The house was lost, but she was determined to regain it. It was hers by the deeply imbedded elements of memory, hers by all the fragrant, richly toned ideas that had grown with her own growth. She looked now at her first memory of the earth and saw in it its enhanced qualities as they had come to her first-seeing. She knew that she had been born at the farm, Linden Hill, but that she had been brought to the town house a few months after her birth, when Linden Hill had passed to other hands. She saw, as if it were a super-drama where time and event are enlarged, herself at play as a little child at the foot of the large rough stone chimney in the east wall, and she knew the soil there intimately with her eyes and with her fingertips, for in the drama she had dug into it with a small spade and had shaped it with her hands. A few herbs such as sorrel and dwarf mint grew there, and a little beyond, away from the damp of the wall, were the first clover blossoms. She saw her hand prodding into the earth to find out its way, her head bent low to see and to smell the crumpled soil. Her mind was fixed now to regain the visible sign of the old play, to keep the trail that led back to her first-knowledge. She saw how the great trunk of the elm tree came out of the earth, deeply wrinkled and gray or black, as the light fell. Among the floating festoons of leaves overhead, a sharp sudden cry, remembered, so real and vivid as to be cruelly felt, had struck her with a quick and joyous pleasure which was like a recognition—and she had heard her first bird-song. “At these points I am attached to the earth,” she thought, looking at her moving hands, her feet, her memories, at the sorrel and ivy of memory. Aunt Bet had gone to another place without regret or outcry, and Siver was gone. She taught her class with fervor. “I perceive the earth, myself imbedded into it, attached to it at all points,” she thought, “sinking at each moment into it.” * * * * *