My Polotzk I knew well before I began to judge it and experiment with it.

America was bewilderingly strange, unimaginably complex, delightfully unexplored.
I rushed impetuously out of the cage of my provincialism and looked eagerly about the brilliant universe.

My question was, What have we here ?--not, What does this mean?
That query came much later.

When I now become retrospectively introspective, I fall into the predicament of the centipede in the rhyme, who got along very smoothly until he was asked which leg came after which, whereupon he became so rattled that he couldn't take a step.

I know I have come on a thousand feet, on wings, winds and American machines,--I have leaped and run and climbed and crawled,--but to tell which step came after which I find a puzzling matter.