Cunningly was the entrance to this nest
contrived: I doubt if anyone may have found it yet. If some
imaginative, dreamy boy has come upon it, what a find it must have
been to him! I could envy him the pleasure. There I always went to
say my prayers and read my bible. But sometimes The Arabian Nights,
or some other book of entrancing human invention, would come
between, and make me neglect both, and then I would feel bad and
forsaken;--for as yet I knew little of the heart to which I cried
for shelter and warmth and defence.
"Somewhere in this time at length, I began to feel dissatisfied,
even displeased with myself. At first the feeling was vague,
altogether undefined--a mere sense that I did not fit into things,
that I was not what I ought to be, what was somehow and by the
Authority required of me. This went on, began to gather roots rather
than send them out, grew towards something more definite. I began to
be aware that, heavy affliction as it was to be made so different
from my fellows, my outward deformity was but a picture of my inward
condition. There nothing was right. Many things which in theory I
condemned, and in others despised, were yet a part of myself, or, at
best, part of evil disease cleaving fast unto me.
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