The perfume of the fur of the squirrel we skinned on that January evening—when Ann teased Philip about High Bower—I well remember. I liked it then; now I like it the more for every year which has since gone by. It was one of the years when I kept a diary, and day by day I can trace its seasons. The old year ended in frost and snow. The new year began with , and with a order from my aunt at Lydiard Constantine, and the purchase of three yards of cotton wool in readiness for the nesting season and our of eggs. On the next day snow fell again, in the evening the streets were ice, and at Abercorran House Philip and I made another drawer of a cabinet for birds’ eggs. Frost and snow continued on the morrow, compelling us to make a instead of a drawer for the cabinet. The sledge carried Philip and me alternately throughout the following day, over frozen roads and . The fifth day[281] was marked by a letter from Lydiard Constantine, eighteen degrees of frost, and more with Philip, and some kind of attention (that has left not a behind) to Sallust’s “Catiline”....  
Within a fortnight the pigeons were beginning to lay, and as one of the nests contained the four useless eggs of an imbecile pair of hens, we tasted thus early the pleasure of blowing one egg in the orthodox manner and sucking three. This being Septuagesima Sunday, nothing would satisfy us but an visit to Our Country, where the jays’ nests and others we had robbed seven months before were found with a thrill all but equal to that of May, and always examined in case of accidents or miracles. For there had now been a whole week of spring sun shining on our hearts, and on the plumage of the cock pheasant we stalked in vain. The thrush sang. The blackbird sang. With the of St Paul came rain, and moreover school, Thucydides, Shakespeare’s “Richard the Second,” and other unrealities and afflictions, wherein I had to prove again how vain it is “to the hungry edge of appetite by bare imagination of a feast” at old Gaunt’s command. But Quinquagesima Sunday meant rising in the dark and going out with Philip, to watch the jays,always ten yards ahead of our most stealthy stepping—to climb after old woodpigeons’ nests, to cut hazel sticks, to the of many skylarks. , a foot could not save me from school on Monday. But now the wild pigeons about the school began to coo all day long and to carry sticks for their nests. Out on the football field, in the bright pale light and the south-west wind the black rooks courted—and more; the jackdaws who generally accompanied them were absent somewhere. What then mattered it whether Henri Quatre or Louis Quatorze were the greatest of the Bourbon kings, as some of my school-fellows debated? Besides, when February was only half through, Aunt Rachel formally invited Philip and me to Lydiard Constantine for Easter. This broke the winter’s back. Frost and fog and Bright’s “History of England” were impotent. We began to write letters to the chosen three or four boys at Lydiard Constantine. We made, in the gas jets at Abercorran House, tubes of glass for the sucking of bird’s eggs. We bought egg drills. We made egg-drills for ourselves.... The cat had kittens. One pair of Higgs’ pigeons hatched out their eggs. The house-sparrows were building. The almond-trees blossomed in the gardens of[283] “Brockenhurst” and the other houses. The rooks now stayed in the football field until five. The sang all day, invisible in the strong sun and burning sky. The gorse was a bonfire of bloom. Then, at last, on St David’s day, the rooks were building, the woodpigeons cooing on every hand, the first lambs were heard.
 
Day after day left us indignant that, in spite of all temptations, no thrush or blackbird had laid an egg, so far as we knew. But all things seemed possible. One day, in a afternoon walk, we found, not far beyond a of new streets, a district “very beautiful and quiet,” says the diary. Losing our way, we had to hire a punt to take us across the stream—I suppose, the Wandle. Beautiful and quiet, too, was the night when Philip scaled the high railings into the grounds of a neighbouring institution, climbed one of the tall elms of its rookery—I could see him up against the sky, bigger than any of the nests, in the topmost boughs—and brought down the first egg. It was the Tuesday before an early Easter, a clear blue, soft day which drove clean out of our minds all thought of fog, frost, and rain, past or to come. Mr Stodham had come into the yard of Abercorran House on the way to his[284] office, as I had on my way to school. Finding Aurelius sitting in the sun with Ladas, he said in his , nervous way: “That’s right. You are making the best of a fine day. Goodness knows what it will be like to-morrow.” “And Goodness cares,” said Aurelius, almost angrily, “I don’t.” “Sorry, sorry,” said Mr Stodham, hastily his pipe. “All right,” said Aurelius, “but if you care about to-morrow, I don’t believe you really care about to-day. You are one of those people, who say that if it is not always fine, or fine when they want it, they don’t care if it is never fine, and be damned to it, say they. And yet they don’t like bad weather so well as I do, or as Jessie does. Now, rain, when it ought not to be raining, makes Jessie angry, and if the day were a man or woman she would come to terms with it, but it isn’t, and what is more, Jessie rapidly gets sick of being angry, and as likely as not she sings ‘Blow away the morning dew,’ and finds that she likes the rain. She has been listening to the talk about rain by persons who want to save Day and Martin. I prefer Betty Martin.... Do you know, Arthur tells me the house martins will soon be here?” We looked up together to see if it was a martin that both of us had heard, or seemed to hear, overhead, but, if it was, it was invisible.
 
