It was this unobservance of actual features, I imagine, which made me
think all gray-haired people alike, and find a difficulty in recognizing
those who called, except generically as callers--people who kissed me,
and whom therefore I liked to see.
One, I remember, for no reason unless because she had a brown face, I
mistook from a distance for my Aunt Dolly, and bounded into the room
where she was sitting, with a cry of rapture. And it was my earliest
conscious test of politeness, when I found out my mistake, not to cry over
it in the kind but very inferior presence to that one I had hoped for.
I suppose, also, that many sights which have no meaning to children go,
happily, quite out of memory; and that what our early years leave for us
in the mind's lavender are just the tit-bits of life, or the first blows
to our intelligence--things which did matter and mean much.
Corduroys come early into my life,--their color and the queer earthy
smell of those which particularly concerned me: because I was picked up
from a fall and tenderly handled by a rough working-man so clothed, whom
I regarded for a long time afterward as an adorable object. He and I
lived to my recognition of him as a wizened, scrubby, middle-aged man,
but remained good friends after the romance was over. I don't know when
the change in my sense of beauty took place as regards him.
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