she'd never heard before, and it
went like this:

I looked before me and behind,
I looked beyond the sun and wind,
Beyond the rainbow and the snow,
And saw a land I used to know.
The floods rolled up to keep me still
A captive on my heavenly hill,
And on their bright and dangerous glass
Was written, Boy, you shall not pass!
I laughed aloud, You shining seas,
I'll run away the day I please!
I am not winged like any plover
Yet I've a way shall take me over,
I am not finned like any bream
Yet I can cross you, lake and stream.
And I my hidden land shall find
That lies beyond the sun and wind--
Past drowned grass and drowning trees
I'll run away the day I please,
I'll run like one whom nothing harms
With my bonny in my arms.

"What does that mean?" asked the child.

"I'm sure I don't know," said Young Gerard. He kicked at the dying log
on the hearth, and sent a fountain of sparks up the chimney. The child
threw a dry leaf and saw it shrivel, and Young Gerard stirred the white
ash and blew up the embers, and held a fan of bracken to them, till the
fire ran up its veins like life in the veins of a man, and the frond
that had already lived and died became a gleaming spirit, and then it
too fell in ashes among the ash. Then Young Gerard took a handful of
twigs and branches, and began to build upon the ash a castle of many
sorts of wood, and the child helped him, laying hazel on his beech and
fir upon his oak; and often before their turret was quite reared a
spark would catch at the dry fringes of the fir, or the brown
oakleaves, and one twig or another would vanish from the castle.

"How quickly wood burns," said the child.

"That's the lovely part of it," said Young Gerard, "the fire is always
changing and doing different things with it."

And they watched the fire together, and smelled its smoke, that had as
many smells as there were sorts of wood. Sometimes it was like roast
coffee, and sometimes like roast chestnuts, and sometimes like incense.
And they saw the lichen on old stumps crinkle into golden ferns, or
fire run up a dead tail of creeper in a red S, and vanish in mid-air
like an Indian boy climbing a rope, or crawl right through the middle
of a birch-twig, making hieroglyphics that glowed and faded between the
gray scales of the bark. And then suddenly it caught the whole
scaffolding of their castle, and blazed up through the fir and oak and
spiny thorns and dea