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IV A BERSERKER RAGE—A FRIGHT-THE WESTERN FEVER— MONTROSE—A MOTHER REGAINED Up to this point of my story, what I have written is hearsay. With the awakening recorded in the last chapter, my real reminiscences begin. The next vivid impression upon my plastic memory has its setting in the McQuie yard. My mother had been to Richmond on a visit and brought back, as a present from a woman who was said to be "good," a doll for my sister. Perhaps she considered me too young to be intrusted with the keeping of the rare creation of wax and real hair. Perhaps she did not recollect my existence. In either case, as I promptly settled within myself, she was not the good woman of my mother's painting. Not that I had ever cared for "dead dolls." When I could just put the wish into words, my craving was for a "real, live, skin baby that could laugh and talk." But this specimen was so nearly alive that it opened its eyes when one pulled a wire concealed by the satin petticoat, and shut them at another tweak. Moreover, the (alleged) good woman in the beautiful city I heard as much of as of heaven, had sent my sister the gift, and none to me. Furthermore, and worst of all, my sister paraded the gift before my angry, miserable eyes, and, out of my mother's hearing, taunted me with the evident fact that "nobody cared for a little girl whose hands were dirty and whose hair was never smooth." I was barely three years old.My sister was a prodigy of learning in the estimation of our acquaintances, and nearer six than five. I took in the case with extraordinary clearness of judgment and soreness of heart, and meditated revenge. Watching an opportunity when mother, nurse, and sister were out ofthe way, I stole into the office-cottage, possessed myself of the hated puppet, who had been put int...