'That these memories of mine concern the year 1389 or 1390 I know from what the Abbot tells me, and also from later studies and deductions of my own. As you may know, there was at that time a bitter war being waged hereabouts between Ghibelline Montferrat and Guelphic Morea. It may have ravaged these very lands by which we travel now. One evening at the hour of dusk a foraging troop of Montferrat horse swept into my native place. There was pillage and brutality of every kind, as you can imagine. There was terror and confusion in every household, no doubt, and even in our own, although Heaven knows we had little cause to stand in dread of pillage. I remember that as night descended we huddled in the dark listening to the sounds of violence in the distance, coming from what I now imagine to have been the more opulent quarter of that township. I can hear my mother's heavy breathing. For once she inspired no terror in us, being herself stricken with terror and cowed into silence. But this greater terror was upon us all, a sense of impending evil, of some horror advancing presently to overwhelm us. There were snivelling, whimpering sounds in the gloom about me from Leocadia and the other children. It is odd, how things heard have remained stamped upon my mind so much more vividly than things seen, which usually are more easily remembered. But from that moment my memory begins to grow clear and consecutive, perhaps from the sudden sharpening of my wits by this crisis. 'It was probably the instinct to withdraw myself beyond the reach of that approaching evil, which drew me furtively from the room. I remember groping my way in the dark down a steep crazy staircase, and tumbling down three stone steps at the door of that hovel into the mud of the street. 'I picked myself up, bruised and covered with filth. At another time this might have set me howling. Just then my mind was filled with graver concerns. In the open the noises were more distinct. I could hear shouts, and once a piercing scream that made my young blood run cold. Away on my right there was a red glow in the sky, and associating it with the evil that was to be escaped, I turned down the alley and made off, whimpering as I ran. Soon there was an end to the houses, and I was out of their shadow in the light of a rising moon on a road that led away through the open country into eternity as it must have seemed to me. From this I have since argued either that the township had neither gates nor walls, or else that the mean quarter we inhabited was outside and beyond them.