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- 5255
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- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.921Z
- extracted_by
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- 5195
- text
- stung with the thought of having been driven away there, too. I now knew
not where to go to rid myself of my loneliness. At last I went outside
of the house, and sat down on a stone, but its coldness went up to my
heart, and I rose and stood on my feet. But my head was dizzy; I could
not stand; I fell, and knew no more. But next morning I found myself in
bed in my uncheerable room, and some dark bread and a cup of water by
me.
"It has only been by chance that I have told thee this one particular
reminiscence of my early life in that house. I could tell many more like
it, but this is enough to show what manner of life I led at that time.
Every day that I then lived, I felt all visible sights and all audible
sounds growing stranger and stranger, and fearful and more fearful to
me. To me the man and the woman were just like the cat; none of them
would speak to me; none of them were comprehensible to me. And the man,
and the woman, and the cat, were just like the green foundation stones
of the house to me; I knew not whence they came, or what cause they had
for being there. I say again, no living human soul came to the house but
the man and the woman; but sometimes the old man early trudged away to a
road that led through the woods, and would not come back till late in
the evening; he brought the dark bread, and the thin, reddish wine with
him. Though the entrance to the wood was not so very far from the door,
yet he came so slowly and infirmly trudging with his little load, that
it seemed weary hours on hours between my first descrying him among the
trees, and his crossing the splintered threshold.
"Now the wide and vacant blurrings of my early life thicken in my mind.
All goes wholly memoryless to me now. It may have been that about that
time I grew sick with some fever, in which for a long interval I lost
myself. Or it may be true, which I have heard, that after the period of
our very earliest recollections, then a space intervenes of entire
unknowingness, followed again by the first dim glimpses of the
succeeding memory, more or less distinctly embracing all our past up to
that one early gap in it.
"However this may be, nothing more can I recall of the house in the wide
open space; nothing of how at last I came to leave it; but I must have
been still extremely young then. But some uncertain, tossing memory have
I of being at last in another round, open space, but immensely larger
than the first one, and with no encircling belt of woods. Yet often it
seems to me that there were three tall, straight things like pine-trees
somewhere there nigh to me at times; and that they fearfully shook and
snapt as the old trees used to in the mountain storms. And the floors
seemed sometimes to droop at the corners still more steeply than the old
floors did; and changefully drooped too, so that I would even seem to
feel them drooping under me.
"Now, too, it was that, as it sometimes seems to me, I first and last
chattered in the two childish languages I spoke of a little time ago.
There seemed people about me, some of whom talked one, and some the
other; but I talked both; yet one not so readily as the other; and but
beginningly as it were; still this other was the one which was gradually
displacing the former. The men who--as it sometimes dreamily seems to me
at times--often climbed the three strange tree-like things, they
talked--I needs must think--if indeed I have any real thought about so
bodiless a phantom as this is--they talked the language which I speak of
as at this time gradually waning in me. It was a bonny tongue; oh, seems
to me so sparkling-gay and lightsome; just the tongue for a child like
me, if the child had not been so sad always. It was pure children's
language, Pierre; so twittering--such a chirp.
- title
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