_From Clement Hazeldine to Hermia Rivers_. "In the course of our many talks together, you have more than once confided to me certain details of your earliest impressions and recollections. What I now want you to do is, to shut your eyes and go back in memory to those early days, and then to write down in detail, and with careful minuteness, everything you can call to mind about your childhood previously to your adoption by Uncle John and Aunt Charlotte. I am afraid that all you can tell me will amount to very little, but I want the information in question for a certain purpose, about which I may have more to tell you by-and-bye. Meanwhile, I shall await your reply with as much patience--or as little--as Providence has seen fit to endow me with." _From Hermia Rivers to Clement Hazeldine_. "You are quite right in your assumption that anything I may be able to tell you of my earliest recollections will amount to very little. Until I heard from Uncle John the story of his adoption of me, I had no absolute knowledge of any existence apart from, or prior to, my life with him and Aunt Charlotte. It is true that I seemed to remember certain people and certain incidents with whom or which uncle and aunt seemed to be in no way mixed up, although there was nothing to prove to me that I was not living under uncle's roof at the time to which they referred. Indeed, so shadowy were they that at times there came over me a doubt as to whether they had any basis of fact whatever; and in any case they lived in my recollections as so many faded pictures, which each year that passed tended to render dimmer and more indistinct; and there is little question that had it not been for what Uncle John told me they would by-and-bye have vanished utterly from my memory. "Uncle John, as you are aware, had no information to give me beyond the fact that, after he had arranged to adopt me, I was taken to his house one evening after dark by a respectable-looking, middle-aged woman, who, judging from her appearance, might be the wife of a well-to-do mechanic. Uncle asked no questions and the woman proffered no statement. She was not more than five minutes in the house, and he never saw her again. "Well, Uncle John's statement threw me back upon myself, so to speak. Again and again I went over my confused and half-forgotten recollections, striving to piece them together, and bring them into clearer relief, but to very little purpose, I'm afraid. However, I will now proceed to sketch for you in outline the three incidents, if I may term them such, which stand out most definitely in my memory as evidently pertaining to a time which I now know must have been anterior to that of my adoption.