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heart.

CHAPTER V.

A NEW ACCOMPLISHMENT LEARNED.

I was rapidly attaining the comfortable home feeling at Oaklands, which
makes life in castle or hut a rapture. There were so many sources of
enjoyment open to me. I had a more than usual love for painting, and
had for years prosecuted the art more from love than duty. My last
teacher, an old German Professor, exacting and very thorough, had been as
particular with my instruction as if my bread depended on my proficiency.
I thanked him now in my heart when I found myself shut out from other
opportunities for improvement than what, unaided, I could secure. There
were special bits of landscape I loved to sketch over and over again;
these I would take to Mrs. Flaxman, or Reynolds, the housekeeper, to see
if they could recognize the original of my drawing; but even Samuel, the
stable-boy, could name the spot at sight. His joy was unbounded, but
scarcely excelled my own when I succeeded in making a water-color sketch
of himself, the hair a shade or two less flame-colored than was natural,
and which even Hubert pronounced a very fair likeness. Then in the large,
stately drawing-room, some of whose furnishing dated back a century or
more, stood a fine, grand piano. Here I studied over again my school
lessons, or tried new ventures from some of the masters. What dreams I
had in that dim room in the pauses of my music; peopling that place again
with the vanished ones who had loved and suffered there my own dead
parents among the rest, whose faces looked down at me, I thought
tenderly, from the walls where their portraits hung in heavy carved
frames, of a fashion a generation old. There was about my mother's face a
haunting expression, as of a well known face which long afterward looked
out at me one day from my own reflection in the mirror and then, to my
joy, I discovered I was like her in feature and expression. In the
library too, whose key Mr. Winthrop had left with Mrs. Flaxman for my
use, I found an unexplored wonderland. My literature had chiefly
consisted of the text book variety, and if I had possessed wider range,
my time was so fully occupied with lessons I could not have availed
myself of the privilege; but now, with what relish I went from shelf to
shelf, dipping into a book here and another there, taking by turns
poetry, history, fiction, and biography, Shakespeare and Milton had so
often perplexed me in Grammar and analysis, that I left them for the m