hey left me, what my object was, and how many years had elapsed since
my last visit. I wonder what the good folk thought of me and my
communications.

At last, however, after much inquiry, I arrive at the place, make my
peace with the gardener, and enter. My disillusion dates from the
opening of the garden door. I repine, I find a reluctation of spirit
against believing that this is the place. What, is this kailyard that
inexhaustible paradise of a garden in which M---- and I found
"elbow-room," and expatiated together without sensible constraint? Is
that little turfed slope the huge and perilous green bank down which I
counted it a feat, and the gardener a sin, to run? Are these two squares
of stone, some two feet high, the pedestals on which I walked with such
a penetrating sense of dizzy elevation, and which I had expected to find
on a level with my eyes? Ay, the place is no more like what I expected
than this bleak April day is like the glorious September with which it
is incorporated in my memory. I look at the gardener, disappointment in
my face, and tell him that the place seems sorrily shrunken from the
high estate that it had held in my remembrance, and he returns, with
quiet laughter, by asking me how long it is since I was there. I tell
him, and he remembers me. Ah! I say, I was a great nuisance, I believe.
But no, my good gardener will plead guilty to having kept no record of
my evil-doings, and I find myself much softened toward the place and
willing to take a kinder view and pardon its shortcomings for the sake
of the gardener and his pretended recollection of myself. And it is just
at this stage (to complete my re-establishment) that I see a little
boy--the gardener's grandchild--just about the same age and the same
height that I must have been in the days when I was here last. My first
feeling is one of almost anger, to see him playing on the gravel where I
had played before, as if he had usurped something of my identity; but
next moment I feel a softening and a sort of rising and qualm of the
throat, accompanied by a pricking heat in the eye balls. I hastily join
conversation with the child, and inwardly felicitate myself that the
gardener is opportunely gone for the key of the house. But the child is
a sort of homily to me. He is perfectly quiet and resigned, an
unconscious hermit. I ask him jocularly if he gets as much abused as I
used to do for running down the bank; but the child's perfect
seriousne