I can hardly say what the reason of it was, but it is very certain that I had a vague sense of some impending event as we took our seats in the Master’s library.  He seemed particularly anxious that we should be comfortably seated, and shook up the cushions of the arm-chairs himself, and got them into the right places.

Now go to sleep—­he said—­or listen,—­just which you like best.  But I am going to begin by telling you both a secret.

Liberavi animam meam.  That is the meaning of my book and of my literary life, if I may give such a name to that party-colored shred of human existence.  I have unburdened myself in this book, and in some other pages, of what I was born to say.  Many things that I have said in my ripe days have been aching in my soul since I was a mere child.  I say aching, because they conflicted with many of my inherited beliefs, or rather traditions.  I did not know then that two strains of blood were striving in me for the mastery,—­two! twenty, perhaps,—­twenty thousand, for aught I know,—­but represented to me by two,—­paternal and maternal.  Blind forces in themselves; shaping thoughts as they shaped features and battled for the moulding of constitution and the mingling of temperament.

Philosophy and poetry came—­to me before I knew their names.

     Je fis mes premiers vers, sans savoir les ecrire.

Not verses so much as the stuff that verses are made of.  I don’t suppose that the thoughts which came up of themselves in my mind were so mighty different from what come up in the minds of other young folks.  And that ’s the best reason I could give for telling ’em.  I don’t believe anything I’ve written is as good as it seemed to me when I wrote it,—­he stopped, for he was afraid he was lying,—­not much that I ’ve written, at any rate,—­he said—­with a smile at the honesty which made him qualify his statement.  But I do know this:  I have struck a good many chords, first and last, in the consciousness of other people.  I confess to a tender feeling for my little brood of thoughts.  When they have been welcomed and praised it has pleased me, and if at any time they have been rudely handled and despitefully entreated it has cost me a little worry.  I don’t despise reputation, and I should like to be remembered as having said something worth lasting well enough to last.

But all that is nothing to the main comfort I feel as a writer.  I have got rid of something my mind could not keep to itself and rise as it was meant to into higher regions.  I saw the aeronauts the other day emptying from the bags some of the sand that served as ballast.  It glistened a moment in the sunlight as a slender shower, and then was lost and seen no more as it scattered itself unnoticed.  But the airship rose higher as the sand was poured out, and so it seems to me I have felt myself getting above the mists and clouds whenever I have lightened myself of some portion of the mental ballast I have carried with me.  Why should I hope or fear when I send out my book?  I have had my reward, for I have wrought out my thought, I have said my say, I have freed my soul.  I can afford to be forgotten.