"Regret! I ached for it. I couldn't picture us being happy in this muddy mining place; I couldn't see this bare barracks ever getting homelike. But it was a roomy house. The dining-room was to the right of the front door, the study to the left, and the nursery was on the ground floor, too. They were all big square rooms: the dining-room was cosy in the evening but rather dark in the day time; the study was a very cheerful room, with books all round the walls, and a bright red carpet, and green leather furniture." "And a little square clock," Ann added, "with an honest sort of face, and a picture of John Knox, long white beard and all, above the mantelpiece, and the carpet had a design on it of large squares; I know, for I used to play a game on it, jumping from one to another. Some deceased elder had left to the Manse and to each succeeding minister a tall glass-doored bookcase containing, among other books, a set of Shakespeare's plays illustrated. It was funny to see how the artist had made even Falstaff and Ariel quite early Victorian--and as for merry Beatrice I think she wore a bustle! Not that it worried us; we were delighted with his efforts ... and in that glass-doored bookcase there stayed also a very little book dressed in fairy green, with gilt lettering on its cover. I have tried for years to find another copy, but I have nothing to go on except that it was a very tiny book and that it contained fairy tales, translations from the German I think, for it talked in one of a king lying under the green lindens! I thought linden the most lovely word I had ever heard! it seemed to set all the horns of Elfland blowing for me. One of the stories must have been _Lohengrin_, there was a swan in it and 'a frail scallop.' How I wept when it appeared for the second time and took the knight away for ever! I loved Germany then because it was the home of green lindens and swans with scallops, and houses with pointed roofs and wide chimneys where storks nested. Even in the war I couldn't hate it as much as I ought to have done, because of that little green book.... But we're straying again, at least I am.... You got to like the house, didn't you?" "Oh dear, yes. It was terribly gaunt at first, but before we left it I thought it was pretty nearly perfect. When we got fresh paper and paint, and the wide upper landing and staircase carpeted with crimson, and curtains shading the high staircase window, everyone said how pretty it was. The drawing-room was always a pleasant room, with two sunny windows, and all my treasures (you would call them atrocities) in the way of gilt and alabaster clocks with glass shades, and marble-topped chiffonier, and red rep furniture. But the big night nursery was the nicest room of all, with its row of little beds, each with a gay counterpane! There was a small room opening from it where your clothes stayed, with a bath and a wash-hand basin--a very handy place."