"Listen, my children.

Many years ago a great shame and sorrow fell upon me, so great a sorrow that, as I sometimes think, it affected my brain.

At any rate, I determined to do what most men would have considered the act of a madman, to go far away into the wilderness with my only child, there to live remote from civilization and its evils.

I did so; I found this place, and here we have lived for many years, happily enough, and perhaps not without doing good in our generation, but still in a way unnatural to our race and status.

At first I thought I would let my daughter grow up in a state of complete ignorance, that she should be Nature's child.