I already had two boys who were putting gray in my hair, and I added two stepkids when I married the man who would become Jane’s father.

She was sitting at the parlour table with a small abacus in front of her. … Peter still recorded weights of fleeces and pounds of cabbages and bushels of grain by cutting notches in tally sticks, but Liza would translate them into figures on paper and have them totted up on the abacus the very same day.

The Hawaiian duck or koloa (Anas wyvilliana) has never been reduced to anything like the pitiful remnant that once represented its relatives on Laysan.

The flowers glowed red and golden: snapdragons and sunflowers, and nasturtians trailing all over the turf walls and peeping in at the round windows.