The One I Knew the Best of All

The One I Knew the Best of All Synopsis

Excerpt from The One I Knew the Best of All: A Memory of the Mind of a Child

I should feel a serious delicacy in present ing to the world a sketch so autobiographical as this if I did not feel myself absolved from any charge of the bad taste of personality by the fact that I believe I might fairly entitle it The Story of any Child with an Imagination. My impres sion is that the Small Person differed from a world of others only in as far as she had more or less imagination than other little girls. I have so often wished that I could see the minds of young things with asight stronger than that-of very interested eyes, which can only see from the outside. There must be so many thoughts for which child courage and child language have not the exact words. So, remembering that there was one child of whom I could write from the inside point of View, and with certain knowledge, I began to make a little sketch of the one I knew the best of all. It wasonly to be a short sketch in my first intention, but when I began it I found so much to record which seemed to me amusing and illustrative, that the short sketch became a long one. After all, it was not myself about whom I was being diffuse, but a little unit of whose parallels there are tens of thousands. The Small Person is gone to that un discoverable far-away land where other Small Persons have emigrated - the land to whose re gretted countries there wandered, some years ago, two little fellows, with picture faces and golden love-locks, whom I have mourned and longed for ever since, and whose going - with my kisses on their little mouths - has left me forever a sadder woman, as all other mothers are sadder, whatso ever the dearness of the maturer creature left be hind to bear the same name and smile with eyes not quite the same. As I might write freely about them, so I feel I may write freely about her.

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