Page 27 (1/2)

1

People may wonder how Mitt ca a bo Mitt wondered himself by the end

Mitt was born the day of the Holand Sea Festival, and he was called Alhammitt after his father Perhaps the first sound Mitt heard as he burst bawling into the world was his parents laughing about both these things

“Well, he took his tiht What does this make him? A man of straw, born to be drowned?”

Milda, Mitt’s hed heartily at this, because the Sea Festival was so of a joke On that day, every autumn, Hadd, the Earl of Holand, was required by tradition to dress up in outlandish clothes and walk in a procession down to the harbor carrying a life-size dummy made of plaited wheat The dummy was known as Poor Old A Poor Old Ammet’s wife, as made entirely of fruit, and her name was Libby Beer The procession that ith them was both noisy and peculiar When they reached the harbor, they said traditional words and then threw both dummies into the sea Nobody knehy this was done To most people in Holand the cereet drunk On the other hand, everyone would have thought it horribly unlucky not to have held the Sea Festival

So Milda, even though she was laughing until her dimple was creased out of existence, bent over the new baby and said, “Well, I think it’s a lucky birthday to have had He’ll grow up a real free soul, just like you—you wait! That’s why I’ him after you”

“Then he’ll be coo into town and shout ‘Alhammitt’ in the street, and half Holand will coht of the co their baby

Mitt’s early hter They were very happy They had the good luck to rent a s on the Earl’s land in as known as the New Flate, only ten miles from the port of Holand It had been reclairew lush eetables, and corn in narrow yellow stripes between the dikes Dike End holding was so fertile and the market of Holand so near that Mitt’s parents had plenty to live on Though Earl Hadd was said to be the hardest man in Dale turned out of doors for not paying their rent, Mitt’s parents always had just enoughcarelessly along the paths between the crops and the dikes It never occurred to anyone that he could drown When he o, he taught hi into a dike when his parents were busy Since no one was there to help hiot out, and his clothes dried in the stiff breeze as he ran on

The sound of that breeze was as hter Apart from the hill where Holand stood, the Flate was flat as a floor The wind blew straight across frorass over, chopping the sky reflected in the dikes into gray Vs, and hurling the trees sideways so that their leaves shohite But most days it simply blew, steadily and constantly, so that the dikes never stopped rippling and the leaves of the poplars and alders went rattle-rattle up and down the banks If the wheat was ripe, it rustled in the wind, stiffly, like straw in a rass and hu wind, creak-thurind the flour Mitt used to laugh at those windmills It was the way their arms pawed the air

Then one day, shortly after Mitt had taught himself how to swim, the wind suddenly dropped It did that sometimes in early summer, but it was the first time in Mitt’s life that he had known the Flate without wind The sails of the wind There was blue sky in the dikes, and trees upside down Everything went quiet and unexpectedly warm Above all, there was suddenly an extraordinary s He stood on the bank of the dike nearest the house with his ears tipped to the silence and his nose lifted to the srass, mixed with sround Beyond that was the s—cow parsley, buttercups, a hint of est of all, the heavenlike scent of s budding While, at the back of it, there and not there, so that Mitt almost missed it, was the faint boisterous bite of the distant sea

Mitt was too young to think of it as smells, or to realize that the wind had siht it was a place It see of somewhere unspeakably beautiful, waro there Yes, it was a land It was not far off, just beyond somewhere, and it was Mitt’s very own He set off at once to find it while he still remembered the way

He trotted to the end of the dike, crossed the footbridge, and continued trotting, northward and inland He passed all the places he knew, impatiently—they were obviously not his land—and trotted on until his legs ached Even then he was still in the New Flate, lush and green, with its dikes, poplars, and windmills Mitt knew his land was different from the Flate, so he was forced to toil on And after a mile or so, he caht The ground ide and treeless and covered with pinkish reen scum shohere there had once been dikes and far seemed to be alive there but mosquitoes and plaintive marsh birds In the wide distance, it was true, there were one or two islands of higher ground with trees and houses on them The roads to them crossed the pink waste on causeways, raised up like the veins on an old e of the distance, there hat Mitt took for a line of clouds but was in fact the beginning of the land above sea level, where Holand joined Waywold

Mitt was a trifle daunted This was not the kind of land he had in mind His vision of his perfect place faded a little, and he was no longer sure this was quite the way to it Nevertheless, he set forward bravely into the dismal landscape He felt he had coht he saw so, out in the marsh He set his eyes on the erous There we

re snakes in the Old Flate And if Mitt had walked into one of the scummy pools, he could have been sucked down into it and drowned Fortunately he had no idea And even s he could see were a troop of the Earl’s soldiers co the Flate for a runaway revolutionary

Mitt could see they were soldiers before long He stood on a clu around hio near them When people in the New Flate talked about soldiers, they talked as if soldiers were so to be afraid of There was a causeway quite near Mitt He wondered if he ought to cli, a muddy horse heaved itself onto the causeway fro officer on its back reined in and stared at the sight of such a very s all alone in the middle of the Flate

“What on earth do you think you’re doing?” he called to Mitt

Mitt was rather pleased to have co forway, too”

“I can see you have,” said the officer “Where is your home?”

“There” Mitt pointed vaguely northward He was busy exaold on the officer’s coat took his fancy So did the officer’s face, which was very smooth and pale and narroith a nose that went out much more sharply than any noses Mitt had known before and a ether Mitt felt he was a person worthy of knowing about the perfect place “It’s all quiet, ater,” he explained, “and it’sto, but I can’t find it yet”

The officer frowned His own s out into the Flate only yesterday, saying she had a house on a hill that was hers and she had to find it He thought he knew the signs “Yes, but where do you live?” he said

“Dike End,” Mitt said is “Of course That’s where I co to my home”

“I see,” said the officer He waved at the distant soldiers “Come here, one of you!”