Down its moss-covered slopes my first steps of infancy were taken, and around its grotesquely gnarled oak trees my first fancies of boyhood were woven. Close by my home there lies a singular wooded hollow, in whose twilight deeps I spent most of my time reading, thinking, and dreaming. This no human creature may do for lacking the fellowship of the living, he inevitably draws upon the companionship of things that are not, or are no longer, living. I have said that I dwelt apart from the visible world, but I have not said that I dwelt alone. It is sufficient for me to relate events without analysing causes. I do not think that what I read in these books or saw in these fields and groves was exactly what other boys read and saw there but of this I must say little, since detailed speech would but confirm those cruel slanders upon my intellect which I sometimes overhear from the whispers of the stealthy attendants around me. Wealthy beyond the necessity of a commercial life, and temperamentally unfitted for the formal studies and social recreations of my acquaintances, I have dwelt ever in realms apart from the visible world spending my youth and adolescence in ancient and little-known books, and in roaming the fields and groves of the region near my ancestral home. My name is Jervas Dudley, and from earliest childhood I have been a dreamer and a visionary. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism. It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience. In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative.

The witch elm novel