“My parents loved me tenderly, and, failing to soothe or conciliate me, they removed from the busy city to a secluded villa in the suburbs.  Those labors which necessitated abrupt or prolonged sound were performed outside our grounds.  The domestics were enjoined to conduct their operations with the utmost quietude.  Carriages never came to the threshold, but stopped at the lodge; the drives were strewn with bark to drown the rattle of wheels; familiar fowls and beasts were excluded; the pines were cut down, though they had moaned for half a century; the angles of the house were rounded, that the wind might not scream and sigh of midnight, and the flapping of a shutter would have warranted the dismissal of the servants.  Thick carpets covered the floors.  My apartments lay in a remote wing, and were surrounded with double walls, filled with wool, to deaden communication.  Goodly books were provided, but none which could arouse fears or passions.  Fiery romances were prohibited, and histories of turmoil and war, with theology and its mournful revelations, and medicine, which revived the bitter story of my organism.  My library was stocked with dreamy and diverting compositions—­old Walton, the pensive angler; the vagaries of ancient Burton, and the placid essayists of the Addisonian day.  Of poets I had Cowper and Wordsworth, who loved quiet life and were the chroniclers of domestic men and manners.  Pictures of shadowy studios and calm lakes, unfrequented coverts and sleepy wayside inns, covered my wall.  The tints of tapestry, panel, and furniture were subdued, and the sunshine which mellowed a stained window was softened by an ingenious arrangement of shades and refractors.  Art opposed her quaintest contrivances against the intense and violent moods of Nature, and my retirement was secure from the inroads of all except my careful guardians.

“But I was still unhappy, and the prey of vivid fancies.  This privacy suggested the great world without, where men were wrestling with dangers.  I imagined ships upon stormy seas, and whirlwinds around mountain-homes; the chaos of cities, the rout of armies, dim arctic solitudes, where the icebergs tumbled apart and the frozen seas split asunder.  They had banished painful occurrences, but the sensitive organism could not be destroyed, and I bore up until almost insane, struggling to be cheerful when stunned and dazzled.  At last, when my mother stole into my room one day—­it was October, I think, for I could hear the tiniest leaves dropping to the grass far below—­I laid my head wearily in her lap and covered my ears with my hands.  My eyes were filled with tears.

“’My dear mother, I cannot bear this life.  I suffer as of old, though there be not a mote across the sun nor a breath in the air.  If my mind could be led from these consciousnesses, I might be calm.’

“‘Luke,’ said my mother, ‘you need a companion.’

“The thought was a new one, and so thrilled me.