The dreamy tendency in the child, that on its worldly side is fancy, imagination, on its religious side is the germ of mysticism, and I believe it to be far more common than many people think.  But the remorseless materialism of the day—­not the philosophic materialism of the few, but the religious materialism of the many—­crushes out all the delicate buddings forth of the childish thought, and bandages the eyes that might otherwise see.  At first the child does not distinguish between what it “sees” and what it “fancies”; the one is as real, as objective, to it as the other, and it will talk to and play with its dream-comrades as merrily as with children like itself.  As a child, I myself very much preferred the former, and never knew what it was to be lonely.  But clumsy grown-ups come along and tramp right through the dream-garden, and crush the dream-flowers, and push the dream-children aside, and then say, in their loud, harsh voices—­not soft and singable like the dream-voices—­“You must not tell such naughty stories, Miss Annie; you give me the shivers, and your mamma will be very vexed with you.”  But this tendency in me was too strong to be stifled, and it found its food in the fairy tales I loved, and in the religious allegories that I found yet more entrancing.  How or when I learned to read, I do not know, for I cannot remember the time when a book was not a delight.  At five years of age I must have read easily, for I remember being often unswathed from a delightful curtain, in which I used to roll myself with a book, and told to “go and play,” while I was still a five-years’-old dot.  And I had a habit of losing myself so completely in the book that my name might be called in the room where I was, and I never hear it, so that I used to be blamed for wilfully hiding myself, when I had simply been away in fairyland, or lying trembling beneath some friendly cabbage-leaf as a giant went by.

I was between seven and eight years of age when I first came across some children’s allegories of a religious kind, and a very little later came “Pilgrim’s Progress,” and Milton’s “Paradise Lost.”  Thenceforth my busy fancies carried me ever into the fascinating world where boy-soldiers kept some outpost for their absent Prince, bearing a shield with his sign of a red cross on it; where devils shaped as dragons came swooping down on the pilgrim, but were driven away defeated after hard struggle; where angels came and talked with little children, and gave them some talisman which warned them of coming danger, and lost its light if they were leaving the right path.  What a dull, tire-some world it was that I had to live in, I used to think to myself, when I was told to be a good child, and not to lose my temper, and to be tidy, and not mess my pinafore at dinner.  How much easier to be a Christian if one could have a red-cross shield and a white banner, and have a real devil to fight with, and a beautiful Divine Prince to smile at you when the battle was over.  How much more exciting