. . . I still feel a thrill when I think of that strange childhood of mine . . . I used to play there in those woods and beside that stream, in Holland; but sometimes I imagined that I was playing at pirates and highwaymen in America, or in the tropics. And in my childish imagination the whole Dutch landscape changed. It became a roaring river, with great boulders, from which the water fell foaming, and very dense, tropical foliage, such as I had seen in pictures; and great flowers, red and white, grew in the enormous trees. Then my fancy changed and I was no longer a pirate or robber, but became . . . an oriental prince. I don't know why I, a pure-bred Dutch boy, should have had that strange vision of the east, of something tropical, there, on those pine-covered hills and beside that little stream . . . It was always like that afterwards: the tropical landscape, the spreading cocoa-trees, the broad plantain-leaves and the huge flowers, white and red . . . and then I often thought, 'Now I will find her.' Whom I wanted to find I didn't know; but I would run down the hills and roam beside the little river and seek and seek . . . and my seeking for 'her' became strange and fantastic: I, an oriental, was seeking for a fairy, or a princess, I forget which. It seemed to me as if she were running there ahead of me, very white and fragile: a little child, as I was a child; a girl, as I was a boy; in white and decked with the flowers, white and red
