Let us come back to Pheasantina, who, I am told, was a delicate and somewhat fractious infant, giving to both father and mother considerable cause for anxiety.  Her first attempts at rising in the world were attended with disaster, for as she was lying in a cradle, with carved iron canopy, and was for a moment left by her nurse in full faith that she could not rise from the recumbent position, Miss Pheasantina determined to show that she was capable of unexpected independence, and made a vigorous struggle to assume that upright position which is the proud prerogative of man.  In another moment the recumbent position was re-assumed, and the nurse returning found the baby’s face covered with blood, streaming from a severe wound on the forehead, the iron fretwork having proved harder than the baby’s head.  The scar remains down to the present time, and gives me the valuable peculiarity of only wrinkling up one side of my forehead when I raise my eyebrows, a feat that I defy any of my readers to emulate.  The heavy cut has, I suppose, so injured the muscles in that spot that they have lost the normal power of contraction.

My earliest personal recollections are of a house and garden that we lived in when I was three and four years of age, situated in Grove Road, St. John’s Wood.  I can remember my mother hovering round the dinner-table to see that all was bright for the home-coming husband; my brother—­two years older than myself—­and I watching “for papa”; the loving welcome, the game of romps that always preceded the dinner of the elder folks.  I can remember on the first of October, 1851, jumping up in my little cot, and shouting out triumphantly:  “Papa! mamma!  I am four years old!” and the grave demand of my brother, conscious of superior age, at dinner-time:  “May not Annie have a knife to-day, as she is four years old?”

It was a sore grievance during that same year 1851, that I was not judged old enough to go to the Great Exhibition, and I have a faint memory of my brother consolingly bringing me home one of those folding pictured strips that are sold in the streets, on which were imaged glories that I longed only the more to see.  Far-away, dusky, trivial memories, these.  What a pity it is that a baby cannot notice, cannot observe, cannot remember, and so throw light on the fashion of the dawning of the external world on the human consciousness.  If only we could remember how things looked when they were first imaged on the retinae; what we felt when first we became conscious of the outer world; what the feeling was as faces of father and mother grew out of the surrounding chaos and became familiar things, greeted with a smile, lost with a cry; if only memory would not become a mist when in later years we strive to throw our glances backward into the darkness of our infancy, what lessons we might learn to help our stumbling psychology, how many questions might be solved whose answers we are groping for in vain.