Excerpt from A Kentucky Cardinal and Aftermath

HE first thing in life that I can remember is the fact of being caught up into somebody's arms and of owning a blue tumbler.

Possibly when that gigantic person - who ever it was' seized °me by my two handles, I seized my tumbler by its one handle; and thus the glass and the caress stayed bound together in my memory as parts of the same commotion. But I can never evoke these ill-assorted beginnings of all conscious recol lection without being also obliged to think of a pump on a slippery hill with a brick pavement around it: and a pump and a tumbler and being suddenly snatched of? The earth suggest some true story of the times. But, then' again, it is impossible x1to recall the image of this pump without instantly dragging into View the head and shoulders of a smiling school - teacher, who held me in his arms and who had the power to give away sweet morsels - on that occa sion; and why be should appear so early in the procession of small knowledge - indeed, at the azoic head of it may be a secret not worth discovering, but it is at least quite certain that no one will ever discover it. Most likely, these several things, which are now beheld as compressed into a single scene and instant, existed far apart through time and place. A year arrived when caresses began to be conscious experience; in another I entered upon the ownership of a cerulean mug; during a third my explorations of the physical world extended to the pump in the yard - for one stood there; on some day of a fourth I may have been led across the woods to the school-house on the mud road - perhaps some Friday afternoon, when it was customary to have spelling matches, or dialogues and speeches, and when parents x11came and refreshments - the arrival of the refreshments being much more important than that of the parents. Be the truth as it may, the matters set down above are all that I can remember on my own account about my birthplace and my earliest years. They are filaments of the obscurest algae, gathered around the coasts of that dim, deep sea which is a child's mind and now resembling nothing so much as a barely traceable bunch of out lines pressed on one small card.

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