The reverent feeling that I have for the place has been born, I believe, from my sea-faring life, with its long voyages to distant places and its dreary exiles during which I thought and dreamed of it constantly.
There is in particular one little grotto for which I have an especial affection: the memory of it has often, in times of depression and melancholy, during the years of weary exile heartened me.
After the angel Azrael had so cruelly passed our way, after reverses of many sorts, and during that sad term when I was a wanderer on the face of the earth, and my widowed mother and my aunt Claire were left alone in the beloved but deserted home that was almost as silent as a tomb, I experienced many a heartache as I thought of the dear hearthstone and of the things so familiar to my childhood that were doubtless going to ruin through neglect. I felt especially anxious to know if the storms of winter and the hands of time had destroyed the delicate arch of that grotto; and strange as it may seem, if those little moss-covered rocks had fallen in I would have felt that an almost irreparable breach had been made in my own life.
At the side of the pond there is an old gray wall which is an integral part of the corner that I call my Holy Mecca; I think it is the very centre of the sacred place, and I recall the tiniest details of it. I can picture to myself the scarcely visible mosses that grow there, and the gaps made by time, which the spiders now inhabit. Growing up at the back of the wall there is an arbor of ivy and honeysuckles whose shade I sought daily every beautiful summer day for the purpose of studying my lessons. But I lounged there lazily, as a school-boy will, and allowed all my attention to be absorbed by those gray stones with their teeming world of insects. Not only do I love and venerate that old wall as the Moslems love their holiest mosque, but I regard it also as something which actually protects me; as something which conserves my life and prolongs my youth. I would not suffer any one to change it in the least, and should it be demolished I would feel as if the very supports under my life were insecure. May it not be because certain things persist, and are known to us throughout our lives, that we borrow from thence delusions in regard to our own stability and our own continuance. Seeing that they abide we suppose that we cannot change nor cease to be.
Personally I cannot explain these sentiments of mine in any other way than to regard them as some sort of fetich worship.
And when I consider that those stones are very like other stones, that they have been brought from I know not where, by whom I care not, to be built into a wall by workmen who lived and died a century before I was even thought of, I realize the childishness of the illusion, which I indulge in spite of myself, that it can extend any sort of spiritual protection to me; I comprehend only too well what a frail and unstable base has that that symbolizes for me the permanency of life.
Those who have never had a permanent home, but who have from infancy been taken from place to place, living in lodgings meantime, may not be able to appreciate these sentiments.
But among those who have daily gathered about the same hearthstone, there are, I am sure, many who, without confessing it, are susceptible in varying degrees to impressions of this sort. And do not such people often, because of an old stone wall, a garden known and loved since childhood, an old terrace which has become in indestructible part of their memory, or an old tree that has not changed form within their lives, seek a warrant for their own hope of immortality?
And doubtless, alas! before their birth these objects lent the same delusive countenance to others, to those unknown now turned to dust and gone to nothingness, who may not even have been of their blood and race.