LETTER LXXI.

I used to stand at the foot of the stairs a long time, when by myself, before daring to start up:  and then it was always the right foot that went first.  And a fearful feeling used to accompany me that I was going to meet the “evil chance” when I got to the corner.  Sometimes when I felt it was there very badly, I used at the last moment to shut my eyes and walk through it:  and feel, on the other side, like a pilgrim who had come through the waters of Jordan.

My eyes were always the timidest things about me:  and to shut my eyes tight against the dark was the only way I had of meeting the solitude of the first hour of bed when Nan-nan had left me, and before I could get to sleep.

I have an idea that one listens better with one’s eyes shut, and that this and other things are a remnant of our primitive existence when perhaps the ears of our arboreal ancestors kept a lookout while the rest of their senses slept.  I think, also, that the instinct I found in myself, and have since in other children, to conceal a wound is a similar survival.  At one time, I suppose, in the human herd the damaged were quickly put out of existence; and it was the self-preservation instinct which gave me so keen a wish to get into hiding when one day I cut my finger badly—­something more than a mere scratch, which I would have cried over and had bandaged quite in the correct way.  I remember I sat in a corner and pretended to be nursing a rag doll which I had knotted round my hand, till Nan-nan noticed, perhaps, that I looked white, and found blood flowing into my lap.  And I can recall still the overcoming comfort which fell upon me as I let resolution go, and sobbed in her arms full of pity for myself and scolding the “naughty knife” that had done the deed.  The rest of that day is lost to me.

Yet it is not only occasions of happiness and pain which impress themselves.  When the mind takes a sudden stride in consciousness,—­that, also, fixes itself.  I remember the agony of shyness which came on me when strange hands did my undressing for me once in Nan-nan’s absence:  the first time I had felt such a thing.  And another day I remember, after contemplating the head of Judas in a pictorial puzzle for a long time, that I seized a brick and pounded him with it beyond recognition:—­these were the first vengeful beginnings of Christianity in me.  All my history, Bible and English, came to me through picture-books.  I wept tenderly over the endangered eyes of Prince Arthur, yet I put out the eyes of many kings, princes, and governors who incurred my displeasure, scratching them with pins till only a white blur remained on the paper.

All this comes to me quite seriously now:  I used to laugh thinking it over.  But can a single thing we do be called trivial, since out of it we grow up minute by minute into a whole being charged with capacity for gladness or suffering?