"
There was a loving pride of country about this person's way of speaking
which annoyed me. I had long been unused to the sound of it in my own.
The Gondour national airs were forever dinning in my ears; therefore I
was glad to leave that country and come back to my dear native land,
where one never hears that sort of music.
A MEMORY,
When I say that I never knew my austere father to be enamoured of but one
poem in all the long half century that he lived, persons who knew him
will easily believe me; when I say that I have never composed but one
poem in all the long third of a century that I have lived, persons who
know me will be sincerely grateful; and finally, when I say that the poem
which I composed was not the one which my father was enamoured of,
persons who may have known us both will not need to have this truth shot
into them with a mountain howitzer before they can receive it. My father
and I were always on the most distant terms when I was a boy--a sort of
armed neutrality so to speak. At irregular intervals this neutrality was
broken, and suffering ensued; but I will be candid enough to say that the
breaking and the suffering were always divided up with strict
impartiality between us--which is to say, my father did the breaking, and
I did the suffering.
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