![Transcription Center logo](/themes/custom/tc_theme/assets/image/logo.png)
This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.
SADNESS. There comes back to me an impression of wind and snow sweeping round an old country house in Chestnut Hill. I am living there alone with my brother who is already afflicted with religious obsessions. Life in the house is peaceful, and St. Amar's long and gloomy prayers seem part of the natural order of things. But suddenly this quiet existence comes to an end and I am told that I must join my mother in town. I remember my departure taking on the proportions of a tragedy wherein figured a beloved cat. Then I found myself a small, unhappy participant of hotel-life in Philadelphia. I dreaded my mother's rooms filled with trunks, clothes, servants, and an angry voice ever making confusion [[crossed out]] worse [[/crossed out]] more confounded. I still recall the menacing wonder of a huge crystal chandelier which hung over me, full-lighted, long after I had been put to bed. My personal attendant was changed so often that she became anonymous and often absent. Soon I made my home in the public corridors of the hotel. Finding some quiet corner I would retreat there to draw cats, trees, and other country things to ease, no doubt, the sorrows of retrospection. There were my first drawings; I was about six years old at the time. One day, after I had arranged them on the floor, against the wall, my mother passed by. She stooped down and, looking at the collection, picked them up and carried them off to her room. I never saw them again, and from that time I was forbidden to draw. My reaction to this was very curious. Though terrified, I began to draw indiscriminately on all sort of objects - on my mother's