s where someone must once have lived, though his place knows him
no more. It was so with the manor. How often had I peeped through the
gates, catching sight of garden walks, and wondering whither they led,
and who had walked in them; seeing that the shutters behind one window
were partly open, and longing to look in.

"To-day I had been in the walks and peeped through the window. This
was the happiness.

"Through the window I had seen a large hall with a marble floor and
broad stone stairs winding upwards into unknown regions. By the walks
I had arrived at the locked door of the kitchen garden, at a small
wood or wilderness of endless delights (including a broken swing), and
at a dilapidated summer-house. I had wandered over the spongy lawn,
which was cut into a long green promenade by high clipt yew-hedges,
walking between which, in olden times, the ladies grew erect and
stately, as plants among brushwood stretch up to air and light.

"Finally, I had brought away such relics as it seemed to me that
honesty would allow. I had found half a rusty pair of scissors in the
summer-house. Perhaps some fair lady of former days had lost them
here, and swept distractedly up and down the long walks seeking them.
Perhaps they were a present, and she had given a luck-penny for them,
lest they should cut love. Sarah said the housekeeper might have
dropped them there; but Sarah was not a person of sentiment. I did not
show her the marble I found by the hedge, the acorn I picked up in the
park, nor a puny pansy which, half way back to a wild heartsease, had
touched me as a pathetic memorial of better days. When I got home, I
put the scissors, the marble, and the pansy into a box. The acorn I
hung in a bottle of water--it was to be an oak tree.

"Properly speaking, I was not at home just then, but on a visit to my
grandmother and a married aunt without children who lived with her. A
fever had broken out in my own home, and my visit here had been
prolonged to keep me out of the way of infection. I was very happy and
comfortable except for one single vexation, which was this:

"I slept on a little bed in what had once been the nursery, a large
room which was now used as a workroom. A great deal of sewing was done
in my grandmother's house, and the sewing-maid and at least one other
of the servants sat there every evening. A red silk screen was put
before my bed to shield me from the candlelight, and I was supposed
to be asleep when t