Then I read hard for a few months at physical science--at Zoology and
Botany, and threw it aside again in bitterness of heart. It was too bitter
to be tantalized with the description of Nature's wondrous forms, and I
there a prisoner between those four white walls.
Then I set to work to write an autobiography--at least to commit to paper
in regular order the most striking incidents and conversations which I
could recollect, and which I had noted down as they occurred in my diary.
From that source I have drawn nearly the whole of my history up to this
point. For the rest I must trust to memory--and, indeed, the strange deeds
and sufferings, and yet stranger revelations, of the last few months, have
branded themselves deep enough upon my brain. I need not hope, or fear,
that aught of them should slip my memory.
* * * * *
So went the weary time. Week after week, month after month, summer after
summer, I scored the days off, like a lonely school boy, on the pages of a
calendar; and day by day I went to my window, and knelt there, gazing at
the gable and the cedar-tree.
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