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member must take some time to grow again. None the less their bodies are their own, and I who know nothing of them must take instruction humbly, and if a man asks me to do the same again I'm sure I shall, though for myself I felt nothing.
    In copulation, an act where the woman has a more pleasurable part, the member comes away in the great tunnel and creeps into the womb where it splits open after a time like a runner bean and deposits a little mannikin to grow in the rich soil. At least, so I am told by women who have become pregnant and must know their husbands' members as well as I do my own dogs.
    When Jordan is older I will tell him what I know about the human body and urge him to be careful of his member. And yet it is not that part of him I fear for; it is his heart. His heart.
    Here at Wimbledon we have a French gardener named Andre Mollet who has come specially to teach Tradescant the French ways with water fountains and parterres.
    Like most Frenchmen he is more interested in his member than in his spade and has made amorous overtures to every woman on the estate, with the exception of myself. In honour of his tirelessness we are to have a stream shooting nine feet high with a silver ball balanced on the top. The cascading torrent will mingle with a wall of water like a hedge, dividing the fish-ponds from the peasantry.
    The fish-ponds are circles and squares filled with rare waters, sometimes salt, sometimes still, containing fabulous fishes of the kind imagined but never seen.
    In the largest pond are a shoal of flying fish that toss their glittering bodies in one leap from one side to the other. Do they dream of tree-tops buffeted by the wind?
    In another, a curious pool shining with its own radiance from a holy well in the East, are a group of spotted toads notable for their singing. These toads do not croak, but engage in madrigals and set up an anthem more fair than any choir in church. Even the palace of the Sun King in France has nothing so rare and wonderful, though I am told he has a dancing weasel given in exchange for a hundred pear trees. For myself I prefer the running stream that leads from the bank planted with cherry and makes a basin in the grotto with the statue of the hermit. The stream is shallow, its bottom crowded with tiny pebbles, its sides sprouting watercress. Underneath the stones are freshwater shrimps feeding on creatures even smaller than themselves. There is a rock near to its source and I very often hide behind it at evening, singing songs of love and death and waiting for the sun to set. When the orange bar is straight across the horizon the kingfisher comes with blue wings beating and dives in one swift streak. Ascends like a saint, vertical and glorious, its beak crammed with shrimp.

    At sea, and away from home in a creaking boat, with Tradescant sleeping beside me, there is a town I sometimes dream about, whose inhabitants are so cunning that to escape the insistence of creditors they knock down their houses in a single night and rebuild them elsewhere. So the number of buildings in the city is always constant but they are never in the same place from one day to the next.
    For close families, and most of the people in the city are close families, this presents no problem, and it is more usual than not for the escapees to find their pursuers waiting for them on the new site of their choice.
    As a subterfuge, then, it has little to recommend it, but as a game it is a most fulfilling pastime and accounts for the extraordinary longevity of the men and women who live there. We were all nomads once, and crossed the deserts and the seas on tracks that could not be detected, but were clear to those who knew the way. Since settling down and rooting like trees, but without the ability to make use of the wind to scatter our seed, we have found only infection and discontent.
    In the city the inhabitants have reconciled two discordant desires: to remain in one place and to leave it behind for