The other scenes of the drama came also fitfully to John’s mind from time to time--the back parlour where he was sent to play with his bricks, and then Robinson Crusoe, and the trouble in his mind lest the savages should have got papa; and then that strange silent spectacle of the lighted court with the judges sitting (as he knew now) and the little sugar-plums sprinkled upon the bread and butter; and then the old people coming to dinner, and grandmamma crying and grandfather with his ‘tchick, tchick,’ and the shandry in which he was carried away, with Betty crying and Susie waving her hand, and mamma neither smiling nor weeping (always so like Emily!) at the open door; and the impression through everything that nothing was to be said before the boy. All this was as distinct in his mind as it ever had been--which perhaps was not saying much: for all was misty with childhood, imperfect in outline, running into such wildernesses of ignorance on either side; but yet so very certain, never forgotten, always at the same point. His mind varied upon matters of every day, and he got to see what happened last year in a different light after passing through the experiences of this year. But nothing changed for him those early scenes, they were beyond the action of experience. They were the same to him at sixteen as they had been when they happened--misty, incomprehensible, yet quite certain and true. He was the son of his grandparents, as has been said. He was like a boy who had never had either father or mother when he set out upon the active way of his life. And how he came to work in that early drama of the beginning, with all the later incidents, and how he was affected by it for good and evil, has now to be shown in the story of John Sandford, who was his father’s son, though he knew nothing of him, and did not even bear his name. CHAPTER III. HOW HE WAS TO BEGIN LIFE.