Now my father Meri was a scribe of the great temple of Ptah, and I was brought up to his trade in the school of the temple, where I copied many rolls and also wrote out Books of the Dead which I adorned with paintings.  Indeed, in this business I became so clever that, after my father went blind some years before his death, I earned enough to keep him, and my sisters also until they married.  Mother I had none, for she was gathered to Osiris while I was still very little.  So life went on from year to year, but in my heart I hated my lot.  While I was still a boy there rose up in me a desire—­not to copy what others had written, but to write what others should copy.  I became a dreamer of dreams.  Walking at night beneath the palm-trees upon the banks of the Nile I watched the moon shining upon the waters, and in its rays I seemed to see many beautiful things.  Pictures appeared there which were different from any that I saw in the world of men, although in them were men and women and even gods.

Of these pictures I made stories in my heart and at last, although that was not for some years, I began to write these stories down in my spare hours.  My sisters found me doing so and told my father, who scolded me for such foolishness which he said would never furnish me with bread and beer.  But still I wrote on in secret by the light of the lamp in my chamber at night.  Then my sisters married, and one day my father died suddenly while he was reciting prayers in the temple.  I caused him to be embalmed in the best fashion and buried with honour in the tomb he had made ready for himself, although to pay the costs I was obliged to copy Books of the Dead for nearly two years, working so hard that I found no time for the writing of stories.

When at length I was free from debt I met a maiden from Thebes with a beautiful face that always seemed to smile, and she took my heart from my breast into her own.  In the end, after I returned from fighting in the war against the Nine Bow Barbarians, to which I was summoned like other men, I married her.  As for her name, let it be, I will not think of it even to myself.  We had one child, a little girl which died within two years of her birth, and then I learned what sorrow can mean to man.  At first my wife was sad, but her grief departed with time and she smiled again as she used to do.  Only she said that she would bear no more children for the gods to take.  Having little to do she began to go about the city and make friends whom I did not know, for of these, being a beautiful woman, she found many.  The end of it was that she departed back to Thebes with a soldier whom I had never seen, for I was always working at home thinking of the babe who was dead and how happiness is a bird that no man can snare, though sometimes, of its own will, it flies in at his window-place.

It was after this that my hair went white before I had counted thirty years.