He knit a circle three inches wide out of a tiny ball of wool. He snipped the ends with folding scissors strung to his belt loop. He gave me the circle. I put it in a pocket where it comforts me even now, though it appears to be of no earthly use. Harold’s unhurried appreciation of the world imbues the little patch. It makes me feel less remote from some unknown comfort. It makes me feel somehow recognized.

I asked him, “You mentioned the alphabet—you mean to visit plants whose names go all the way from A to Z?”

“Not only plants!”

“What else?”

He thought about this, as if watching a parade of possible answers, and said, “Yesterday when I decided to begin with the letter A, I climbed to the top of Mont Royal and inadvertently caused a small avalanche.” He seemed amused by this, as he cast on five pink stitches.

13 Oyster

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 6.

NOON.

The Green Spot. Montreal, Quebec

“THE DEVIL, THE RAM, THE GRIM REAPER in his crypt, the sharp-toothed lunging beast and the hollow-eyed eroded monkey at the door…all these and a thousand other stone entities crowded and overwhelmed me so that I feel their disturbance still,” says Genevieve Waugh as she bites into her Green Spot smoked-meat sandwich. She has warmed up, this woman, become somewhat excited, as compared with her former reserve when we met last year. She seems to think she knows me well. Apparently she has been all over the place tracing my steps through history, in order to write about me with something she calls “emanations.” She has been, for instance, over the water to Scotland to stay in a half-ruined castle so that she might know how I felt in those bleak winter months of 1753 when I did the same. I am not sure how I feel about her enthusiasm.

“Emanations?”

“Yes, in the same way you feel emanations from living people. I mean the way I feel emanations from you right now, or the way you feel mine…it’s like a smell, except without sensory shape or impulse, and simply hangs in the air, giving off a heart-feeling or an ineffable but unmistakable energy, the energy of that unique, particular person, and no other. I mean, Wolfe has begun to have that for me, now.”

“Wolfe?”

“I mean the old Wolfe,” she eyes me quickly, “not—I mean, I don’t know him the way you do, I mean he doesn’t inhabit me, but—”

“There is only one Wolfe. There isn’t an old one and a new one.”

“Of course, I mean that for me there is, perhaps, having newly travelled over the historic places and now, getting to know you a little…”

“I don’t think you know me. I hardly think…”

“I mean that I’m finding out new things about him. Things I’m sure, of course that you already—”

“What kind of things?”