Every year such days came—any time in Lent, or even before. I take it for granted that, as an historical fact, they were followed, as they have been in the twentieth century, by fog, frost, mists, , rain, , snow, east wind, and north wind, and I know very well that we resented these things. But we loved the sun. We strove to it in imagination through the bad weather, believing in every kind of illusory hint that the rain was going to stop, and so on. Moreover rain had its merits. For example, on a Sunday, it kept the roads nearly as quiet as on a week day, and we could have Our Country, or Richmond Park, or Wimbledon Common, all to ourselves. Then, again, what a thing it was to return wet, with a rainy brightness in your eyes, to change rapidly, to run round to Abercorran House, and find Philip and Ann expecting you in the kitchen, with a gooseberry , currant tart, raspberry tart, plum tart, blackberry tart, and apple tart, apple tart, according to season; and mere jam or tart in the blank periods. My love of mud also I trace to that age, because Philip and I could escape all company by turn[286]ing out of a first class road into the black of a lane. If we met anyone there, it was a carter contending with the mud, a tramp sitting between the bank and a fire, or a bird-catcher beyond the hedge.
 
If the lane was both muddy and new to us, and we two, Philip and I, turned into it, there was nothing which we should have thought out of its power to present in half a mile or so, nothing which it would have overmuch astonished us by presenting. It might have been a Gypsy camp, it might have been the terrestrial Paradise of Sheddad the son of Ad—we should have fitted either into our scheme of the universe. Not that we were blasé; for every new thrush’s egg in the season had a new charm for us. Not that we had been flightily by fairy tales and . No: the reason was that we only regarded as impossible such things as a score of 2000 in first class cricket, an air ship, or the like; and the class of improbabilities did not exist for us. Nor was this all. We were not merely ready to welcome strange things when we had walked half a mile up a lane and met no man, but we were in a gracious condition for receiving whatever might fall to us. We did not go in search of miracles, we invited[287] them to come to us. What was familiar to others was never, on that account, tedious or to us. I remember that when Philip and I first made our way through London to a shop which was in an advertisement, in spite of the crowds on either hand all along our route, in spite of the full directions of our elders, we were as much elated by our achievement as if it had been an discovery made after a journey in a desert. In our there was some suspicion that our experience had been secret, , and unique. As to the crowd, we through it as angels might. This building, expected by us and known to all, astonished us as much as the walls of Sheddad the son of Ad unexpectedly towering would have done.
 
Sometimes in our rare London travels we had a glimpse of a side street, a row of silent houses all combined as it were into one gray palace, a dark , a gorgeous window, a surprising man disappearing.... We looked, and though we never said so, we believed that we alone had seen these things, that they had never been seen before. We should not have expected to see them there if we went again. Many and many a time have we looked, have[288] I alone in more recent years looked, for certain things thus revealed to us in passing. Either it happened that the thing was different from what it had once been, or it had disappeared altogether.
 
Now and then venturing down a few side streets where the system was rectangular and of deceiving, we came on a church full of sound or gloomily silent—I do not know how to describe the calm and pride in the minds of the discoverers. Some of the very quiet, uninhabited courts, for example, made us feel that corners of London had been and forgotten, that anyone could hide away there, living in as in a grave. Knowing how we ourselves, walking or talking together, grew of all things that were not within our brains, or and desirably before our eyes, feeling ourselves in proud delight, deserted and forgotten of the multitude who were not us, we imagined, I suppose, that houses and other things could have a similar experience, or could share it with us, were we to seek refuge there like Morgan in his mountain tower. The crowd passing and surrounding us consisted of beings unlike us, incapable of our or delight: the[289] houses whispering in quiet must be the haunt of spirits unlike the crowd and more like us, or, if not, at least they must be waiting in readiness for such. I recognised in them something that linked them to Abercorran House and them from Brockenhurst.
 
Had these favoured houses been outwardly as as they were in spirit they might have pleased us more, but I am not certain. Philip had his house with the windows that were as the days of the year. But I came only once near to seeing, with outward eyes, such a house as perhaps we desired without knowing it. Suddenly, over the tops of the third or fourth and final of roofs, visible a quarter of a mile away from one of the windows at Abercorran House, much taller than any of the of houses and clear in the sky over them, I saw a castle on a high rock. It resembled St Michael’s Mount, only the rock was giddier and had a narrower summit, and the castle’s three clustered round towers of unequal height stood up above it like three fingers above a hand. When I it out to Philip he gave one dark, rapid glance as of mysterious understanding, and looked at me, saying slowly:
 
 
 
“‘A portal as of shadowy
Stands yawning on the highway of the life
Which we all tread, a huge and gaunt;
Around it rages an unceasing
Of sha............