, and was nearly pulled
down, and all its old ornaments stripped and carried away to the
owner's other house, where they were set up, and looked as awkward as
if some one were to carry away the old tombs they had seen lately at
the Abbey, and stick them up in Lady C.'s tawdry gilt drawing-room.
Here John smiled, as much as to say, "that would be foolish indeed."
And then I told how, when she came to die, her funeral was attended by
a concourse of all the poor, and some of the gentry too, of the
neighbourhood for many miles round, to show their respect for her
memory, because she had been such a good and religious woman; so good
indeed that she knew all the Psaltery by heart, ay, and a great part
of the Testament besides. Here little Alice spread her hands. Then I
told what a tall, upright, graceful person their great-grandmother
Field once was; and how in her youth she was esteemed the best
dancer--here Alice's little right foot played an involuntary movement,
till upon my looking grave, it desisted--the best dancer, I was
saying, in the county, till a cruel disease, called a cancer, came,
and bowed her down with pain; but it could never bend her good
spirits, or make them stoop, but they were still upright, because she
was so good and religious. Then I told how she was used to sleep by
herself in a lone chamber of the great lone house; and how she
believed that an apparition of two infants was to be seen at midnight
gliding up and down the great staircase near where she slept, but she
said "those innocents would do her no harm;" and how frightened I used
to be, though in those days I had my maid to sleep with me, because I
was never half so good or religious as she--and yet I never saw the
infants. Here John expanded all his eyebrows and tried to look
courageous. Then I told how good she was to all her grand-children,
having us to the great house in the holydays, where I in particular
used to spend many hours by myself, in gazing upon the old busts of
the Twelve Caesars, that had been Emperors of Rome, till the old marble
heads would seem to live again, or I to be turned into marble with
them; how I never could be tired with roaming about that huge mansion,
with its vast empty rooms, with their worn-out hangings, fluttering
tapestry, and carved oaken panels, with the gilding almost rubbed
out--sometimes in the spacious old-fashioned gardens, which I had
almost to myself, unless when now and then a solitary gardening man