_When we lose our Edens, you and I, is it any wonder that we sometimes pause in the journey, and long to recapture the days when we played in the enchanted enclosure? What if, some day, one creeps back close to the wall, holding up the magic mirror he brought away with him? What if he gets glimpses that help him to continue on the way? What if he lets you peep into the mirror, too--the mirror which will reflect the garden you played in, the paths you trod, the flowers you gathered, the playmates you knew?_ A LIFE UNVEILED CHAPTER I THE FAMILY TREE I seem always to have lived a life apart from the obvious one, seeing the strange contrasts, the incongruities, the dramatic moments, though always these things were unexpressed. Those about me had no inkling of what was passing in my mind. Perhaps it is so with all children. One can only know one’s self, and that so vaguely. I was born near the foot of a drumlin. Their smooth level crests broke the horizon line of my native village. Amid the drumlins I shared in all the little world they bounded. On the summit of a drumlin my kindred lie buried, and back to the drumlins I shall one day turn--back to the commonplace little village where my life began. The village has not grown in all the years, either in population or importance; on the contrary, it seems to have dwindled to tiny dimensions. Whenever I go back there now, the houses and the prominent buildings look smaller, the drumlins lower, and all the distances are lessened to a surprising degree. I look at the one handsome residence the village boasts and ask, Is that the house I used to think so imposing? Are those the grounds so illimitable to my childish eyes? And is this the same hill near Grandfather’s barn that was so steep when three happy children clambered over it in search of sorrel leaves? What a paltry patch of ground Grandmother’s garden now is! yet there was a time when, engaged in one of the tasks of my childhood (that of picking Grandma’s raspberries and currants), her garden bounded my little world which then did not seem little at all. Nor was it; for while moving among the currant bushes, my fingers busy, my thoughts roamed far afield--out past the hop vines in the rear; out past the clump of big red “pineys” in front, and the corner where the smallage grew; past the snowball bush, even past the oxheart cherry tree; through the little blue gate, and out into the big wonderful world beyond. No, it was not a little garden; it was a very big garden then; some unkind trickery has been at work these later years to make it the poor cramped little enclosure which I viewed last summer through blinding tears.