I would have gone without chicken myself rather than have seen one of those splendid big brown birds dropped from the skies.

I was so careful to shield them, that I selected this for my especial retreat when I wanted most to be alone, and I carefully gathered up any offal from the nest that might point out their location, and threw it into the water where it ran the swiftest.
I parted the vines and crept where the roots of the big oak stretched like bony fingers over the water, that was slowly eating under it and baring its roots.

I sat on them above the water and thought.

I had decided the day before about my going to school, and the day before that, and many, many times before that, and here I was having to settle it all over again.

Doubled on the sak roots, a troubled little soul, I settled it once more.
No books or teachers were needed to tell me about flowing water and fish, how hawks raised their broods and kept house, about the softly cooing doves of the spice thickets, the cuckoos slipping snakelike in and out of the wild crab-apple bushes, or the brown thrush's weird call from the thorn bush.