ding stairs except Bessie. On the first floor to the
front, with five windows looking into High Street, is the drawing-room.
This was divided, and one part of it was converted into a schoolroom.
The Principal's study was on the same floor at the back of the house.
What is known as the north wing stretches back, and has two or three
small rooms which can easily be isolated. It was in them that Bessie was
nursed through scarlet fever.

There is also a south wing with excellent kitchens and good servants'
rooms.

On the second floor the space above the drawing-room and schoolroom was
occupied by Mrs. Gilbert's room and the two nurseries; whilst a large
bedroom at the back, away from the street and over the study, the spare
room, was that in which all the children saw the light, and from which
eleven of them successively emerged. The second and ninth were boys, and
there were nine daughters. A little girl died in 1834, and is buried in
the adjacent churchyard of St. Mary's. Bessie, who was eight years old,
was taken into the room to bid farewell to her sister Gertrude, and laid
her little hand upon her. She never forgot it; and would say in after
years in a low tone of awe: "She was so cold." The impression produced
on a sensitive organisation was so painful that she was never again
taken into the chamber of death.

There is a large "flat" or leaden roof above this "spare" room over the
study, to which there is access from an adjacent passage; but this roof
is too dangerous a place for a playground, and the children had none in
or near the house. The south windows in the front look into High Street;
an east window high up in the nursery looks out upon St. Mary's; and all
the windows to the north at the back of the house look over walls, and
houses, and chimney pots, and brick and mortar. The children played at
home in ordinary times, but in the long vacation they played in the
quadrangle, a grassy, treeless enclosure, but a very garden of delight
to them. The favourite part of it was near the figures called "Cain and
Abel," long since removed, and long since known not to have represented
Cain and Abel, but to have been a copy of antique sculpture. There were
grand games of hide and seek around "Cain and Abel," in which Bessie
always joined.

Sometimes the children dined in the College Hall during vacation, and
were joined after dinner in the quadrangle by their friends amongst the
Fellows of Brasenose, who all had a kin