But that invitation, received at first with a sort of uneasiness, awoke the dormant energies in my feelings. Cracow is the town where I spent with my father the last eighteen months of his life. It was in that old royal and academical city that I ceased to be a child, became a boy, knew the friendships, the admirations, the thoughts and the indignation of that age. It was between those historic walls that I began to understand things, form affections, lay up a store of memories and a fund of sensations with which I was to break violently by throwing myself into an unrelated life which permitted me but seldom to look back that way. The wings of time were spread over all this, and I feared at first that if I ventured bodily in there I would find that I who have evoked so many imaginary lives had been embracing mere shadows in my youth. I feared. But fear in itself may become a fascination. Men have gone alone, trembling, into graveyards at midnight--just to see what would happen. And this adventure was to be pursued in sunshine. Neither would it be pursued alone. The invitation was extended to us all. This journey would have something of a migratory character, the invasion of a tribe. My present, all that gave solidity and value to it at any rate, would stand by me in this test of the reality of my past. I was pleased to show my companions what Polish country life was like and the town where I was at school, before my boys got too old, and gaining an individual past of their own should lose the fresh sympathies of their age. It is only in this short understanding of youth that perhaps we have the faculty of coming out of ourselves to see dimly the visions and share the trouble of another soul. For youth all is reality, and with justice; since they can apprehend so vividly its images behind which a longer life makes one doubt whether there is any substance. I trusted to the fresh receptivity of these young beings in whom, unless heredity is merely a phantasy, there should have been fibre which would quicken at the sight, the atmosphere, the memories, of that corner of the earth where my own boyhood received its first independent impressions. The first of the third week in July, while the telegraph wires hummed with the words of enormous import which were to fill blue-books, yellow-books, white-books and rouse the wonder of the world, was taken up with light-hearted preparation for the journey. What was it but just a rush through Germany to get over as quickly as possible?