"Call that a winter? When I was a sapling we had winters -"

Then the tree vanished.

After a shocked pause for a couple of years, one of the clump said: "He just went! Just like that! One day he was here, next he was gone!"

If the other trees had been humans, they would have shuffled their feet.

"It happens, lad," said one of them, carefully. "He's been taken to a Better Place, you can be sure of that. He was a good tree."

The young tree, which was a mere five thousand, one hundred and eleven years old, said: "What sort of Better Place?"

"We're not sure, " said one of the clump. It trembled uneasily in a week-long gale. "But we think it involves... sawdust."

Since the trees were unable even to sense any event that took place in less than a day, they never heard the sound of axes.

Windle Poons, oldest wizard in the entire faculty of Unseen University - home of magic, wizardry and big dinners - was also going to die.

He knew it, in a frail and shaky sort of way.

Of course, he mused, as he wheeled his wheel-chair over the flagstones towards his ground-floor study, in a general sort of way everyone knew they were going to die, even the common people. No-one knew where you were before you were born, but when you were born, it wasn't long before you found you'd arrived with your return ticket already punched.

But wizards really knew. Not if death involved violence or murder, of course, but if the cause of death was simply a case of running out of life then... well, you knew. You generally got the premonition in time to return your library books and make sure your best suit was clean and borrow quite large sums of money from your friends.

He was one hundred and thirty. It occurred to him that for most of his life he'd been an old man. Didn't seem fair, really.

And no-one had said anything. He'd mentioned it in the Uncommon Room last week, and no-one had taken the hint. And at lunch today they'd hardly spoken to him. Even his old so-called friends seemed to be avoiding him, and he wasn't even trying to borrow money.