His nurse’s lullaby is translated into the mysteries of time.  She sings absolutely immemorial words.  It matters little what they may mean to waking ears; to the ears of a child going to sleep they tell of the beginning of the world.  He has fallen asleep to the sound of them all his life; and “all his life” means more than older speech can well express.

Ancient custom is formed in a single spacious year.  A child is beset with long traditions.  And his infancy is so old, so old, that the mere adding of years in the life to follow will not seem to throw it further back—­it is already so far.  That is, it looks as remote to the memory of a man of thirty as to that of a man of seventy.  What are a mere forty years of added later life in the contemplation of such a distance?  Pshaw!

Footnotes: 

{1} It is worth noting that long after the writing of this paper, and the ascription of a Stevenson-like character to the quoted phrase, a letter of Stevenson’s was published, and proved that he had read Lucy Hutchinson’s writings, and that he did not love her.  “I have possessed myself of Mrs. Hutchinson, whom, of course, I admire, etc. . .  I sometimes wish the old Colonel had got drunk and beaten her, in the bitterness of my spirit. . .  The way in which she talks of herself makes one’s blood run cold.”  He was young at that time of writing, and perhaps hardly aware of the lesson in English he had taken from her.  We know that he never wasted the opportunity for such a lesson; and the fact that he did allow her to administer one to him in right seventeenth-century diction is established—­it is not too bold to say so—­by my recognition of his style in her own.  I had surely caught the retrospective reflex note, heard first in his voice, recognized in hers.

{2} I found it afterwards:  it was Rebecca.