So long as I was a mere part of them, without individual existence, and swept on, a satellite, in their atmosphere, I was mirthful when they were mirthful, and grave when they were grave.  The mere fact that I had no young companions, no storybooks, no outdoor amusements, none of the thousand and one employments provided for other children in more conventional surroundings, did not make me discontented or fretful, because I did not know of the existence of such entertainments.  In exchange, I became keenly attentive to the limited circle of interests open to me.  Oddly enough, I have no recollection of any curiosity about other children, nor of any desire to speak to them or play with them.  They did not enter into my dreams, which were occupied entirely with grown-up people and animals.  I had three dolls, to whom my attitude was not very intelligible.  Two of these were female, one with a shapeless face of rags, the other in wax.  But, in my fifth year, when the Crimean War broke out, I was given a third doll, a soldier, dressed very smartly in a scarlet cloth tunic.  I used to put the dolls on three chairs, and harangue them aloud, but my sentiment to them was never confidential, until our maid-servant one day, intruding on my audience, and misunderstanding the occasion of it, said:  ’What? a boy, and playing with a soldier when he’s got two lady-dolls to play with?’ I had never thought of my dolls as confidants before, but from that time forth I paid a special attention to the soldier, in order to make up to him for Lizzie’s unwarrantable insult.

The declaration of war with Russia brought the first breath of outside life into our Calvinist cloister.  My parents took in a daily newspaper, which they had never done before, and events in picturesque places, which my Father and I looked out on the map, were eagerly discussed.  One of my vividest early memories can be dated exactly.  I was playing about the house, and suddenly burst into the breakfast-room, where, close to the door, sat an amazing figure, a very tall young man, as stiff as my doll, in a gorgeous scarlet tunic.  Quite far away from him, at her writing-table, my Mother sat with her Bible open before her, and was urging the gospel plan of salvation on his acceptance.  She promptly told me to run away and play, but I had seen a great sight.  This guardsman was in the act of leaving for the Crimea, and his adventures,—­he was converted in consequence of my Mother’s instruction,—­were afterwards told by her in a tract, called ’The Guardsman of the Alma’, of which I believe that more than half a million copies were circulated.  He was killed in that battle, and this added an extraordinary lustre to my dream of him.  I see him still in my mind’s eye, large, stiff, and unspeakably brilliant, seated, from respect, as near as possible to our parlour door.  This apparition gave reality to my subsequent conversations with the soldier doll.