with no economy of space; a house belonging to a period when land was
cheap, and, so far as that was concerned, there was no occasion to
economize. Though it was so near the town, the clump of trees in which it
was environed was a veritable grove. In the grounds in spring the
primroses grew as thickly as in the forest. We had a few fields for the
cows, and an excellent walled garden. The place is being pulled down at
this moment to make room for more streets of mean little houses,--the
kind of thing, and not a dull house of faded gentry, which perhaps the
neighborhood requires. The house was dull, and so were we, its last
inhabitants; and the furniture was faded, even a little dingy,--nothing
to brag of. I do not, however, intend to convey a suggestion that we were
faded gentry, for that was not the case. My father, indeed, was rich, and
had no need to spare any expense in making his life and his house bright
if he pleased; but he did not please, and I had not been long enough at
home to exercise any special influence of my own. It was the only home I
had ever known; but except in my earliest childhood, and in my holidays
as a schoolboy, I had in reality known but little of it. My mother had
died at my birth, or shortly after, and I had grown up in the gravity and
silence of a house without women. In my infancy, I believe, a sister of
my father's had lived with us, and taken charge of the household and of
me; but she, too, had died long, long ago, my mourning for her being one
of the first things I could recollect. And she had no successor. There
were, indeed, a housekeeper and some maids,--the latter of whom I only
saw disappearing at the end of a passage, or whisking out of a room when
one of "the gentlemen" appeared. Mrs. Weir, indeed, I saw nearly every
day; but a curtsey, a smile, a pair of nice round arms which she caressed
while folding them across her ample waist, and a large white apron, were
all I knew of her. This was the only female influence in the house. The
drawing-room I was aware of only as a place of deadly good order, into
which nobody ever entered. It had three long windows opening on the lawn,