ended the lecture by informing us, “Spouts when in a state of ac-tiv-it-y, fire, smoke, glow-ing stones and mol-tennn law-vaw.” Powerless to protest, and crushed beneath the weight of my own incompetence, I have sat through the performance of this revolting rite as often as three times in a single morning. Revenge came slowly. It took nineteen years to arrive, but it arrived. Unduly familiar in childhood with continents and dizzy heights, Adelaide, as she matured, reached out, expanded, longed to become a world-power. At the age of twenty-six, therefore, she eloped with a French “count,” who not only failed to observe the convention of proving to be a waiter or a hairdresser, he absolutely failed to be anything at all and Adelaide ever since has had to support him. At eleven o’clock we took a dejected orphan-asylum walk about the suburban streets in two long lines led by the older pupils of the more advanced school downstairs and followed by Mrs. White who, by constantly running back and forth in order to satisfy herself that no one was neglecting to “observe nature,” must have covered miles to our blocks. How we all loathed nature! I loved animals and plants, clouds and rain, snow and sunshine then as I do now, but “Nature” was something quite different. I don’t believe we ever knew what it was and probably connected the term in our minds not with the works of God themselves but with the inescapable obligation of perpetually fussing about them. I without doubt would have ended by becoming very fond of the White Maria’s shaggy old ponies, but the labored pretense that we were all dying to bring them a handful of oats for their Thanksgiving dinner and a dozen other pretenses concerning them ended by preventing it. Birds were really wonderful, heavenly creatures to watch and examine, but weeks of prattle about the Christmas present (seeds, bread-crumbs and more oats) of birds we had never seen, merely resulted in a band of ornithological cynics. This fictitious passion for just birds--disembodied, abstract birds, that Mrs. White entirely imagined for us and widely advertised--was taken seriously by our families for years. My grandmother fondly believed in it to the last and almost embittered my young life by bequeathing in her will three beautiful family portraits to my brothers, and to me the “nature lover,” the unwilling product of Mrs. White’s, a set of Audubon!