houses 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.