4 MEMOIR OF GEORGE WILSON. CHAP. T. 



tell, but, undoubtedly, impressions for life were made during 

 those years. At five lie perhaps learned the first lesson of death 

 and immortality when his baby sister slept her last sleep ; and 

 as he had attained the age of seven when the sister of four 

 years, and the brother of one, were taken away within two 

 months of each other, he was capable of realizing much that our 

 Heavenly Father only teaches in those hours of darkness. In 

 manhood and later years, he occasionally alluded to them in 

 such a thrilling way, as made one feel that through all his life 

 they had been present with him ; but, evidently, the topic was 

 one not to be dwelt upon. " I saw," he wrote in the last year 

 of his life, "in early childhood or boyhood, so many little 

 brothers and sisters die, that the darkness of those scenes, and 

 the anguish of father and mother, made an indelible impression 

 upon me." It was his belief that the human mind loses no 

 impression ever made on it, and that the events of infancy, 

 though they cannot be recalled, are not effaced, and will pro- 

 bably, like wonders revealed in a palimpsest, come up for review 

 in the future life. His friends will remember many a pleasant 

 wish for the autobiography of a baby, expressed both in public 

 and private. 1 It may be that the distress he ever felt, on hear- 

 ing of or witnessing suffering in young children, originated in 

 those early experiences. 



But though so soon reaping the benefits of a yoke borne in 

 youth, let it not be supposed that his was a gloomy childhood. 

 Far otherwise ; his keen susceptibilities were open to joy as fully 

 as to sorrow. His active, healthy frame, in boyish pursuits and 

 games with his brothers, made life itself a pleasure ; warm affec- 

 tions bound him closely to each one in the home circle ; his 

 mother's face was in his eyes the most sweet and beautiful the 



1 " I have always thought and even declared in my lectures, that the most won- 

 derful of all books would be the Autobiography of a Baby ; but since, I fear, that 

 you will not be able to coax either Freddy or Malcolm to make your fortune by writ- 

 ing it, I go on to suggest that in the life that is to come, our memory of the past will 

 go back over all our earthly reminiscences, not merely over all that ive grown folks 

 recall, but over all that we have forgotten, which is at present most vivid to your 

 dear bairns. We shall mount to the origin of our individual lives, and trace to their 

 dim beginnings our first conceptions of space and time, of our own individuality, 

 and of other existences ; of an inner consciousness and an outer universe." 



