"Where is the perfume?" I bawled.

All I got was squawks. Some of the birds were, in fact, standing on one foot and tucking their heads away.

It was growing lighter. The birds were going to bed.

Feverishly, I pulled out Uncle Izzy's old volume of poetry.

Brushing from my mind a vision of Mr. Picks in a state of shock and another picture of Uncle Isadore snickering triumphantly, I stood on that desert land enchanted—on that home by horror haunted, and solemnly read "The Dodo" to a colony of wingless birds.

My dodo identified himself at the proper place, but I kept on, waiting for something to show me my inheritance.

"Then methought the air grew denser," I read.

"Perfume from an unseen censor!" a bird croaked from the back row.

"Where?" I cried, pushing my way through the birds crowding around me in various stages of roost and curiosity.

"Then," I repeated, "the air grew denser."

"Perfume," the bird now in front of me said, "from an unseen censor."

He began to scratch at the ground assiduously under one of four dim shapes about the level of my eyes. Then he yawned gapingly, gave up and went to sleep.

I sat down to wait, because it was almost dawn and the last dodo had tucked his head into his feathers.

Daylight showed me four little trees, nothing like the usual scraggy vegetation of Alvarla. They must be perfume trees, I thought. But they were too young to have blossoms or pods.

I didn't go too near them, remembering what Rene had said.

And, remembering that, I began to figure out how they grew here.

This place was a little valley. No, a crater. Several feet deeper than my height, with sloping sides. The birds apparently kept it warm with their body heat, plus the heat the rocky sides would store. Since it was a crater, the winds wouldn't reach it. The crater made a basin to catch the snow which I could see beginning to melt at the edges and ooze down the slope.

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