to be burned at the stake. I tried again and again to forget
nurse's stories, and to remember the secret I had seen that afternoon,
and what was in the secret wood, but I could only see the dark and a
glimmering in the dark, and then it went away, and I only saw myself
running, and then a great moon came up white over a dark round hill.
Then all the old stories came back again, and the queer rhymes that
nurse used to sing to me; and there was one beginning 'Halsy cumsy Helen
musty,' that she used to sing very softly when she wanted me to go to
sleep. And I began to sing it to myself inside of my head, and I went to
sleep.

The next morning I was very tired and sleepy, and could hardly do my
lessons, and I was very glad when they were over and I had had my
dinner, as I wanted to go out and be alone. It was a warm day, and I
went to a nice turfy hill by the river, and sat down on my mother's old
shawl that I had brought with me on purpose. The sky was grey, like the
day before, but there was a kind of white gleam behind it, and from
where I was sitting I could look down on the town, and it was all still
and quiet and white, like a picture. I remembered that it was on that
hill that nurse taught me to play an old game called 'Troy Town,' in
which one had to dance, and wind in and out on a pattern in the grass,
and then when one had danced and turned long enough the other person
asks you questions, and you can't help answering whether you want to or
not, and whatever you are told to do you feel you have to do it. Nurse
said there used to be a lot of games like that that some people knew of,
and there was one by which people could be turned into anything you
liked, and an old man her great-grandmother had seen had known a girl
who had been turned into a large snake. And there was another very
ancient game of dancing and winding and turning, by which you could take
a person out of himself and hide him away as long as you liked, and his
body went walking about quite empty, without any sense in it. But I came
to that hill because I wanted to think of what had happened the day
before, and of the secret of the wood. From the place where I was
sitting I could see beyond the town, into the opening I had found, where
a little brook had led me into an unknown country. And I pretended I was
following the brook over again, and I went all the way in my mind, and
at last I found the wood, and crept into it under the bushes, and then
in