had a hundred times told him, all that had happened in those rooms
in the far-off days when people danced and sang and laughed through life,
and nobody seemed ever to be old or sorry.

There was, and still is, an inn within a stone's throw of
the great iron gates, with two very old lime trees in front of it,
where we used to lunch on our arrival at a little table spread
with a red and blue check cloth, the lime blossoms dropping into
our soup, and the bees humming in the scented shadows overhead.
I have a picture of the house by my side as I write, done from
the lake in old times, with a boat full of ladies in hoops
and powder in the foreground, and a youth playing a guitar.
The pilgrimages to this place were those I loved the best.

But the stories my father told me, sometimes odd enough stories
to tell a little girl, as we wandered about the echoing rooms,
or hung over the stone balustrade and fed the fishes in the lake,
or picked the pale dog-roses in the hedges, or lay in the boat
in a shady reed-grown bay while he smoked to keep the mosquitoes off,
were after all only traditions, imparted to me in small doses
from time to time, when his earnest desire not to raise his remarks above the level of dulness
supposed to be wholesome
for Backfische was neutralised by an impulse to share his thoughts
with somebody who would laugh; whereas the place I was bound for on
my latest pilgrimage was filled with living, first-hand memories
of all the enchanted years that lie between two and eighteen.
How enchanted those years are is made more and more clear to me
the older I grow. There has been nothing in the least like them since;
and though I have forgotten most of what happened six months ago,
every incident, almost every day of those wonderful long years