How many recollections crowded on her mind when it appeared in sight!
Two-and-twenty years. Her boy's whole life and history. The last time
she looked back upon those roofs among the trees, she carried him in her
arms, an infant. How often since that time had she sat beside him night
and day, watching for the dawn of mind that never came; how had she
feared, and doubted, and yet hoped, long after conviction forced itself
upon her! The little stratagems she had devised to try him, the little
tokens he had given in his childish way--not of dulness but of something
infinitely worse, so ghastly and unchildlike in its cunning--came back
as vividly as if but yesterday had intervened. The room in which they
used to be; the spot in which his cradle stood; he, old and elfin-like
in face, but ever dear to her, gazing at her with a wild and vacant
eye, and crooning some uncouth song as she sat by and rocked him; every
circumstance of his infancy came thronging back, and the most trivial,
perhaps, the most distinctly.
His older childhood, too; the strange imaginings he had; his terror of
certain senseless things--familiar objects he endowed with life; the
slow and gradual breaking out of that one horror, in which, before his
birth, his darkened intellect began; how, in the midst of all, she had
found some hope and comfort in his being unlike another child, and had
gone on almost believing in the slow development of his mind until he
grew a man, and then his childhood was complete and lasting; one after
another, all these old thoughts sprung up within her, strong after their
long slumber and bitterer than ever.
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