"What is that?" asked his mother.

The little boy looked at it doubtfully for a moment, unwilling to admit
it a blot. Then he laughed.

"Mother, Mother, that is America." (Stefan heard himself.) "Look!" And
rapidly he drew a bird flying high above the blot, with its head pointed
to the right, away from it.

His mother laughed and hugged him quickly. "Yes, eastward," she said.

After that all his birds flew one way, and in the left-hand lower corner
there was usually a blob of dark brown or black. Once it was a square,
red, white, and blue.

On her table his mother had a little globe which revolved above a brass
base. Because of this he knew the relative position of two places
--America and Bohemia. Of this country he thought his mother was unwilling
to speak, but its name fell from her lips with sighs, with--as it now
seemed to him--a wild longing. Knowing nothing of it, he had pictured it
a paradise, a land of roses. He seemed to have no knowledge of why she
had left it; but years later his father spoke of finding her in Boston in
the days when he preached there, penniless, searching for work as a
teacher of singing. How she became jettisoned in that--to her--cold and
inhospitable port, Stefan did not know, nor how soon after their marriage
the two moved to the still more alien peninsula of Michigan.

Into his memories of the room where they painted a shadow constantly
intruded, chilling them, such a shadow, deep and cold, as is cast by an
iceberg. The door would open, and his father's face, high and white with