small package done up in ice-blue paper, "take this, and open it when you get to the City." She kissed him lightly.
"Take this," Lily said, giving him one wrapped in mintygreen, "and open it when you think of it."
"Take this," Lucy said. Hers was wrapped in white. "Open it when you want to come home again."
He gathered these together, nodding, embarrassed, and put them in his duffle. The girls said nothing more about them, only sat for a while with him and Smoky on the porch, across which dead leaves blew unswept, gathering up under the seats of wicker chairs (whith ought to go in the basement, Smoky thought; an old chore of Auberon's; he felt a chill of foreboding, or loss, but thought it to be the somber November gloaming only). Auberon, who was young and solitary enough to think that he might have escaped his house without anyone being the wiser, that no one paid much attention to his movements, sat constrainedly with them watching dawn grow; then he slapped his knees, rose, shook his father's hand, kissed his sisters, promised to write, and at last stepped off southward into the sounding sea of leaves, striking for the crossroads where a bus could be hailed; he didn't look back at the four who watched him go.
"Well," Smoky said, remembering his own journey to the City at an age near Auberon's, "he'll have adventures."
"Lots," Tacey said.
"It'll be fun," Smoky said, "probably, possibly. I remember . . ."
"Fun for a while," Lily said.
"Not much fun," Lucy said. "Fun first, though, at least."
"Dad," said Tacey, seeing him trembling, "you shouldn't sit out here in your 'jammies, for God's sake."
He rose, pulling his bathrobe around him. This afternoon he would have to get in the porch furniture, before snow piled absurdly in its summery seats.
A Friend of the Doctor's
Shifting focus, George Mouse watched from a niche in the Old Stone Fence as Auberon came across the Old Pasture, short-cutting his way toward Meadowbrook. The Meadow Mouse in that niche, grass blade between his teeth and gloomy thoughts in his mind, watched the human come toward him, crunching great twigs and dead leaves by the hundreds beneath his boots. Ah, the great and clumsy feet of them! The shod feet, larger and harder even than the Brown Bear's of ancient memory! Only the fact that they had only two each, and came around rarely and singly near his home, allowed the Meadow Mouse to feel somewhat more kindly toward them than toward the house-wrecking Cow, his personal behemoth. As Auberon came closer, passing indeed very close to the niche where he huddled, the Meadow Mouse had a surprise. This was the boy—grown huge—who had once come with the Doctor who was the Meadow Mouse's great-great-grandfather's friend; the very same boy that the Meadow Mouse as a tiny mousling had once observed, hands on his bare and scabby knees peering intently into the familial home as the Doctor took down Great-great-grandfather's memoirs, which were so famous now not only among generations of Meadow Mice but throughout the Great World as well! His natural timidity overcome by a rush of family feeling, the Meadow Mouse put his nose out of the niche in the wall and attempted a greeting: "My great-great-grandfather knew the Doctor," he called out. But the fellow went right on.
The Doctor could talk with the animals, but the boy, apparently, could not.
A Shepherd in the Bronx
When Auberon was standing by the crossroads ankle-deep in golden leaves, and Smoky was standing abstracted before his tribe who puzzled that he had fallen silent, chalk to board, between noun and predicate, Daily Alice beneath her figured quilt (yes! George Mouse gasped at the breadth and length of his own Mental Sympathies) dreamed that her son Auberon, who lived in the City now, had telephoned to tell her how he was getting on.
"For a while I was a shepherd in the Bronx," the disembodied and still secretive voice was saying, "but when November came, I sold the flock;" and as he told her of it, she could see the Bronx he spoke of: its green, cropped sea-hills, a space of clean, windy air between those hills and the low wet clouds. It was as though she had been there herself when he shepherded, and had followed the delicate prints and black droppings along the rutted ways to pasturage, her ears full of their complainings, nose full of the smell of their wet wool on misty mornings.