The bear was enjoying retirement in the bosom of his family; he could be seen warming his youngest born by holding him before the fire by the paws; his wife was hanging linen before the fire and a young cub in a corner was lifting up his little shirt by way of precaution before retiring; some one is knocking at the door, but the legend explains: “We live by ourselves; we detest visitors and bores.” A parroquet flapping his wings without being able to fly represented the illustrious poet Kacatogan. And the martlet with the magpie and the crow made a trio of women of letters. I did not know what a woman of letters could be, but the White Blackbird, who like the parroquet was a poet, taught me in his memoirs: _While I was composing my poems she was bedaubing reams of paper with her scribblings. I would recite my verses to her aloud, and she, indifferent, kept on writing while I was doing so. She produced romances with a facility almost equal to mine, always choosing the most dramatic subjects: parricides, kidnappings, murders, and even pocket-picking, always taking pains to attack the government, in passing, and to preach the emancipation of Martlets. In one word, no effort was too great for her mind, no clap-trap for her modesty; it never occurred to her to erase a line, nor to work out a plan before setting to work. She was the typical lettered Martlet._ Aunt Deen also produced stories with marvellous facility; she, too, preferred terrible subjects and was not averse to attacking the government. I even suspected her of not knowing, when she began, how she was going to end up, and of inventing the plots of her stories as she went along. Then why didn’t she bedaub paper? The simplest way was to ask her. “Aunt Deen, are you a woman of letters?” She asked me twice to repeat my question, as if women of letters really belonged to the zoological kingdom, in the category of monsters. After which she shrugged her shoulders, not even deigning to reply directly. “The child is certainly crazy. Augustus’s books have addled his brain.”