Part One: Me One: Scaredy Cat I WAS running away. I was running away from England, from my childhood, from the winter, from a sequence of untidy, unattractive love-affairs, from the few sticks of furniture and jumble of overworn clothes that my London life had collected around me; and I was running away from drabness, fustiness, snobbery, the claustrophobia of close horizons, and from my inability, although I am quite an attractive rat, to make headway in the rat-race. In fact I was running away from almost everything except the law. And I had run a very long way indeed—almost, exaggerating a bit, halfway round the world. In fact I had come all the way from London to The Dreamy Pines Motor Court, which is ten miles west of Lake George, the famous American tourist resort in the Adirondacks—that vast expanse of mountains, lakes, and pine forests which forms most of the northern territory of New York State. I had started on September the first, and it was now Friday the thirteenth of October. When I had left, the grimy little row of domesticated maples in my square had been green, or as green as any tree can be in London in August. Now, in the billion-strong army of pine trees that marched away northward toward the Canadian border, the real, wild maples flamed here and there like shrapnel-bursts. And I felt that I, or at any rate my