Yesterday at noon, when the house and all the land were still, and the men, with the lads and lasses, were away at the harvesting, and I sat alone, with barred doors, for fear of the Indians (who have of late shown themselves unfriendly), I chanced to look up from my spinning-wheel through the open window, across the creek on which our house stands. And something, I scarce know what, carried me back through the years and across the seas to the old house on the borders of the Fen Country, in the days of my childhood. It may have been the quiet rustling of the sleepy air in the long grasses by the water-side that wafted my spirit back to where the English winds sigh and sough among the reeds on the borders of the fens; it may have been the shining of the smooth water, furrowed by the track of the water-fowl, that set my memory down beside the broad Mere, whose gleam we could see from my chamber window. It may have been the smell of this year's hay, which came in in sweet, soft gusts through the lattice, that floated me up to the top of the tiny haystack, made of the waste grass in the orchard at old Netherby Manor, at the foot of which Roger, my brother, used to stand while I turned up the hay, assisted by our Cousin Placidia (when she was condescending), and by our Aunt Gretel, my mother's sister, whenever we had need of her. Most probably it was the hay. For, as the excellent Mr. Bunyan has illustriously set forth in his work on the Holy War, the soul hath five gates through which she holdeth parlance with the outer world. And correspondent with these outer gates from the sensible world in space, meseemeth, are as many inner gates into the inner, invisible world of thought and time; which inner gates open simultaneously with the outer, by the same spring. But of all the mystic springs which unlock the wondrous inward world, none act with such swift, secret magic as those of the Gate of Odors. There stealeth in unobserved some delicate perfume of familiar field flower or garden herb, and straightway, or ere she is aware, the soul is afar off in the world of the past, gathering posies among the fields of childhood, or culling herbs in the old corner of the old garden, to be laid, by hands long since cold, in familiar chambers long since tenanted by other owners. Wherefore, I deem, it was the new, sweet smell of our New England hay which more than anything carried me back to the old house in Old England, and the days so long gone by. With my heart in far-off days, I continued my spinning, as women are wont, the hand moving the more swiftly for the speed wherewith the thoughts travel, until my thoughts and my work came to a pause together by the flax on my distaff being exhausted. I went to an upper chamber for a fresh stock, and while there my eye lighted on an old chest, in the depths whereof lay many little volumes of an old journal written by my hand through a series of buried years.