At all events, when I look back upon the boy I was, I see the beginnings of a real person who fades little by little as manhood arrives and advances, until suddenly I am aware that a stranger has taken his place....

I lived in a city which is now some twelve hours distant from the Atlantic seaboard.  A very different city, too, it was in youth, in my grandfather’s day and my father’s, even in my own boyhood, from what it has since become in this most material of ages.

There is a book of my photographs, preserved by my mother, which I have been looking over lately.  First is presented a plump child of two, gazing in smiling trustfulness upon a world of sunshine; later on a lean boy in plaided kilts, whose wavy, chestnut-brown hair has been most carefully parted on the side by Norah, his nurse.  The face is still childish.  Then appears a youth of fourteen or thereabout in long trousers and the queerest of short jackets, standing beside a marble table against a classic background; he is smiling still in undiminished hope and trust, despite increasing vexations and crossings, meaningless lessons which had to be learned, disciplines to rack an aspiring soul, and long, uncomfortable hours in the stiff pew of the First Presbyterian Church.  Associated with this torture is a peculiar Sunday smell and the faint rustling of silk dresses.  I can see the stern black figure of Dr. Pound, who made interminable statements to the Lord.

“Oh, Lord,” I can hear him say, “thou knowest...”

These pictures, though yellowed and faded, suggest vividly the being I once was, the feelings that possessed and animated me, love for my playmates, vague impulses struggling for expression in a world forever thwarting them.  I recall, too, innocent dreams of a future unidentified, dreams from which I emerged vibrating with an energy that was lost for lack of a definite objective:  yet it was constantly being renewed.  I often wonder what I might have become if it could have been harnessed, directed!  Speculations are vain.  Calvinism, though it had begun to make compromises, was still a force in those days, inimical to spontaneity and human instincts.  And when I think of Calvinism I see, not Dr. Pound, who preached it, but my father, who practised and embodied it.  I loved him, but he made of righteousness a stern and terrible thing implying not joy, but punishment, the, suppression rather than the expansion of aspirations.  His religion seemed woven all of austerity, contained no shining threads to catch my eye.  Dreams, to him, were matters for suspicion and distrust.

I sometimes ask myself, as I gaze upon his portrait now, the duplicate of the one painted for the Bar Association, whether he ever could have felt the secret, hot thrills I knew and did not identify with religion.  His religion was real to him, though he failed utterly to make it comprehensible to me.  The apparent calmness, evenness of his life awed me.  A successful lawyer, a respected and trusted citizen, was he lacking somewhat in virility, vitality?  I cannot judge him, even to-day.  I never knew him.  There were times in my youth when the curtain of his unfamiliar spirit was withdrawn a little:  and once, after I had passed the crisis of some childhood disease, I awoke to find him bending over my bed with a tender expression that surprised and puzzled me.