will ask. What was there in this
simple and somewhat pretty sleeping-closet to startle the most timid?
Merely this--These articles of furniture could not be real, solid
arm-chairs, looking-glasses, and washstands--they must be the ghosts of
such articles; or, if this were denied as too wild an hypothesis--and,
confounded as I was, I _did_ deny it--there remained but to conclude
that I had myself passed into an abnormal state of mind; in short, that
I was very ill and delirious: and even then, mine was the strangest
figment with which delirium had ever harassed a victim.

I knew--I was obliged to know--the green chintz of that little chair;
the little snug chair itself, the carved, shining-black, foliated frame
of that glass; the smooth, milky-green of the china vessels on the
stand; the very stand too, with its top of grey marble, splintered at
one corner;--all these I was compelled to recognise and to hail, as
last night I had, perforce, recognised and hailed the rosewood, the
drapery, the porcelain, of the drawing-room.

Bretton! Bretton! and ten years ago shone reflected in that mirror. And
why did Bretton and my fourteenth year haunt me thus? Why, if they came
at all, did they not return complete? Why hovered before my distempered
vision the mere furniture, while the rooms and the locality were gone?
As to that pincushion made of crimson satin, ornamented with gold beads
and frilled with thread-lace, I had the same right to know it as to
know the screens--I had made it myself. Rising with a start from the
bed, I took the cushion in my hand and examined it. There was the
cipher "L. L. B." formed in gold beds, and surrounded with an oval
wreath embroidered in white silk. These were the initials of my
godmother's name--Lonisa Lucy Bretton.

"Am I in England? Am I at Bretton?" I muttered; and hastily pulling up
the blind with which the lattice was shrouded, I looked out to try and
discover _where_ I was; half-prepared to meet the calm, old, handsome
buildings and clean grey pavement of St. Ann's Street, and to see at
the end the towers of the minster: or, if otherwise, fully expectant of
a town view somewhere, a rue in Villette, if not a street in a pleasant
and ancient English city.

I looked, on the contrary, through a frame of leafage, clustering round
the high lattice, and forth thence to a grassy mead-like level, a
lawn-terrace with trees rising from the lower ground beyond--high
forest-trees, such as I had no