Chapters from My Autobiography | Page 9

rude, unsensitive animals, but it is not so in all cases.
Each boy has one or two sensitive spots, and if you can find out where
they are located you have only to touch them and you can scorch him
as with fire. I suffered miserably over that episode. I expected that the
facts would be all over the village in the morning, but it was not so.
The secret remained confined to the two girls and Sandy and me. That
was some appeasement of my pain, but it was far from sufficient--the
main trouble remained: I was under four mocking eyes, and it might as
well have been a thousand, for I suspected all girls' eyes of being the
ones I so dreaded. During several weeks I could not look any young
lady in the face; I dropped my eyes in confusion when any one of them
smiled upon me and gave me greeting; and I said to myself, "That is
one of them," and got quickly away. Of course I was meeting the right
girls everywhere, but if they ever let slip any betraying sign I was not
bright enough to catch it. When I left Hannibal four years later, the
secret was still a secret; I had never guessed those girls out, and was no
longer expecting to do it. Nor wanting to, either.
One of the dearest and prettiest girls in the village at the time of my
mishap was one whom I will call Mary Wilson, because that was not
her name. She was twenty years old; she was dainty and sweet,
peach-bloomy and exquisite, gracious and lovely in character, and I
stood in awe of her, for she seemed to me to be made out of angel-clay
and rightfully unapproachable by an unholy ordinary kind of a boy like
me. I probably never suspected her. But--
The scene changes. To Calcutta--forty-seven years later. It was in 1896.
I arrived there on my lecturing trip. As I entered the hotel a divine
vision passed out of it, clothed in the glory of the Indian sunshine--the
Mary Wilson of my long-vanished boyhood! It was a startling thing.
Before I could recover from the bewildering shock and speak to her she
was gone. I thought maybe I had seen an apparition, but it was not so,
she was flesh. She was the granddaughter of the other Mary, the
original Mary. That Mary, now a widow, was up-stairs, and presently
sent for me. She was old and gray-haired, but she looked young and
was very handsome. We sat down and talked. We steeped our thirsty
souls in the reviving wine of the past, the beautiful past, the dear and

lamented past; we uttered the names that had been silent upon our lips
for fifty years, and it was as if they were made of music; with reverent
hands we unburied our dead, the mates of our youth, and caressed them
with our speech; we searched the dusty chambers of our memories and
dragged forth incident after incident, episode after episode, folly after
folly, and laughed such good laughs over them, with the tears running
down; and finally Mary said suddenly, and without any leading up--
"Tell me! What is the special peculiarity of smoked herrings?"
It seemed a strange question at such a hallowed time as this. And so
inconsequential, too. I was a little shocked. And yet I was aware of a
stir of some kind away back in the deeps of my memory somewhere. It
set me to musing--thinking--searching. Smoked herrings. Smoked
herrings. The peculiarity of smo.... I glanced up. Her face was grave,
but there was a dim and shadowy twinkle in her eye which--All of a
sudden I knew! and far away down in the hoary past I heard a
remembered voice murmur, "Dey eats 'em guts and all!"
"At--last! I've found one of you, anyway! Who was the other girl?"
But she drew the line there. She wouldn't tell me.
FOOTNOTE:
[4] That house still stands.
IV.
... But it was on a bench in Washington Square that I saw the most of
Louis Stevenson. It was an outing that lasted an hour or more, and was
very pleasant and sociable. I had come with him from his house, where
I had been paying my respects to his family. His business in the Square
was to absorb the sunshine. He was most scantily furnished with flesh,
his clothes seemed to fall into hollows as if there might be nothing
inside but the frame for a sculptor's statue. His long face and lank hair
and dark complexion and musing and melancholy expression seemed to
fit these details justly and harmoniously, and the altogether of it seemed

especially planned to gather the rays of your observation and