ective according to their age, and became really my grandparents,
in a room, properly, of another world, which could be seen, but was
not. A room no one could enter any more. I remember a black sofa,
which smelt of dust, an antimacassar over its head. That sofa would
wake to squeak tales if I stood on it to inspect the model of a ship in
yellow ivory, resting on a wall-bracket above. There were many old
shells in the polished brass fender, some with thick orange lips and
spotted backs; others were spirals of mother-o'-pearl, which took
different colours for every way you held them. You could get the only
sound in the room by putting the shells to your ear. Like the people
of the portraits, it was impossible to believe the shells had ever
lived. The inside of the grate was filled with white paper, and the
trickles of fine black dust which rested in its crevices would start
and run stealthily when people walked in the next room. Over the
looking-glass there hung a pair of immense buffalo horns, with a piece
of curly black hair dividing them which looked like the skin of our
retriever dog. Above the horns was the picture of "The Famous Tea
Clipper _Oberon_, setting her Studding Sails off the Lizard"; but so
high was the print, and so faint--for the picture, too, was old--that
some one grown up had to tell me all about it.

The clipper _Oberon_ long since sailed to the Isle-of-No-Land-at-All,
and the room in which her picture hung has gone also, like old
Dockland, and is now no more than something remembered. The clipper's
picture went with the wreckage, when the room was strewn, and I expect
in that house today there is a photograph of a steamer with two funnels.

Nothing conjures back that room so well as the recollection of a
strange odour which fell from it when its door opened, as though
something bodiless passed as we entered. There was never anything in
the room which alone could account for the smell, for it had in it
something of the sofa, which was old and black, and of the lacquered
tea-caddy, within the lid of which was the faint ghost of a principle
indefinably ancient and rare; and there was in it, too, something of
the shells. But you could never find where the smell really came from.
I have tried, and know. A recollection of that strange dusky fragrance
brings back the old room on a summer afternoon, so sombre that the
mahogany sideboard had its own reddish light, so quiet that the clock
could