‘Why, don’t you know? Rocks grow.’

‘I never see any grow. I never see one a-growen.’

‘I never see one a-growen neither, but they grow all the same. You pick up all the rocks offen this-here hill and in a year there’s as many out again. I lay there’ll be a stack to pick up right here again next year.’

‘I can’t seem to think it! Rocks a-growen now! They don’t seem alive. They seem dead-like. Maybe they’ve got another kind of way to be alive.’

‘Maybe they have. All I know is they grow.’

‘Rocks have got shells printed on the sides and some have little snails worked on their edges and some have got little worms-like worked on. But once I found a spider with a dragon beast in a picture on its back. Some rocks, now, are shaped like little silos and some are all marked with little snails and waterbugs and some are open fans and some have little scallops on the edges. Rocks grow in ways that are right pretty now. It’s a wonder, really.’

‘I wish I could see a rock grow,’ she said again. ‘I can’t think how it is. You could watch a rock for a whole year and you’d never see any sign of it growen. The rock doorstep over at Bodine’s didn’t grow e’er bit all the time we lived there.’

‘Maybe it did and you couldn’t see.’

‘It might maybe be they don’t grow if you watch, like fish don’t bite if you make a noise.’

‘I don’t expect, now I come to study about it, I don’t expect rocks out like that grow. It’s rocks in fields that grow, if you ever noticed.’

‘Maybe they take soil, like everything else, but it’s a strange wonder nohow. Like ants now, and like where wind comes from, like horse-hairs that turn to snakes, or like warts that go away and you never know when.’

‘I heared a man say once that the sun was made outen fish oil. He said when fishes die they float on the top of the water and the air dries up the oil and it draws up to the sun. Up in the sun it burns and that’s what makes the heat and light. I heared a man say that. I don’t know whe’r he was a learned man or not.’

‘Well,’ Ellen said. And again, ‘Well, some people sleep on beds but some sleep on the ground and some sleep on the floor and some sleep in wagons. I’ve heared it said sailors sleep in hammocks. The people on the other side of the world might, maybe, sleep some other way we can’t think. It might be that way with the sun for all we know. It might be fish oil like that man said and again it might be some other kind. I wish I knowed for sure.’