Camilla's death looked natural, except that I should have expected the death contractions to muss the straw and that hadn't happened. Maybe the angel had arranged the old lady's body for decorum, though I don't see how her muscular strength would have been equal to it, Camilla weighed at least seven pounds. As I was burying her at the edge of the garden and the angel was humming over my head, I recalled a thing which, when it happened, I had dismissed as a dream. Merely a moonlight image of the angel standing in the nest box with her hands on Camilla's head, then pressing her mouth gently on Camilla's throat, just before the hen's head sank down out of my line of vision. Probably I actually awoke and saw it happen. I am somehow unconcerned--even, as I think more about it, pleased. After the burial the angel's hands said: "Sit on the grass and we'll talk. Question me; I'll tell you what I can. My father asks you to write it down." So that is what we have been doing for the last four days. I have been going to school, a slow but willing pupil. Rather than enter anything in this journal, for in the evenings I was exhausted, I made notes as best I could. The angel has gone now to see her father and will not return until morning. I shall try to make a readable version of my notes. Since she had invited questions, I began with something which had been bothering me, as a would-be naturalist, exceedingly. I couldn't see how creatures no larger than the adults I had observed could lay eggs, as large as Camilla's. Nor could I understand why, if they were hatched in an almost adult condition and able to eat a varied diet, she had any use for that ridiculous, lovely and apparently functional pair of breasts. * * * * * When the angel grasped my difficulty, she exploded with laughter--her kind, which buzzed her all over the garden and caused her to fluff my hair on the wing and pinch my earlobe. She lit on a rhubarb leaf and gave a delectably naughty representation of herself as a hen laying an egg, including the cackle. She got me to bumbling helplessly--my kind of laughter--and it was some time before we could quiet down. Then she did her best to explain. They are true mammals, and the young--not more than two or at most three in a lifetime averaging two hundred and fifty years--are delivered in very much the human way. The baby is nursed, human fashion, until his brain begins to respond a little to their unspoken language. That takes three to four weeks. Then he is placed in an altogether different medium. She could not describe that clearly, because there was very little in my educational storehouse to help me grasp it. It is some gaseous medium which arrests bodily growth for an almost indefinite period, while mental growth continues. It took them, she says, about seven thousand years to perfect this technique after they first hit on the idea; they are never in a hurry.