It was the strangest story Winnie had ever heard. She soon suspected they had never told it before, except to each other—that she was their first real audience; for they gathered around her like children at their mother’s knee, each trying to claim her attention, and sometimes they all talked at once, and interrupted each other, in their eagerness.

Eighty-seven years before, the Tucks had come from a long way to the east, looking for a place to settle. In those days the wood was not a wood, it was a forest, just as her grandmother had said: a forest that went on and on and on. They had thought they would start a farm, as soon as they came to the end of the trees. But the trees never seemed to end. When they came to the part that was now the wood, and turned from the trail to find a camping place, they happened on the spring. ‘It was real nice,’ said Jesse with a sigh. ‘It looked just the way it does now. A clearing, lots of sunshine, that big tree with all those knobby roots. We stopped and everyone took a drink, even the horse.’

“‘No,” said Mae,’ the cat didn’t drink. That’s important.’

“‘Yes,’ said Miles, ‘don’t leave that out. We all had a drink, except for the cat.’

“‘Well, anyway,’ Jesse went on, ‘the water tasted —sort of strange. But we camped there overnight. And Pa carved a T on the tree trunk, to mark where we’d been. And then we went on.’

“They had come out of the forest at last, many miles to the west, had found a thinly populated valley, had started their farm. ‘We put up a house for Ma and Pa,’ said Miles, ‘and a little shack for Jesse and me. We figured we’d be starting families of our own pretty soon and would want our own houses.’

“‘That was the first time we figured there was something peculiar,’ said Mae. ‘Jesse fell out of a tree …’

“‘I was way up in the middle,’ Jesse interrupted, ‘trying to saw off some of the big branches before we cut her down. I lost my balance and I fell…’

“He landed plum on his head,” said Mae with a shudder. ‘We thought for sure he’d broke his neck. But come to find out, it didn’t hurt him a bit!’

“‘Not long after,’ Miles went on, ‘some hunters come by one day at sunset. The horse was out grazing by some trees and they shot him. Mistook him for a deer, they said. Can you fancy that? But the thing is, they didn’t kill him. The bullet went right on through him, and didn’t hardly even leave a mark.’

“‘Then Pa got snake bite …’

“‘And Jesse ate the poison toadstools …’

“‘And I cut myself,’ said Mae. ‘Remember? Slicing bread.’

But it was the passage of time that worried them most. They had worked the farm, settled down,made friends. But after ten years, then twenty, they had to face the fact that there was something terribly wrong. None of them was getting any older. ‘I was more’n forty by then,’ said Miles sadly. ‘I was married. I had two children. But, from the look of me, I was still twenty-two. My wife, she finally made up her mind I’d sold my soul to the Devil. She left me. She went away and she took the children with her.’

“I”m glad I never got married,’ Jesse put in.

“‘It was the same with our friends,’ said Mae. ‘They come to pull back from us. There was talk about witchcraft. Black magic. Well, you can’t hardly blame them, but finally we had to leave the farm. We didn’t know where to go. We started back the way we come, just wandering. We was like gypsies. When we got this far, it’d changed, of course. A lot of the trees was gone. There was people, and Treegap —it was a new village. The road was here, but in those days it was mostly just a cow path. We went on into what was left of the wood to make a camp, and when we got to the clearing and the tree and the spring, we remembered it from before.’

“‘It hadn’t changed, no more’n we had,’ said Miles. ‘And that was how we found out. Pa’d carved a T on the tree, remember, twenty years before, but the T was just where it’d been when he done it. That tree hadn’t grown one whit in all that time. It was exactly the same. And the T he’d carved was as fresh as if it’d just been put there.’

Then they had remembered drinking the water. They—and the horse. But not the cat. The cat had lived a long and happy life on the farm, but had died some ten years before. So they decided at last that the source of their changelessness was the spring. ‘When we come to that conclusion,’ Mae went on, ‘Tuck said—that’s my husband, Angus Tuck- he said he had to be sure, once and for all. He took his shotgun and he pointed it at hisself the best way he could, and before we could stop him, he pulled the trigger.’

There was a long pause. Mae’s fingers, laced together in her lap, twisted with the tension of remembering. At last she said, ‘The shot knocked him down. Went into his heart. It had to, the way he aimed. And right on through him. It scarcely even left a mark. Just likee—you know—like you shot a bullet through water. And he was just the same as if he’d never done it.’

“‘After that we went sort of crazy,’ said Jesse, grinning at the memory. ‘Heck, we was going to live forever. Can you picture what it felt like to find that out?’

“‘But then we sat down and talked it over . . .’ said Miles.

“‘We’re still talking it over,’ Jesse added.

“‘And we figured it’d be very bad if everyone knowed about that spring,’ said Mae.  ‘We begun to see what it would mean.’ She peered at Winnie. ‘Do you understand, child? That water—it stops you right where you are. If you’d had a drink of it today, you’d stay a little girl forever. You’d never grow up, not ever.’

“‘We don’t know how it works, or even why,‘  said Miles. ‘Pa thinks it’s something left over from—well, from some other plan for the way the world should be’ said Jesse. ‘Some plan that didn’t work out too good. And so everything was changed. Except that the spring was passed over, somehow or other. Maybe he’s right. I don’t know. But you see, Winnie Foster, when I told you before I’m a hundred and four years old, I was telling the truth. But I’m really only seventeen. And, so far as I know, I’ll stay seventeen till the end of the world.'” Babbitt, Tuck, pgs. 37-41.