This recollection of her childhood by Lillian Smith was made orally on June 14, 1966 in Atlanta, Ga. She was seriously ill at the time, and that is why it took this form. She died on September 28 of the same year. The setting is Jasper, Fla. , where Miss Smith was born and where she lived until 1915. Her memories of Jasper were tape-recorded by Joan Titus, who is working on a biography of the Southern writer entitled Trembling Earth. Miss Smith's works include Strange Fruit and Killers of the Dream.

I was thinking of old days in Jasper this morning. It's funny how your mind goes back and stays and you don't realize it's there. You are planning things with your conscious mind and sometimes even reading a book; and yet this old memory is like a ghost just flitting around from the big camphor tree to the banana shrub, on to the big oak tree and the magnolia and so on. And suddenly I saw two little feet and one of them was mine and one of them was Marjorie's, and they were wiggling up and down in the sand and each of us was digging a hole with our hands but we were also half-digging with our toes and making what is called a toad-frog house. And we'd dig and dig and dig. This is strange land down there in North Florida. If you dig 12 or 14 inches you always come to very wet earth and sometimes even at six inches you do, so it's wonderful to play with.