The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert

seven miles away, and across the river. It could be nine o’clock on a Sunday night during a bitterly cold March storm, and Alma would leap off her father’s lap and start running. A servant would have to catch her at the door and carry her back into the drawing room, or else—at the age of six, without a cloak or bonnet upon her, without a penny in her pocket or the tiniest bit of gold sewn into her hems—by God, she would have done it.
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    W hat a childhood this girl passed!
    Not only did Alma have these potent and clever parents, but she also had the entire estate of White Acre to explore at her will. It was truly an Arcadia. There was so much to be taken in. The house alone was an ever-unfolding marvel. There was the lumpy stuffed giraffe in the east pavilion, with hisalarmed and comical face. There was the threesome of enormous mastodon ribs in the front atrium, dug up in a nearby field by a local farmer, who traded it to Henry for a new rifle. There was the ballroom, gleaming and empty, where once—in the chill of late autumn—Alma had encountered a trapped hummingbird, which had shot past her ear in the most remarkable trajectory (a jeweled missile, it seemed, fired from a tiny cannon). There was the caged mynah bird in her father’s study, who came all the way from China, and who could speak with impassioned eloquence (or so Henry claimed) but only in its native tongue. There were the rare snakeskins, preserved with a filling of straw and sawdust. There were shelves stocked with South Sea coral, Javanese idols, ancient Egyptian jewelry of lapis lazuli, and dusty Turkish almanacs.
    And there were so many places in which one could eat! The dining room, the drawing room, the kitchen, the parlor, the study, the sunroom, and the verandahs with their shaded arbors. There were luncheons of tea and gingerbread, chestnuts and peaches. (And such peaches—pink on one side, gold on the other.) In the winter, one could drink soup in the upstairs nursery while watching the river below, which glittered under the barren sky like a polished mirror.
    But outdoors, the delights were even more plentiful and ripe with mystery. There were the noble greenhouses, filled with cycads, palms, and ferns, all packed in deep, black, stinking tanner’s bark to keep them warm. There was the loud and frightening water engine, which kept the greenhouses wet. There were the mysterious forcing houses—always faintingly hot—where the delicate imported plants were brought to heal after long sea voyages, and where orchids were bribed into blooming. There were the lemon trees in the orangery, which were wheeled outside every summer like consumptive patients, to enjoy the natural sun. There was the small Grecian temple, hidden at the end of an avenue of oaks, where one could imagine Olympus.
    There was the dairy and, hard beside it, the buttery—with its alluring whiff of alchemy, superstition, and witchcraft. The German dairymaids drew hexes in chalk on the buttery’s door, and muttered incantations before entering the building. The cheese would not set, they told Alma, if it was cursed by the devil. When Alma asked her mother about this, she was scolded as a credulous innocent, and given a long lecture in how cheeseactually sets—as it turns out, through a perfectly rational chemical transmutation of fresh milk treated with rennet, which is then set to age in wax rinds at controlled temperatures. Lesson completed, Beatrix then wiped the hexes from the buttery’s door, reprimanding the dairymaids as superstitious fools. The next day, Alma noticed, the chalk hexes were drawn back in. One way or another, the cheese continued to set properly.
    Then there were the endless sylvan acres of woodland—left purposely uncultivated—filled with rabbits, foxes, and park deer who would eat out of one’s hand. Alma was allowed—nay, encouraged!—by her parents to wander that woodland at will, in order to learn the natural world. She gathered