everyone dies, don't they?

Isn't that so?

You tried to get into the locked drawer today, didn't you?

How do the dead comeback, mother?

What's the secrets of it?

One.

He painted trees as by some special divining instinct of their essential qualities.

He understood them.

He knew why an oak forest, for instance,

no individual was utterly distinct from its fellows, and

why no two beaches in the world were alike.

People asked him down to paint a favourite lime or silver birch, for he caught the individuality

of a tree as some catch the individuality of a horse.

How he managed it was something of a puzzle, for he had never

had painting lessons. His drawing was often wildly inaccurate, and while his perception

of a tree personality was true and vivid, his rendering of it might almost approach the

ludicrous. Yet the character and personality of that particular tree stood

there alive beneath his brush, shining, frowning, dreaming, as the case might be, friendly

or hostile, good or evil. It emerged. There was nothing else in the wide world that he could paint.

Flowers and landscapes he only muddled away into a smudge. With people, he was helpless and hopeless,

also with animals. Skies he could sometimes manage manage or effects of wind in foliage.

But as a rule, he left these all severely alone.

...