Produced by Delphine Lettau, Ross Cooling and the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net CONSTABLE'S MISCELLANY OF ORIGINAL & SELECTED PUBLICATIONS IN LITERATURE SPIRITUAL ADVENTURES BY ARTHUR SYMONS CONSTABLE·AND·CO·LIMITED·LONDON _First Published_ 1905. _Constable's Miscellany_ 1928. Printed in Great Britain by Lowe & Brydone Printers Limited. Park Street, N.W.1. TO THOMAS HARDY CONTENTS PAGE A PRELUDE TO LIFE 3 ESTHER KAHN 57 CHRISTIAN TREVALGA 91 THE CHILDHOOD OF LUCY NEWCOME 125 THE DEATH OF PETER WAYDELIN 157 AN AUTUMN CITY 189 SEAWARD LACKLAND 213 EXTRACTS FROM THE JOURNAL OF HENRY LUXULYAN 253 A PRELUDE TO LIFE. I I am afraid I must begin a good way back if I am to explain myself to myself at all satisfactorily. I can see how the queer child I was laid the foundation of the man I became, and yet I remember singularly little of my childhood. My parents were never very long in one place, and I have never known what it was to have a home, as most children know it; a home that has been lived in so long that it has got into the ways, the bodily creases, of its inhabitants, like an old, comfortable garment, warmed through and through by the same flesh. I left the town where I was born when I was one year old, and I have never seen it since. I do not even remember in what part of England my eyes first became conscious of the things about them. I remember the hammering of iron on wood, when a great ship was launched in a harbour; the terrifying sound of cannons, as they burst into smoke on a great plain near an ancient castle, while the soldiers rode in long lines across the grass; the clop-clop of a cripple with a wooden leg; with my intense terror at the toppling wagons of hay, as I passed them in the road. I remember absolutely nothing else out of my very early childhood; I have not even been told many things about it, except that I once wakened my mother, as I lay in a little cot at her side, to listen to the nightingales, and that Victor Hugo once stopped the nurse to smile at me, as she walked with me in her arms at Fermain Bay, in Guernsey. If I have been a vagabond, and have never been able to root myself in any one place in the world, it is because I have no early memories of any one sky or soil. It has freed me from many prejudices in giving me its own unresting kind of freedom; but it has cut me off from whatever is stable, of long growth in the world.