I, Hubert, with a mind full of fears, though not for myself, and a
stirring of the blood such as was natural to my age at the approach
of my first taste of battle, ran fast up to that house which I have
described, and paused for a moment by the big elm tree that grew in
front of the door, of which the lower boughs were sawn off because they
shut out the light from the windows. I remember that elm tree very
well, first because when I was a child starlings nested in a hole in the
trunk, and I reared one in a wicker cage and made a talking bird of it
which I kept for several years. It was so tame that it used to go about
sitting on my shoulder, till at last, outside the town a cat frightened
it thence, and before I could recapture it, it was taken by a hawk,
which hawk I shot afterwards with an arrow out of revenge.

Also this elm is impressed upon me by the fact that on that morning when
I halted by it, I noted how green and full of leaf it was. Next morning,
after the fire, I saw it again, all charred and blackened, with its
beautiful foliage withered by the heat. This contrast remained upon my
memory, and whenever I see any great change of fortune from prosperity
to ruin, or from life to death, always I bethink me of that elm. For
it is by little things which we ourselves have seen and not by those
written of or told by others, that we measure and compare events.

The reason that I ran so hard and then paused by the elm, was because
my widowed mother lived in that house. Knowing that the French meant
mischief for a good reason, because one of their arrows, or perhaps a
quarrel from a cross-bow, whistled just past my head out there upon the
sea, my first thought was to get her away to some place of safety, no
easy task seeing that she was infirm with age. My second, that which
caused me to pause by the tree, was how I should break the news to her
in such a fashion that she would not be over-frightened. Having thought