who owned pasture and pond and trees, had ever been a boy, so far as I
could remember, or had ever eaten of those persimmons. Would they have
left the trees through all these years?

I pushed through the hedge of cedars and stopped for an instant,
confused. The very pond was gone! and the trees! No, there was the
pond,--but how small the patch of water! and the two persimmon trees?
The bush and undergrowth had grown these twenty years. Which way--Ah,
there they stand, only their leafless tops showing; but see the hard
angular limbs, how closely globed with fruit! how softly etched upon the
sky!

I hurried around to the trees and climbed the one with the two broken
branches, up, clear up to the top, into the thick of the persimmons.

Did I say it had been twenty years? That could not be. Twenty years
would have made me a man, and this sweet, real taste in my mouth only a
_boy_ could know. But there was college, and marriage, a Massachusetts
farm, four boys of my own, and--no matter! it could not have been
_years_--twenty years--since. It was only yesterday that I last climbed
this tree and ate the rich rimy fruit frosted with a Christmas snow.

And yet, could it have been yesterday? It was storming, and I clung here
in the swirling snow and heard the wild ducks go over in their hurry
toward the bay. Yesterday, and all this change in the vast treetop
world, this huddled pond, those narrowed meadows, that shrunken creek! I
should have eaten the persimmons and climbed straight down, not stopped
to gaze out upon the pond, and away over the dark ditches to the creek.
But reaching out quickly I gathered another handful,--and all was
yesterday again.