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the pleasure, treasuring my benificence, and knowing anyway that if the situation became desperate there was nothing to stop me taking a rolled-up newspaper into the wood one afternoon and bludgeoning to extinction a whole species of lepidoptera, small blues, while they frittered away the first glorious days of summer.
    It was in summer too that I came into my kingdom. The calendar date is lost, but the occasion is still invested in my mind with the sonorous harmony of a more complex, less tangible combination of pure numbers. There was a clearing in the wood, not a clearing, but an open place under the sadly drooping, slender boughs of a big tree. Mama sat at the edge of a white cloth spread on the grass, reading a book and brushing imaginary flies away from her cheek. At her feet my father lay on his back with his hands behind his head, quite still, and yet managing to give the impression of bouncing restlessly, tensely, on the springy turf. I watched, fascinated, this curious phenomenon, but soon the shifting patterns of light and leaf on the cloth distracted me, and there was another distraction, which it took me a while to identify, and it was this, that Mama had not once in ten minutes turned a page of her book. That was very strange. At last Papa stood up, stretched himself ostentatiously, and yawned. Mama's lack of interest in her book grew more intense, if that is possible, and I caught her glancing sideways at him with that furtive, mournful, altogether lovesick look which already I had come to know so well. Patting the last of his yawn with three fingertips, he considered the top of her head, the inclined pale plane of her jaw, and then turned and sauntered off into the trees, whistling through his teeth, his hands in his pockets. Soon she put her book away and followed him, as I knew she would. I was forgotten.
    Our wood was one of nature's cripples. It covered, I suppose, three or four acres of the worst land on the farm, a hillside sloping down crookedly to the untended nether edge of the stagnant pond we called a lake. Under a couple of feet of soil there was a bed of solid rock, that intractable granite for which the area is notorious. On this unfriendly host the trees grew wicked and deformed, some of them so terribly twisted that they crawled horizontally across the hill, their warped branches warring with the undergrowth, while behind them, at some distance, the roots they had struggled to put down were thrust up again by the rock, queer maimed things. Here too, on the swollen trunks, were lymphatic mushrooms flourishing in sodden moss, and other things, reddish glandular blobs which I called dwarfs’ ears. It was a hideous, secretive and exciting place, I liked it there, and when, surfeited on the fetid air of the lower wood, I sought the sunlight above the hill, there on a high ridge, to lift my spirit, was the eponymous patch of birches, restless gay little trees which sang in summer, and in winter winds rattled together their bare branches as delicate as lace.
    Left alone, I pulled pale stalks of grass from their sockets and crushed the soft flesh in my mouth. Timidly, almost unnoticed, there came breaking in upon me that music, palpable and tender, which a wood in summer makes, whose melody is always just beyond hearing, always enticing. Dreamily I wandered down through the trees, into the bluegreen gloom. Down there were flies, not the intricate translucent things which browsed among the birches, but vivid nightblue brutes with brittle bodies, swarming over the rot, and there were black birds too, under the bushes screaming. Somewhere afar a dog barked listlessly between precise pauses, and I heard the sound of an axe, and other sounds too numerous to name. I came to Cotter's place. This was a little house, in ruins, with everything gone under lyme grass and thorns but for one end wall with a fireplace halfway up it, and a shattered chimney with the black flue exposed, and over the fireplace a cracked