They caught the wind, they held the sunset and the dawn;
they turned the air into a shining garden. They stood somehow for a
yearning beauty in his own heart that expressed itself in his stories.
"If you pick them," he warned Tim, who climbed like a monkey, and was
as destructive as his age, "the place will lose its charm. They grow
for the End of the World, and the End of the World belongs to them.
This wonderful spot will have no beauty when they're gone." To wear a
blossom in the hair or buttonhole was to be protected against decay
and ugliness.
Most wonderful of all, however, was the door in the old grey fence;
for it was a Gateway, and a Gateway, according to Uncle Felix, was a
solemn thing. None knew where it led to, it was a threshold into an
unknown world. Ordinary doors, doors in a house, for instance, were
not Gateways; they merely opened into rooms and other familiar places.
Dentists, governesses, and bedrooms existed behind ordinary, indoor
doors; but out-of-doors opened straight into the sky, and in virtue of
it were extraordinary. They were Gateways. At the End of the World
stood a stupendous, towering door that was a Gateway.
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