It is right that I should explain this matter, so that my readers may judge how far they may place reliance on my narrative.
I do not know whether my experience in this matter is at all a common one with writers of reminiscences, but I have found that my memory is, on many occasions, subject to what seems to be a sort of 'illumination' or 'inspiration.' Thus, when I have fixed my mind on one, say, of the incidents recalled in these chapters, the scene has begun to unfold itself—perhaps slowly at first, but afterwards rapidly and clearly. Meditating upon it for a time, I have lifted my pen and begun to write. Then, to my surprise, the conversations, long buried or hidden somewhere in my memory, have come back to me, sometimes in the greatest fullness—word for word, as we say. Nay, not only the bare words, but the tones, the pauses, and the gestures of the speaker. The whole scene, in fact, with all that was at the time visible to (or at least noted by) the eye, and all that was heard or noted by the ear, has returned and rehearsed or repeated itself in my mind. Or, to put the experience in another and perhaps as true a way, my mind has been taken back—winged imaginatively across the gulf of years—to the actual occurrence, and I have seen and heard once more what I then saw and heard.
In writing, for example, the account given in the chapter 'A Red-Letter Day,' of our meeting on the cinder-heap, I was taken back, so to speak, to that Saturday afternoon thirty-two years ago, and lived over again its minutes and hours. I sat again with Morris in the train; I listened to the inebriated house-carpenter's chatter; I turned away shamefaced on the station platform, while Morris fulminated against the unlucky railway guard. I stood by the cinder-heap and listened to Morris give his address, hearing his voice and observing his mannerisms, watching the faces and hearing the occasional remarks of the audience, and noting the dreary surroundings of dismal
