Pen and ink, white gouache

8.3 x 11.7 inches

"The wide marketplace, surrounded by silent facades, was empty, but it didn't take us long to find the house 

that the agency had indicated to us. It was one of the largest in the place; not far from the church standing in a lawn cemetery of Scotch pines and yews, it lay in a quiet street, hidden behind a man-high wall and a thickly intergrown copse of juniper and Lusitanian laurel. We walked down the sweeping driveway slightly and across the front yard which was evenly covered with fine gravel. To the right, behind the stables and coach houses, rose high into the clear autumn sky a stand of beech trees with a colony of crows, now deserted in the early afternoon, the nests dark spots under the canopy of leaves that moved only sometimes."

(From the volume: The Emigrants. Story: Dr. Selwyn by W.G. Sebald, Fischerverlage, 1992)