A CHILD OF THE AGE
I
I
At some time in my earliest childhood I must, I think, have lived near a wind-mill: for I have, every now and then, ever since I can remember, seen one in the middle of a tender yellowy-golden band of sunset on a sandy elevation. Somewhere, perhaps below in the house in which I am, a canary, cageless, with upward-throbbing throat, sings.
And then I know a darker vision: a darker vision of a slanting planked floor, with an uncertain atmosphere therein, and a sound from thereout, as of a ship on the sea. A dim-rayed lamp oscillates in the middle. A woman is up in one of the berths, soothing and giving suck to a baby fractious with sleep and misery. In the far corner is a huddled tartan-petticoated lump-round, with two protruding bare knees—a child unkempt, dirty, miserable, afraid of some heavy coming footstep. I know in some way that I am the child.
And then comes yet another vision, but lighter, and in a broader scene. A red-cheeked woman rolls a perambulator and a quiet little boy down a cindery path in the shine of a moist sunset. They stop by a grey, sweating, barred gate. (There are four or five bars: not less.) In a little, the boy struggles out from the tarpaulin of the perambulator on to the clammy earth: crosses the tall wet rank grasses: climbs on to the gate, and looks at a band of tender yellowy-gold down by the horizon, which is to him a new revelation of his earliest dreams. For on that day that tender yellowy-gold band and far sky of light seem to him to contain
