in heaps on the ground. Aunt Nan and Gilbert would collect them in sacks and put them in the barn. There they would grow all black, so that you could strip off the covering and find the crinkled nutshell within. Then you cracked them on a stone.
The yard was wonderful to Gilbert. The winter was one long torpor when, as he played with his blocks in the great stretch of sunlight in Mother's room, the days passed almost in a dream. It was only when spring came, and he could run about and see the buds and the flowers come out one after another, that he felt alive again. And it was good in the endless summer days to have so much to attend to. He could be playing in Three Trees Grove, and yet have running in an undercurrent of his mind the sense of the garden or the japonica hedge, or the manger in the barn. He could go down to the cherry-tree to see if the cherries were ripe, or to the currant-bushes, or he could prick his fingers on the rose-bushes, or get himself stuck in the gum of the pine-trees. The yard was a world, and only very dimly did he imagine anything beyond it. What his mother did in the kitchen or about the house only very dimly concerned him. What they had to live on never entered his mind. His sorrows were concerned almost entirely with the rebellions of Olga, or the calamities of weather which would keep them all home from a walk to the kind lady who lived up the street and gave them cookies when they went to see her. Or the hornets and yellow-jackets. Sometimes on very hot days, when Mother kept them in the darkened back parlor and the big clock ticked menacingly, insistently at them, and Gilbert felt sleepy and could not go to sleep, the tedium vitæ would overwhelm him in a great drenching wave. He was suddenly conscious of time, endlessly flowing and yet somehow dreadfully static. Nothing was ever going to happen again; he was as if alive in a tomb. The flies buzzed; the clock ticked; Mother was taking an exhausted nap; Aunt Nan and Garna were away for a vacation. The world was a great vacuum with nothing to experience and nothing to do.
And if a summer afternoon could produce so appalling a sense of eternity, what must heaven be like, where you went so infallibly when you were dead? Either because lovely Garna and mild Miss Fogg had kept Gilbert from the terrors of hell, or it was his natural ego, it never occurred to him that he was not destined for heaven, or that there was any way of avoiding it. And the thought of
