Suddenly, suddenly, a sort of ghost of my grandmother’s room rose before me; and as I peered into it and about it, a ghost of the old emotion her room used to stir in me rose too, an echo of the old wonder, the old feeling of strangeness and mystery. It was a big room—or, at least, it seemed big to a child—a corner room, on the first floor, with windows on two sides. The windows on one side looked through the branches of a great elm, a city of birds and squirrels, out upon the lawn, with the pond at the bottom of it. On the other side, the windows looked over the terrace, into the shrubberies and winding paths of the garden. The walls of the room were hung with white paper, upon which, at regular intervals, was repeated a landscape in blue, a stretch of meadow with cows in it, and a hillside topped by a ruined castle. In a corner, the inmost corner, stood my grandmother’s four-post bed, with its canopy and curtains of dark-green tapestry. Then, of course, there was the fireplace, surmounted by a high, slender mantelpiece, on which were ranged a pair of silver candlesticks, a silver tray containing the snuffers and the extinguisher, and, in the middle, a solemn old buhl clock. From above the mantelpiece a picture looked down at you, the only picture in the room, the life-size portrait of a gentleman in a white stock and an embroidered waistcoat—the portrait of my grandfather, indeed, who had died long years before I was born, when my mother was a schoolgirl. And then there was the rest of the furniture of the room—a chair at each window, and between the various windows my grandmother’s dressing-table, her work-table, her armoire-à-glace, her great mahogany bureau, a writing-desk above, a chest-of-drawers below. In two or three places—besides the big double door that led into her room from the outer passage—the wall was broken by smaller doors, doors papered over like the wall itself, and even with it, so that you would scarcely have noticed them. One of these was the door of my grandmother’s oratory, with its praying-desk and its little altar. The others were the doors of her closets: the deep black closet, where her innumerable dresses were suspended, and the closets where she kept her bandboxes and her sunshades and her regiment of bottles—chief among them the tall dark-blue bottle of orange-flower water.