Looking right back to the days of my childhood, the first beginnings of things are blurred and confused, but I must disentangle them as well as I may if I am to tell my story clearly and coherently. I know now that the story began long before I was born, but I must pick up the thread of it where it first crossed my path. And even that is difficult enough. For before I was conscious to the point of memory I was already enmeshed in a net of mystery woven long since of dark and incredible things. But to me they didn't seem dark and incredible, for they were with me before I could reason and distinguish, nor had my experience any touchstone by which to test or measure them. I think perhaps I first began to take conscious stock of my surroundings on a certain night of wind and rain. For earlier events were with me but as shapeless shadows of memory, but from this night my life began to unfold before me like a clearly written book. I had been nursed in the atmosphere of mystery, though at this time, of course, such a term would have had no meaning for me, for nothing is strange to the inexperienced. But vaguely I was becoming accustomed to a life of sudden change and hiding and swift flight. My eyes were opening with growing consciousness to a world of passing lights and shadows, with nothing definite or stationary, but all in wavering motion. The one binding and constant element, the thread as it were which gave single consistency to the whole, was the presence of my father, whose laughter and gaiety, whose thrilling stories of pirates and smugglers and treasure-trove, acted rather than narrated with a dramatic realism that left them scored in burning pictures on my imagination, and whose strong and tender companionship to a child of five or six, set him central like the sun in my little world now growing out of chaos to some semblance of form and individuality. Why this night above all nights should live in my memory as the first clear picture there, is perhaps due to the keener suffering I was called upon to endure, or perhaps to the fact that the shadowy pursuer who kept ever on the road became this night not merely a name and a fear but a creature of flesh and blood. The flight in the morning I don't remember distinctly, for that was much as others had been. My father had been playing with me at hide-and-seek, our favourite pastime, and one always full of thrill and strange romance, when he had crept up to me where I lay hidden, and putting his finger to his lips muttered, "Whist!"--glancing slowly round with infinite caution. All this I surmise, for it had happened so before, and I knew the procedure well. It meant that the mysterious enemy was on our trail again, and we must be away on the path without delay. "Is it Shadow-of-Fear?" I said, creeping close to my father so as to whisper in his ear.