That was one epoch: the apple-tree epoch. Another had ended before it began. Time is a queer thing and memory a queerer; the tricks that time plays with memory and memory with time are queerest of all. From maturity one looks back at the succession of years, counts them and makes them many, yet cannot feel length in the number, however large. In a stream that turns a mill-wheel there is a lot of water; the mill-pond is quiet, its surface dark and shadowed, and there does not seem to be much water in it. Time in the sum is nothing. And yet -- a year to a child is an eternity, and in the memory that phase of one's being -- a certain mental landscape -- will seem to have endured without beginning and without end. The part of the mind that preserves dates and events may remonstrate, ``It could have been like that for only a little while''; but true memory does not count nor add: it holds fast to things that were and they are outside of time.

Once, then -- for how many years or how few does not matter -- my world was bound round by fences, when I was too small to reach the apple tree bough, to twist my knee over it and pull myself up. That world was in scale with my own smallness. I have no picture in my mind of the garden as a whole -- that I could not see -- but certain aspects of certain corners linger in the memory: wind-blown, frost-bitten, white chrysanthemums beneath a window, with their brittle brown leaves and their sharp scent of November; ripe pears lying in long grass, to be turned over by a dusty slippered foot, cautiously, lest bees still worked in the ragged, brown edged holes; hot colored verbenas in the corner between the dining-room wall and the side porch, where we passed on our way to the pump with the half gourd tied to it as a cup by my grandmother for our childish pleasure in drinking from it.