e light from the windows. I remember that elm tree very
well, first because when I was a child starlings nested in a hole in the
trunk, and I reared one in a wicker cage and made a talking bird of it
which I kept for several years. It was so tame that it used to go about
sitting on my shoulder, till at last, outside the town a cat frightened
it thence, and before I could recapture it, it was taken by a hawk,
which hawk I shot afterwards with an arrow out of revenge.

Also this elm is impressed upon me by the fact that on that morning when
I halted by it, I noted how green and full of leaf it was. Next morning,
after the fire, I saw it again, all charred and blackened, with its
beautiful foliage withered by the heat. This contrast remained upon my
memory, and whenever I see any great change of fortune from prosperity
to ruin, or from life to death, always I bethink me of that elm. For
it is by little things which we ourselves have seen and not by those
written of or told by others, that we measure and compare events.

The reason that I ran so hard and then paused by the elm, was because
my widowed mother lived in that house. Knowing that the French meant
mischief for a good reason, because one of their arrows, or perhaps a
quarrel from a cross-bow, whistled just past my head out there upon the
sea, my first thought was to get her away to some place of safety, no
easy task seeing that she was infirm with age. My second, that which
caused me to pause by the tree, was how I should break the news to her
in such a fashion that she would not be over-frightened. Having thought
this over I went on into the house.

The door opened into the sitting-room that had a low roof of plaster and
big oak beams. There I found my mother kneeling by the table upon which
food was set for breakfast: fried herrings, cold meat, and a jug of ale.
She was saying her prayers after her custom, being very religious
though in a new fashion, since she was a follower of a preacher called
Wycliffe, who troubled the Church in those days. She seemed to have gone
to sleep at her prayers, and I watched her for a moment, hesitating to
waken her. My mother, as even then I noted, was a very handsome woman,
though old, for I was born when she had been married twenty years or
more, with white hair and well-cut features that showed the good blood
of which she came, for she was better bred than my father and quarrelled
with her kin to marry him.

At the sound of