I stroll through the village, and I think I know every house, every crooked, willow-plaited fence, every mushroom-shaped, snow-laden, icicle-hung thatched roof, and also every face that gapes at me without knowing who I might be, and every eye, sparkling with curiosity, peering through the panes of the little windows:

but not a single eye can see me at one-third my present size, in a small gray coat with a tobacco-colored velvet collar, a round gray hat on my curly head, and the hated bow—enormous, spotted like a toadstool—under my chin; no one sees me holding Miss Fern’s hand, nicely lifting my little legs in their buttoned leggings over the beer-colored puddles in the mire of the village street. No, I am no longer Christopher Robin.

I walk through rooms so musty, dusty, seedy that my heart contracts. I think I can still sense a breath of my mother’s perfume—a sentimental delusion, of course. Only after a few days do I realize that some of the rooms have been completely repapered, refurbished, rearranged. . .

I listen to the huge, mysteriously chattering stillness of the park, whose floods of summery green were always filled with invisible life: busy birdsong and birds whooshing in the boughs, the needle-fine squealing of a dormouse in the foliage of the bushes, a rocking branch from which a squirrel, a marten, has leaped, an owl has soundlessly soared, bits of bark dropping down from heaven knows where, the soft gurgling of frog heads peeping out of the water and then vanishing in the reeds around the motionless water lilies on the pond, a rustling in the leaves, perhaps from a hedgehog or a ring snake . . .

I have always, all my life, carried it in my blood, this park. It was my Garden of Eden, my paradise promised and lost. Missing it was the bitterest part of my exile. I traveled toward it as toward a beloved, its image in my senses: the soughing of its treetops in the night wind, the sun-dappled coolness of its shade, the damp fresh moldy smell rising in autumn from the leopard skin of the forest floor, its mushroom taste of fern and moss and bark . . .

I regard myself as its creature. Whatever is in it I find also in myself: as the decor of my childhood legend, the proper grooming of its gravel paths, and the vain complacence of the Russian pavilion with the ornamental stained-glass lozenges in the birch woods; the Mondrian severity of the rolled, red, white-lined subdivisions of the tennis court, and the sumptuous flowering of the shrubs on the tall fence surrounding it . . .

and above and beyond this (always there, not simply aroused after years of exile in Vienna) the air of adventure: the sudden stench of carrion in the blackberry thicket of some remote unsupervised corner; the romanticism, true, of the huge cedars along the ramshackle wall crumbling under burdens of ivy, but also the sinister and disreputable quality of the black soil of the creek banks, hollowed out by rats and crayfish under the giant hairy umbrellas of the coltsfoot leaves . . .