CHAPTER XXII
BOYHOOD'S END
The book--The Saledero, or killing-grounds, and their smell--Walls
built of bullocks' skulls--A pestilential city--River water and Aljibe
water--Days of lassitude--Novel scenes--Home again--Typhus--My first
day out--Birthday reflections--What I asked of life--A boy's mind--A
brother's resolution--End of our thousand and one nights--A reading
spell--My boyhood ends in disaster.
This book has already run to a greater length than was intended;
nevertheless there must be yet another chapter or two to bring it to a
proper ending, which I can only find by skipping over three years of
my life, and so getting at once to the age of fifteen. For that was a
time of great events and serious changes, bodily and mental, which
practically brought the happy time of my boyhood to an end.
On looking back over the book, I find that on three or four occasions
I have placed some incident in the wrong chapter or group, thus making
it take place a year or so too soon or too late. These small errors of
memory are, however, not worth altering now: so long as the scene or
event is rightly remembered and pictured it doesn't matter much
whether I was six or seven, or eight years old at the time. I find,
too, that I have omitted many things which perhaps deserved a place in
the book--scenes and events which are vividly remembered, but which
unfortunately did not come up at the right moment, and so were left
out.
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