“If you should walk and wind and wander far enough on one of those afternoons in April when smoke goes down instead of up, and nearby things sound far away and far things near, you are more than likely to come at last to the enchanted forest that lies between the Moonstone Mines and Centaurs Mountain. You’ll know the woods when you are still a long way off by virtue of a fragrance you can never quite forget and never quite remember. And there’ll be a distant bell that causes boys to run and laugh and girls to stand and tremble. If you pluck one of the ten thousand toadstools that grow in the emerald grass … it will feel as heavy as a hammer in your hand, but if you let it go it will sail away over the trees like a tiny parachute …”
— the beginning of The White Deer by James Thurber (1945)
Words + Images 