Like the river: the waters gliding and glimmering over the reflected trees plunged down deep in the river's depths, far more fascinating and mysterious than those so much more substantial trees always upright on the banks. The long grass: the best bed of all, and with stems to chew and make whistles from, and sometimes shaking seeds into her hair and down the neck of her dress to — to tickle. Insects to study: ants always so methodically busy, poor things, just like her sisters; ladybird beetles, like herself, opening their little red carapaces with the black polka-dots to spread their wings and half flutter, half totter, from one stalk of grass to another, blissfully without method or purpose at all. Birds skimming over the water and arrowing among the trees, alighting on branches, plucking at their plumage with quite shameless vanity, and pausing, stiffening now and again, to take watch around them — something they'd heard? or smelt? or just sensed without really knowing, like she herself did? Calling to each other, always so happy. Except crows, carping and cavilling their endless complaints, and black, like her sisters had been for months, in mourning when their mother had died. The old grey-white horseijjith the shaggy lock of mane hanging forlorn over his eyes and his look of mild reproach, just like their father's. Crickets itchy in the grass. O the grass, the grass! How she always loved just to lie there in its luxury. Especially today, for today was a very special day, a very special day indeed…

Today was her birthday. Seventeen years ago today she had been born in the house just over her shoulder of the mother whom she had never seen because, so sadly, so tragically, she had died shortly after she herself, Maisie Jane Matthews, had been born; and consequently she had never known a mother's love and maternal ministrations, no matter how much her five elder sisters might proclaim that they all of them were 'little mothers' to their poor baby Maisie.