And I could never go to sleep until I had said a long prayer in which I commended myself to the mercy of my Saviour.
I do not believe there was ever a little child who had a more sensitive conscience than I; about everything I was so morbidly scrupulous that I was often misunderstood by those who loved me best, a thing that caused me the most poignant heartaches.

I remember having been tormented for days merely because in relating something I had not reported it precisely as it had happened.

And to such a point did I carry my squeamishness of conscience that when I had finished with my recital or statement I would murmur in a low voice, in the tone of one who tells over his beads, these words: "After all, perhaps I do not remember just exactly how it was." When I think of the thousand remorses and fears which my trifling wrong doings caused me, and which from my sixth to my eighth year cast a gloom over my childhood, I feel a sort of retrospective depression.
At that period if any one asked me what I hoped to be in the future, when a man, without hesitation I would answer: "I expect to be a minister,"-- and to me the religious vocation seemed the very grandest one.

And those about me would smile and without doubt they thought, inasmuch as I too wished it, that it was the best career for me.
In the evening, especially at night, I meditated constantly of that hereafter which to pronounce the name of filled me with terror: eternity.

And my departure from this earth,--this earth which I had scarcely seen, of which I had seen no more than the tiniest and most colorless corner--seemed to me a thing very near at hand.