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I cannot picture to myself, in my after-knowledge of the bookselling trade, any enterprise more futile in its inception or more feeble in its execution; but to my youthful ambition the actual commission to write a novel, with an advance payment of fifty shillings to show good faith on the part of my Yorkshire speculator, seemed like the opening of that pen-and-ink paradise which I had sighed for ever since I could hold a pen.
This is hardly the place to dwell upon the amount of knowledge acquired from birth to five years of age; yet when you consider how the mind is reaching in every direction, appropriating, investigating, drawing conclusions which are the foundation of all our after-knowledge, you will see that the brain is working with an intensity never afterwards equaled; and, as brain-work means actual destruction of brain-fiber, how vital it is that food should be furnished in the right ratio, and made up of the right elements!
You can also imagine my wonder when by following out the plan I have indicated, the subjoined sentences appeared, which, if somewhat incoherent at times as could only be expected from the limited means at his command certainly convey a decided meaning, especially after receiving the punctuation and capital letters, which, after long study and some after-knowledge of affairs, I have ventured upon giving them: "My sin is ever before me.
Thus much however, he learned aright, that I had been in the Doone valley several years before, and might be brought upon strong inducement to venture there again. But as to the mode of my getting in, the things I saw, and my thoughts upon them, he not only failed to learn the truth, but certified himself into an obstinacy of error, from which no after-knowledge was able to deliver him.
I say "unfortunately," because after-knowledge makes it highly probable that they were the celebrated Charhkan musk-melons, famous far and wide for their exquisite flavor; the variety can be grown elsewhere, but, strange to say, the peculiar, delicate flavor which makes them so celebrated is absent when they vegetate anywhere outside this particular locality.
Nothing is plainer than the evidence that nobody present has the slightest conception of what I want to do, or where I wish to go. As a matter of fact, there is no "road," and the best anyone could do would be to point out its direction in a general way. All this, however, comes with after-knowledge.
The house cried out to me for help. In the after-knowledge I now possess of what was to happen there, that impression is not more clearly definite than it was at my first sight of the place. Let me at once set down that this is not the story of a haunted house.
After long ages of blindness, men are at last seeing that the spontaneous activity of the observing faculties in children has a meaning and a use. What was once thought mere purposeless action, or play, or mischief, as the case might be, is now recognised as the process of acquiring a knowledge on which all after-knowledge is based.
"God is eternal," says a fine French apothegm, "but man is very old." And very new. Mary O'Halloran was perfect Young-Australian. To describe her from after-knowledge she was a very creature of the phenomena which had environed her own dawning intelligence. She was a child of the wilderness, a dryad among her kindred trees.
No doubt the great care taken of this venerable vegetable will ensure its surviving for another century at least. Now you will be wondering what all this after-knowledge about the dragon-tree of Oritava has to do with Ben Brace, myself, or the trees that had fixed our attention on the plain. I shall tell you then what it has to do with us.
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