ly prevented the formation of any such ornamental setting to
our house. My mother's repeated applications to our landlord (the
village baker) to remove or allow her to remove this unsightly
encumbrance were unavailing. He thought he might have future use for the
sand, and he knew he had no other present place of deposit for it; and
there it remained, defying all my mother's ingenuity and love of beauty
to convert it into any thing useful or ornamental, or other than a cruel
eye-sore and disfigurement to our small domain.

At length she hit upon a device for abating her nuisance, and set about
executing it as follows. She had the sand dug out of the interior of the
mound and added to its exterior, which she had graded and smoothed and
leveled and turfed so as to resemble the glacis of a square bastion or
casemate, or other steep, smooth-sided earth-work in a fortification. It
was, I suppose, about twenty feet high, and sloped at too steep an angle
for us to scale or descend it; a good footpath ran round the top,
accessible from the entrance of the sand-heap, the interior walls of
which she turfed (to speak Irish) with heather, and the ground or floor
of this curious inclosure she planted with small clumps of evergreen
shrubs, leaving a broad walk through the middle of it to the house door.
A more curious piece of domestic fortification never adorned a cottage
garden. It looked like a bit of Robinson Crusoe's castle--perhaps even
more like a portion of some deserted fortress. It challenged the
astonishment of all our visitors, whose invariable demand was, "What is
that curious place in the garden?" "The mound," was the reply; and the
mound was a delightful play-ground for us, and did infinite credit to my
mother's powers of contrivance. Forty years and more elapsed between my
first acquaintance with Weybridge and my last visit there. The Duke of
York's house at Oatlands, afterwards inhabited by my friends Lord and
Lady Ellesmere, had become a country hotel, pleasant to all its visitors
but those who, like myself, saw ghosts in its rooms and on its gravel
walks; its lovely park, a nest of "villas," made into a suburb of London
by the railroads that intersect in all directions the wild moorland
twenty miles from the city, which looked, when I first knew it, as if it
might be a hundred.

I read and spent a night at the Oatlands Hotel, and walked, before I did
so, to my mother's old cottage. The tiny house had had some small