Page:Following darkness (IA followingdarknes00reid).pdf/26

my fifteenth year. I had my secret world, too, where such adventures took place. Behind this inner, imaginative life must have lurked a vague dissatisfaction with life as I actually found it. Now and then I read something which appeared to me to describe my other world, and, as I chanced on such suggestions more frequently in verse than in prose, I became a great reader of poetry. The passages that echoed so familiarly, though so faintly, from my mysterious, lovely land, brought it up before me very much as the scent of a flower may call up a vision of a high-walled summer garden. Whether any reality lay behind it, I don’t know that I even asked myself; but, on drowsy summer afternoons, dream and reality would float and mingle together, and I would feel intensely happy.

As I write I would give much to be able to live over again one of those summer afternoons, when the air hung heavy with the scent of mignonette and roses, and Mrs. Carroll sat reading or working, while I lay in the grass on my back at her feet, and the low sound of the sea splashed through the silence of my sleepy thoughts, and the booming of a bee was the slumberous soul of June or July heat turned to music. In those hours my other world was very, very near.

Afterwards I sometimes wondered if there were a place where those lived days were laid away, or if their beauty, happiness and peace, must be quite lost. They had a quality of peacefulness that for me no later days have had: I seemed to dip deep into their cleansing dreamy quiet, as into a clear sea.

Other dreams I had, that were not so pleasant, but they came only at night. One I still remember vividly was unfortunately typical of many. I seemed to be walking down a street with another boy, when our attention was attracted by the high, bare wall of a house. There was something, I know not what, about this house, which made