e walk along. We are alone in this
Garden of Eden. Busie holds me tightly, very tightly. She is silent, but
I imagine she is talking to me in the words from the "Song of Songs":

"My beloved is mine, and I am his."

The Levada is big. It stretches away without a beginning and without an
end. It is covered with a green mantle, sprinkled with yellow flowers,
and nailed down with red nails. It gives out a delicious odour--the most
fragrant spices in the world are there. We walked along, embraced--we
two alone in the Garden of Eden.

"Shemak," says Busie to me, looking straight into my eyes, and nestling
still closer to me, "when shall we start gathering the green boughs for
the '_Shevuous_'?"

"The day is long enough, little fool," I say to her. I am on fire. I do
not know where to look first, whether at the blue sky, or the green
fields, or over there, at the end of the world, where the sky has become
one with the earth. Or shall I look at Busie's shining face--into her
large beautiful eyes that are to me deep as the heavens and dreamy as
the night? Her eyes are always dreamy. A deep sorrow lies hidden within
them. They are veiled by a shade of melancholy. I know her sorrow. I am
acquainted with the cause of her melancholy. She has a great grief in
her heart. She is pained because her mother married a stranger, and went
away from her for ever and ever, as if she had been nothing to her. In
my home her mother's name must not be mentioned. It is as if Busie had
never had a mother. My mother is her mother, and my father is her
father. They love her as if she were their own child. They fret over
her, and give her everything that her heart desires. There is nothing
too dear for Busie. She wanted to go with me to gather green boughs for
the Festival decorations (I told her to ask it), and my father said to
my mother:

"What do you think?" He looked over his silver spectacles, and stroked
the silver white hair of his beard. And there went on an argument
between my father and mother about our going off outside the town to
gather green boughs for the "_Shevuous_."

Father: "What do you say?"

Mother: "What do you say?"

Father: "Shall we let them go?"

Mother: "Why should we not let them go?"

Father: "Do I say we should not?"

Mother: "What then are you saying?"

Father: "I am saying that we should let them go."

Mother: "Why should they not go?"

And so forth. I know what is worrying them. About twenty times my