Although, as I write, I am only in late middle age and hale and hearty, all that I intend to record seems long ago indeed. Yet truthfully, and in such ways as memory recalls it, do I intend to put it down. If I am discursive, it is because I am led away by the vividness with which my eye puts the scenes again before me; that is all there is to it. In going over many events of the past in the half-waking hours at night--a habit I have long been prone to--I have felt, often, my heart-beats quicken, and more than once I have scarce restrained an inclination to speak or to cry aloud in accordance with my feelings. Perhaps the placing of all this upon paper may reduce the intensity with which I relive a life that is gone. And thus, to begin: My earliest childhood's recollection is of a warm summer's day. I know it was warm, because the sand in which I was playing sparkled and shone as it ran through my fingers, and the long stretch of beach, whose whiteness dazzled my eyes, was hot to the touch of my bare feet. A great brown curly dog playing up and down the water's edge makes part of the picture, and an old colored mammy, crooning softly to herself, was shading my head with the green branch of a tree. Then a tall man with gray hair came and lifted me on his shoulder and carried me through a wood whose trees seemed to touch the clouds; then out of the shadows, by a path through a meadow (in which were some great fierce hogs that frightened me most dreadfully), up to a large house, where a beautiful woman took me in her arms and kissed me and called me pet names that I was glad to hear. This, I say, is the first day of all my life that I can remember--which is beginning at the beginning, and no mistake. Gradually it came to me, so that I can remember it, that I began to love things. I loved my beautiful mother, who spoke to me in a language very different from that of the three old colored people whom I saw every day, namely, Aunt Sheba, Ann Martha, and Ol' Peter; and I loved them also, and I loved the dog. I seemed to understand the two kinds of speaking very well (my mother's and the rest of the world's, I mean), although I did not know that one was French and the other darky English pure and simple. The tall man, whom I sometimes called "_père_," and at others "daddy," was not always with us. Very often it was long months between his visits, and he generally remarked how I had grown and how much heavier I had become since last he had lifted me up on his shoulder. Then came the time when I began to think--strange thoughts that were never answered, because for the most part I confided them to no one except, maybe, to the brown curly dog, who was called "Maréchal" by my mother, and "Maa'shal" by the colored people. Like myself, he seemed to understand either language perfectly, and replied to each in his own fashion.