It was something she remembered. She had been there before, only there was, the other time, a brick floor and there was a tall white cat. A tall white cat came out from under the stove and on the stove a teakettle was boiling. She had been six years old then and she had lived in a house under some nut trees. One day a man went by with his back full of tinware to sell and she could hear all the little cups crying and chiming together when he passed on. ‘What I want with any more tin? I got no money to buy tin,’ a voice said. ‘Take care your fingers, I’m a-goen to shut the door…’ She could remember the strange smell that hung about the nut trees.

Ellen went up the staircase to the room above which was filled with the late afternoon sun and was quite warm. Henry set up her bed in the middle of the floor, telling her she could push it anywhere it best pleased her. Her first night there was strange and sleepless, for a high wind blew. She heard mules running overhead in the wind. Other mules were crying out somewhere over toward the barns and further off a jack was braying. It was far back to Bodine’s. She had slept there only the night before and she had risen there that morning, but the loft room seemed far, beyond the moss on the road, beyond the bale of wire, beyond the white cat and the tinman, beyond men fishing in a river, wading with long naked legs and drawing in a seine full of fishes with little horns. There were hounds in the air before morning, rushing down through trees full upon the cabin. She could hear the beating of their feet above the pleading of their voices as they passed the door on the trail of the hunted thing.