On returning from these nightly expeditions to the pond, the sight of the old country-house against the sky always excited me strangely. Three cedars of Lebanon flanked it on the side I climbed out, towering aloft with their great funereal branches, and I thought of all the people asleep in their silent rooms, and wondered how they could be so dull and unenterprising, when out here they could see these sweeping branches and hear the wind sighing so beautifully among the needles. These people, it seemed to me at such moments, belonged to a different race. I had nothing in common with them. Night and stars and trees and wind and rain were the things I had to do with and wanted. They were alive and personal, stirring my depths within, full of messages and meanings, whereas my parents and sisters and brother, all indoors and asleep, were mere accidents, and apart from my real life and self. My friend the under-gardener always took the ladder away early in the morning. Sometimes an elder sister accompanied me on these excursions. She, too, loved mystery, and the peopled darkness, but she was also practical. On returning to her room in the early morning we always found eggs ready to boil, cake and cold plum-pudding perhaps, or some such satisfying morsels to fill the void. She was always wonderful to me in those days. Very handsome, dark, with glowing eyes and a keen interest in the undertaking, she came down the ladder and stepped along the garden paths more like a fairy being than a mortal, and I always enjoyed the event twice as much when she accompanied me. In the day-time she faded back into the dull elder sister and seemed a different person altogether. I never reconcile the two.