When I go by the overgrown path, in through the woods, my heart quivers
with an unearthly joy. I call to mind a spot on the eastern shores of the
Caspian, where I once stood. All just as it is here, with the water still
and heavy and iron-grey as now. I walked through the woods, touched to the
heart, and verging on tears for sheer happiness' sake, and saying to
myself all the time: God in heaven. To be here again....

As if I had been there before.

Ah well, I may have been there once before, perhaps, coming from another
time and another land, where the woods and the woodland paths were the
same. Perhaps I was a flower then, in the woods, or perhaps a beetle, with
its home in some acacia tree.

And now I have come to this place. Perhaps I was a bird and flew all that
long way. Or the kernel in some fruit sent by a Persian trader.

See, now I am well away from the rush and crowd of the city, from people
and newspapers; I have fled away from it all, because of the calling that
came to me once more from the quiet, lonely tracts where I belong. "It
will all come right this time," I tell myself, and am full of hope. Alas,
I have fled from the city like this before, and afterwards returned. And
fled away again.

But this time I am resolved. Peace I will have, at any cost. And for the
present I have taken a room in a cottage here, with Old Gunhild to look
after me.

Here and there among the pines are rowans, with ripe coral berries; now