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the other side of the wall. Young Tristran Thorn, eight years old, did not attend, finding himself packed off to stay with extremely distant relations in a village a day’s ride away.
    His little sister, Louisa, six months his junior, was, however, allowed to go to the market, and this was a source of great ranklement to the boy, as was the fact that Louisa brought back from the market a glass globe, filled with speckles of light that glittered and flashed in the twilight, and which cast a warm and gentle radiance into the darkness of their bedroom in the farmhouse, while all Tristran brought back from his relatives was a nasty case of the measles.
    Shortly afterward, the farm cat had three kittens: two black-and-white ones like herself, and a tiny kitten with a dusty blue sheen to her coat, and eyes that changed color depending on her mood, from green and gold to salmon, scarlet and vermilion.
    This kitten was given to Tristran to make up for missing the market. She grew slowly, the blue cat, and she was the sweetest cat in the world, until, one evening, she began to prowl the house impatiently, to mrowll and to flash her eyes, which were the purple-red of foxgloves; and when Tristran’s father came back from a day in the fields, the cat yowled, bolted through the door and was off into the dusk.
    The guards on the wall were for people, not cats; and Tristran, who was twelve by this time, never saw the blue cat again. He was inconsolable for a while. His father came into his bedroom one night and sat at the end of his bed, saying gruffly, “She’ll be happier, over the wall. With her own kind. Don’t you fret now, lad.”
    His mother said nothing to him about the matter, as she said little to him on any subject. Sometimes Tristran would look up to see his mother staring at him intently, as if she were trying to tease some secret from his face.
    Louisa, his sister, would needle him about this as they walked to the village school in the morning, as she would goad him about so many other things: the shape of his ears, for example (the right ear was flat against his head, and almost pointed; the left one was not), and about the foolish things he said: once he told her that the tiny clouds, fluffy and white, that clustered across the horizon at sunset as they walked home from school, were sheep. It was no matter that he later claimed that he had meant simply that they reminded him of sheep, or that there was something fluffy and sheeplike about them. Louisa laughed and teased and goaded like a goblin; and what was worse, she told the other children, and incited them to “baa” quietly whenever Tristran walked past. Louisa was a born inciter, and danced circles around her brother.
    The village school was a fine school, and under the tutelage of Mrs. Cherry, the schoolmistress, Tristran Thorn learned all about fractions, and longitude and latitude; he could ask in French for the pen of the gardener’s aunt, indeed for the pen of his own aunt; he learned the kings and queens of England from William the Conqueror, 1066, to Victoria, 1837. He learned his reading and had a fair copperplate hand. Travelers to the village were rare, but occasionally a peddler would come through the village, selling “penny dreadful” accounts of grisly murders, fateful encounters, dire doings and remarkable escapes. Most peddlers sold song sheets, two for a penny, and families would buy them and gather about their pianos to sing songs such as “Cherry Ripe” and “In My Father’s Garden.”
    So the days went by, and the weeks went by, and the years went by also. At age fourteen, by a process of osmosis, of dirty jokes, whispered secrets and filthy ballads,Tristran learned of sex. When he was fifteen he hurt his arm falling from the apple tree outside Mr.Thomas Forester’s house: more specifically, from the apple tree outside Miss Victoria Forester’s bedroom window. To Tristran’s regret, he had caught no more than a pink and tantalizing