[Sidenote: Emotions of Surprise, Pleasure, or Pain.] Besides being fewer in number it is also probable that in early childhood the memory markings that endure are those of such experiences as caused strong emotions of surprise, pleasure, or pain. One of the very earliest recollections of the writer is of attending a wedding when he was three years old. But none of the usual incidents impressed him at all. The dresses of the bridesmaids, the appearance of the bride, the bouquets, bells and other accompaniments of a wedding have been completely forgotten. No remembrance of any single person or circumstance remains excepting two things which struck him with astonishment. First of all, he, in common with others attending the service, was taken across a wide river in a boat, and, secondly, he was put to stand close against the back of a harmonium, the noise of which at such close quarters was to him extraordinary and rather disagreeable. [Sidenote: Joys Better Remembered than Griefs.] The complete obliteration of everything connected with this visit—for the ceremony took place a day’s journey from his home—seems to point clearly to the fact that the unusual is not by itself enough to permanently impress a child’s mind, but it must be coupled with sensations of peculiar surprise, or special pleasure or pain. With regard to the two latter it is a beneficent provision that the joys of early life are remembered long after its sadnesses have been forgotten. [Sidenote: Summer Days at a Country Rectory.] A man looks back on the summers he spent as a child in a country rectory. It appears to him that the days were ever sunny: he recalls the sharp hiss of the whetstone on the scythe, which told him as he lay in his little bed that the parson’s man was mowing the lawn before the dew was off the grass; he can remember the wild strawberries in the less conventional part of the garden; he can in fancy take his way to the cowhouse, mug in hand, to get a drink of new and frothy milk; he can climb about the lower branches of a favourite tree; he can rake and water his little square of garden; he can come home atop of the last load of hay from the glebe fields; but it is always in the dancing sunlight that he moves; it would seem to him that there could never have been any single day in all his childhood when rain came down and skies were grey and cold. [Sidenote: The Old Nursery.]