perhaps rather enjoyed her grotesqueness--and that
no one who was willing to take the least trouble about her was competent
to make her a particle more refined than I saw her--the wonder ceased. We
don't know how little is heritable, and how much simply training, until we
encounter some-such spectacle as that of my poor cousin Milly.

When I lay down in my bed and reviewed the day, it seemed like a month of
wonders. Uncle Silas was always before me; the voice so silvery for an old
man--so preternaturally soft; the manners so sweet, so gentle; the aspect,
smiling, suffering, spectral. It was no longer a shadow; I had now seen
him in the flesh. But, after all, was he more than a shadow to me? When I
closed my eyes I saw him before me still, in necromantic black, ashy with a
pallor on which I looked with fear and pain, a face so dazzlingly pale,
and those hollow, fiery, awful eyes! It sometimes seemed as if the curtain
opened, and I had seen a ghost.

I had seen him; but he was still an enigma and a marvel. The living face
did not expound the past, any more than the portrait portended the future.
He was still a mystery and a vision; and thinking of these things I fell
asleep.

Mary Quince, who slept in the dressing-room, the door of which was close
to my bed, and lay open to secure me against ghosts, called me up; and the
moment I knew where I was I jumped up, and peeped eagerly from the window.
It commanded the avenue and court-yard; but we were many windows removed
from that over the hall-door, and immediately beneath ours lay the two
giant lime trees, prostrate and uprooted, which I had observed as we drove
up the night before.

I saw more clearly in the bright light of morning the signs of neglect and
almost of dilapidation which had struck me as I approached. The court-yard
was tufted over with grass, seldom from year to year crushed by the
carriage-wheels, or trodden by the feet of visitors. This melancholy
verdure thickened where the area was more remote from the centre; and under
the windows, and skirting the walls to the left, was reinforced by a thick
grove of nettles. The avenue was all grass-grown, except in the very
centre, where a narrow track still showed the roadway The handsome carved
balustrade of the court-yard was discoloured with lichens, and in two
places gapped and broken; and the air of decay was heightened by the fallen
trees, among whose sprays and yellow leaves the small birds were hopping.