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where there were green fields, and maybe a huge forest, and some dripping water. Maybe I am sentimental; but I should like to know that that's what she wanted to do while I was being created.
Finally I was born. That was rather bad for me. As there is a whole book written on the subject of how it feels to be born, I shall say nothing about it. At the time, I think it was worse for my mother than for me. Now she has entirely recovered from it, but I shall never recover.
I have been in the world two years. Until now I have held my peace. But my present circumstances have aroused me to make my first articulate revolt against tyranny. The fact is that every day when my mother goes to work I am taken to a nursery where I spend the best part of the day with a lot of other tiny children. I have funny things to lace up and button. I have good food to eat and plenty of sleep. In the evening some one takes me home and my mother plays with me a few minutes before I am put to bed.
This arrangement solves the problem of me for my mother. But how about my own problem? I do not mean to complain, but I must tell you that my radical tendencies make me abhor this way of disposing of me. I would much rather live in my own house where everything has a funny smell which seems good and companionable to me. I want my father to hold me on his lap while he reads one of his stories out loud so that his round dark voice drones in my ear and puts me to sleep. I want my mother nearly all the time I am awake. Just why, I cannot tell you. There is something peculiar about it. Every one needs a companion. A great big, soft, friendly, clean dog would do, but not so well as a friendly human being, and no human being so well as a mother.
In concluding this document I should like to state that I consider myself most courageous in performing the initial feat of bringing about my entry into the world. Although I never spoke of it, I knew all the time that I should have to undergo infinite experimentation in the way of being brought up and that every one would expect me, in spite of so much distraction, to be more radical than my mother.
I realized, also, that I should have to submit to limitations to which children of non-radicals do not have to bow. For example, if I am a boy (I am too young yet, by the Binet test, to know my