He saw himself seated on a small wooden horse fastened to a little platform with wheels under it. The horse was black with white spots, and possessed a nobly curved neck, a head with ears on top of it, and a pair of fiercely red nostrils.
The next thing recurring to his mind was a sense of swift, exhilarating movement. His father stood at one end of the living-room, his mother at the other, and the horse with himself on it was being pushed rapidly back and forth between them.
He could even hear his own joyous shouts as his father sent the horse careering across the floor by an extra strong push. The general impression left behind by the whole scene was one of happiness so acute that nothing else in his life compared with it.
Was it a real memory? If so, when did it happen? And what had become of the horse?
Finally the pressure from within became too strong and he blurted out the whole story to his mother in order to make sure of what it meant.
"You never had a horse large enough to sit on," she declared emphatically.
"You have been dreaming, child," Granny put in.
"What would the neighbours below have said," his mother continued. "And the rag carpets on the floor would have caught the wheels, anyhow."
Removing the rag carpets except for purposes of cleaning was one of the unforgivable sins, by the bye.
"And it isn't like your father either," Granny added after a while, not without a suggestion of bitterness in her voice.