An eery sensation struck the young girl:  the feeling that she had lived this moment once before.  She paused in her gardening to lift her head and glance around.  She was looking for something unusual that she recalled, something to prove that this day was repeating.

It was shortly after breakfast on a pleasant summer morning.  The garden was bursting with a wide variety of healthy green plants, from great bristling bushes taller than a man to typical vegetables not yet waist high.  No sign of the order that you might expect to find, such as rows or patches, appeared.  Robust shrubs, delicate flowers and food plants grew side-by-side in a riot of confusion.  At one end of the spacious garden stood The Roost,¹ which had been the girl’s home all her life.  This was a round, four-story tower of dark stone patterned with bright green ivy.  It perched at the top of the hill, standing out starkly against the clear blue sky.  Two ancient, hunched crab apple trees topped with a healthy thatch of mistletoe framed the front door.  Along the other end of the garden ran a fieldstone fence broken by a rickety, well-weathered wooden gate.  The path from the gate to the tower cut sharply back and forth through the garden like a bolt of lightning.  Clucking chickens with red, white and black patches of color were strutting around the nearby yard.  Beyond them stood a shabby-looking wooden barn, round like the house.