lidays and everyone groaned; they thought of the white
house with the beautiful tangled garden--late roses, asters, marigold,
sweet mignonette, and feathery asparagus--of the wilderness which
someone had once meant to make into an orchard, but which was now,
as Father said, 'five acres of thistles haunted by the ghosts of baby
cherry-trees'. They thought of the view across the valley, where the
lime-kilns looked like Aladdin's palaces in the sunshine, and they
thought of their own sandpit, with its fringe of yellowy grasses and
pale-stringy-stalked wild flowers, and the little holes in the cliff
that were the little sand-martins' little front doors. And they thought
of the free fresh air smelling of thyme and sweetbriar, and the scent of
the wood-smoke from the cottages in the lane--and they looked round old
Nurse's stuffy parlour, and Jane said--

'Oh, how different it all is!'

It was. Old Nurse had been in the habit of letting lodgings, till Father
gave her the children to take care of. And her rooms were furnished 'for
letting'. Now it is a very odd thing that no one ever seems to furnish
a room 'for letting' in a bit the same way as one would furnish it for
living in. This room had heavy dark red stuff curtains--the colour that
blood would not make a stain on--with coarse lace curtains inside. The
carpet was yellow, and violet, with bits of grey and brown oilcloth in
odd places. The fireplace had shavings and tinsel in it. There was
a very varnished mahogany chiffonier, or sideboard, with a lock that
wouldn't act. There were hard chairs--far too many of them--with crochet
antimacassars slipping off their seats, all of which sloped the wrong
way. The table wore a cloth of a cruel green colour with a yellow
chain-stitch pattern round it. Over the fireplace was a looking-glass
that made you look much uglier than you really were, however plain you
might be to begin with. Then there was a mantelboard with maroon plush
and wool fringe that did not match the plush; a dreary clock like a
black marble tomb--it was silent as the grave too, for it had long since
forgotten how to tick. And there were painted glass vases that never had
any flowers in, and a painted tambourine that no one ever played, and
painted brackets with nothing on them.

'And maple-framed engravings of the Queen, the Houses of
Parliament, the Plains of Heaven, and of a blunt-nosed
woodman's flat return.'

There were two books--last December's