect any thoughts, and I never adulterate any
thoughts; but when I speak, think forth from the tongue, speech being
sometimes before the thought; so, often, my own tongue teaches me new
things.
"Now as yet I never had questioned the woman, or her husband, or the
young girls, their children, why I had been brought to the house, or how
long I was to stay in the house. There I was; just as I found myself in
the world; there I was; for what cause I had been brought into the
world, would have been no stranger question to me, than for what cause I
had been brought to the house. I knew nothing of myself, or any thing
pertaining to myself; I felt my pulse, my thought; but other things I
was ignorant of, except the general feeling of my humanness among the
inhumanities. But as I grew older, I expanded in my mind. I began to
learn things out of me; to see still stranger, and minuter differences.
I called the woman mother, and so did the other girls; yet the woman
often kissed them, but seldom me. She always helped them first at table.
The farmer scarcely ever spoke to me. Now months, years rolled on, and
the young girls began to stare at me. Then the bewilderingness of the
old starings of the solitary old man and old woman, by the cracked
hearth-stone of the desolate old house, in the desolate, round, open
space; the bewilderingness of those old starings now returned to me; and
the green starings, and the serpent hissings of the uncompanionable cat,
recurred to me, and the feeling of the infinite forlornness of my life
rolled over me. But the woman was very kind to me; she taught the girls
not to be cruel to me; she would call me to her, and speak cheerfully to
me, and I thanked--not God, for I had been taught no God--I thanked the
bright human summer, and the joyful human sun in the sky; I thanked the
human summer and the sun, that they had given me the woman; and I would
sometimes steal away into the beautiful grass, and worship the kind
summer and the sun; and often say over to myself the soft words, summer
and the sun.
- title
- Chunk 1