sometimes, but the church-people and Sunday-school children were generally kind to the homeless little boy. He had some faint idea of death. He saw a dead baby in a little coffin. He was told that it could not eat, drink, or speak, and so it would go into the ground and never, never come back home. Again, he was told that he would get sick and go down into the ground. He got angry. He said that he would go up to the sky where his moon-mother wanted him.
Mr. d'Estrella's autobiographic letter to me runs as follows:
The history of my parents is a very little known. I never saw my father. He was a French-Swiss. My mother — a native of Mexico — died when I was five years old. Then I had no other living relative known to me. It is about seven years ago when I first learned that I had one aunt and two cousins yet living. I am now forty years old.
I was born quite deaf. However, I have been able to hear a little in the left ear only. About eight years ago my ears were examined, and it was said that the external ear and the drum as well as the nerves going to the brain were perfect, but the trouble was the inner ear or the mechanism of the internal ear. Suppose, if I were not born deaf, it must then be that I became deaf somehow in my infancy. My two friends who saw me in my infancy said that I was not born deaf. They remembered that everybody would speak to me, and I should immediately turn towards them. The doctors attributed my deafness to a fall or fright. I cannot see that either the fall or the fright had anything to do with my deafness. It is said that those who are born deaf never hear in their dreams. I am strongly subjected to dreams, but I never heard any sound in my dreams until once in 1880. Since then I had not heard again till 1890. Later, since, I have heard three times — making up five times in all my life hitherto. However I do not believe that fact, because I know that a good many deaf mutes who lost their hearing at five or six years have never heard in their dreams.
The first recollection is that I cried. I think I was four years old then. One morning my mother left me alone for the first time in a room and locked the door. I was afraid because I had never remained alone in a closed room. So I cried. She came back in soon and ran laughing to me. She comforted and caressed me with kisses of love. This only is all what I can think instinctively of a mother's love. Probably the next recollection is one of the few I have cherished through years of memory. I remember it as though this had occurred yesterday. While walking one sunny Sunday morning with my mother to a Catholic convent, it took me by surprise when I heard the bell tolling. Rapture seized me at once. I cried joyfully. Then I felt a dreamy, wandering sensation amid the bustle of the people. Even after the good bell ceased tolling, the vibrations continued ringing in my over-excited brain for awhile. Often do I think of this undying recollection — sometimes with awe, sometimes with delight. When I think of it, I feel as though I were actually hearing the bell toll — toll slowly and sweetly. Even, while writing this part, I feel apparently paralyzed in my senses as if my soul were giving way to the mesmeric spell of the very recollection.
