John Sherwood Ironmaster - 1911 Author:Silas Weir Mitchell Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: n I SHOULD care little to dwell on my childhood were it not that its peculiar conditions and singular social isolation from other young lives left me long wit... more »hout the contradictions and discipline which come out of normal relation to other beings as young as I and of other mental make. I was fortunate in that it did not make me more peculiar, but I am sure that the unusual character of my young life did to some extent affect my later years. I was an only child and a very lonely child. When is it that we begin to acquire permanent memories? There are mysterious years and at last remembrances of scenes and people with long unfilled gaps and then more distinctly-remembered scenes. The first I now recall impressed me strangely. I see my cousin, a tall, well-made woman, settling a dispute between the baker and our cook. The bill paid weekly was based on the agreement of two tallies, thin laths of wood notched for each loaf by the baker's file when laid together. There was some disagreement. My cousin was angry. I was wondering that anyone ventured to contradict her seeing that she was so big and the baker so small, when Iwas told to go into the garden. I went out as ordered to amuse myself in the hundred feet of flowers and grass plots under the peach and apricot trees which bore delicious and forbidden fruit. Other scenes recur to me, but generally it was this playground and as I became older, when five or six years of age, dull afternoon walks, duller visits to St. Peter's church and overwhelming sleepiness when Euphemia read to me child stories of a morning. My cousin had no idea of fitting the book to my age or sex. When I should have had "Jack and the Bean-stalk" I was dosed with Sanford and Mer- ton—worst of all was a small volume called "Blossoms of Morality." These rea...« less