“One by one my sisters and brothers made haste to leave. So eager were they to get away that some took the first matrimonial boat on which they could secure passage, and thereby made sad shipwreck of their lives. How I longed to be loved. When I saw other children petted and caressed my heart swelled almost to bursting. The result of my unsatisfied longing was that I took refuge in my imagination and there lived a life as congenial and blissful as my outside life was distasteful and miserable. I surrounded myself with imaginary friends whom I loved and who loved me--charming, agreeable, superior people--men and women, not children. The misery that prevailed in our home had taken my childhood from me before I knew I possessed it. I early learned the solemn truth that ‘each soul in what is most itself, in what is deepest and nearest, lives alone, and that there is more loneliness in life than there is communion.’ I, too, like my little sister, suffered from a strange homesickness of the spirit, a longing for sympathetic association, for companionship, in short. I wanted congenial air, ‘that air which may be found everywhere, if we can find sympathetic souls to breathe it with us, and which is to be found nowhere without them,--the air of the land of our dreams, of the country of the ideal.’ Plotinus says ‘Our true country is that from whence we came.’ It has always seemed to me that far back in the past I lived somewhere and was happy. Now I am ever searching for the souls who are in sympathy with me, as in that far-off time. They are my own people, rather than those to whom I am related by consanguine ties. They or their counterparts exist somewhere on the earth, I believe, and the real business of my life is to find them. “One’s own people! Think of what it would be to dwell among them, where sympathy met one in every glance, and love made itself felt in every tone of the voice.