I was still a babe, often carried in arms, when the event happened which changed my whole future and destined me to a strange and lonely existence.  I cannot relate it even now without a sense of terror.  I must force myself to recall the circumstances as told me and vaguely remembered, for I am not willing that my doomed and wholly exceptional life should pass away unrecorded, unexplained, unvindicated.  My nature is, I feel sure, a kind and social one, but I have lived apart, as if my heart were filled with hatred of my fellow-creatures.  If there are any readers who look without pity, without sympathy, upon those who shun the fellowship of their fellow men and women, who show by their downcast or averted eyes that they dread companionship and long for solitude, I pray them, if this paper ever reaches them, to stop at this point.  Follow me no further, for you will not believe my story, nor enter into the feelings which I am about to reveal.  But if there are any to whom all that is human is of interest, who have felt in their own consciousness some stirrings of invincible attraction to one individual and equally invincible repugnance to another, who know by their own experience that elective affinities have as their necessary counterpart, and, as it were, their polar opposites, currents not less strong of elective repulsions, let them read with unquestioning faith the story of a blighted life I am about to relate, much of it, of course, received from the lips of others.

My cousin Laura, a girl of seventeen, lately returned from Europe, was considered eminently beautiful.  It was in my second summer that she visited my father’s house, where he was living with his servants and my old nurse, my mother having but recently left him a widower.  Laura was full of vivacity, impulsive, quick in her movements, thoughtless occasionally, as it is not strange that a young girl of her age should be.  It was a beautiful summer day when she saw me for the first time.  My nurse had me in her arms, walking back and forward on a balcony with a low railing, upon which opened the windows of the second story of my father’s house.  While the nurse was thus carrying me, Laura came suddenly upon the balcony.  She no sooner saw me than with all the delighted eagerness of her youthful nature she rushed toward me, and, catching me from the nurse’s arms, began tossing me after the fashion of young girls who have been so lately playing with dolls that they feel as if babies were very much of the same nature.  The abrupt seizure frightened me; I sprang from her arms in my terror, and fell over the railing of the balcony.  I should probably enough have been killed on the spot but for the fact that a low thorn-bush grew just beneath the balcony, into which I fell and thus had the violence of the shock broken.  But the thorns tore my tender flesh, and I bear to this day marks of the deep wounds they inflicted.

That dreadful experience is burned deep into my memory.  The sudden apparition of the girl; the sense of being torn away from the protecting arms around me; the frantic effort to escape; the shriek that accompanied my fall through what must have seemed unmeasurable space; the cruel lacerations of the piercing and rending thorns,—­all these fearful impressions blended in one paralyzing terror.