Adventures in Contentment

"I think," he said, "it hastened her death." He would not go to the funeral; he did not dare, he said. He cried and fought when they came to take him away, and when the house was silent he ran up to her room and buried his head in her pillows and ran in swift imagination to her funeral. He said he could see himself in the country road, hurrying in the cold rain--for it seemed raining--he said he could actually feel the stones and ruts, although he could not tell how it was possible that he should have seen himself at a distance and felt in his own feet the stones of the road. He said he saw the box taken from the wagon--saw it--and that he heard the sound of the clods thrown in, and it made him shriek until they came running and held him. As he grew older he said he came to live everything beforehand, and that the event as imagined was so far more vivid and affecting that he had no heart for the reality itself. "It seems strange to you," he said, "but I am telling you exactly what my experience was." It was curious, he said, when his father told him he must not do a thing, how he went on and imagined in how many different ways he could do it--and how, afterward, he imagined he was punished by that "worm," his father, whom he seemed to hate bitterly. Of those early days, in which he suffered acutely--in idleness, apparently--and perhaps that was one of the causes of his disorder--he told us at length, but many of the incidents were so evidently worn by the constant handling of his mind that they gave no clear impression.