The Eastwoods lived in an old house in one of the southwestern suburbs of London. It was one of those houses which, dating only from the prosaic age of Queen Anne, have come to be picturesque in their way--which they were never intended to be--and are comfortable, which they were intended to be, to a degree rarely attained by all our modern efforts. What advances we have made since then in every way! And yet all Belgravia did not hold a house so thoroughly good for living in, so pleasant, so modest, so dignified, and so refined, as the big brick house, partly whitewashed, partly retaining its native red, lichened all over with brown and yellow mosses, in which, at the outset of this history, Mrs. Eastwood lived with her children. It had been built by the Eastwoods of the time, more than a century and a half ago. It had given shelter to various generations since then--their mortal inn and lodging, the everlasting dwelling-place of their memory. They had left layers, so to speak, of old furniture, from the japanned screens and cabinets of the founder, to the hideous haircloth and mahogany of George IV.; and pictures and knick-knacks, and precious old china for which collectors would have given its weight in gold. All these riches were not shown off to advantage, as they might have been. You stumbled on them in corners; you found them in out-of-the-way cupboards, in rooms that were rarely used. In short, you could not take a walk on a wet day about this delightful house without finding something out that you had not seen before. For my own part I prefer this to the modern device of making a museum or china-shop of one’s drawing-room. The drawing-room was a place to live in at The Elms. It had a hundred prettinesses about, none of which had been bought within the memory of any of the young people, except, indeed, a few foolish knick-knacks belonging to Ellinor--for what girl worth calling such was ever without knick-knacks? But its supreme use was to be lived in, and for this it was infinitely well adapted. Its only drawback that I know--and that many people thought a great advantage--was that, being close to London, you saw nothing from the windows that you might not have seen a hundred miles deep in the country. The drawing-room windows looked out upon a great green lawn, set in old trees. In winter, when the trees had lost their leaves, bits of other old houses, red and mossy, looked in through the bare branches; but in spring the farther end of the lawn was carpeted with primroses, and canopied with foliage, and the long avenue of elms at one side, and the narrower path on the other under the lime-trees, which was called the Lady’s Walk, might have graced a squire’s house anywhere. Both of these ended in a high paling; but I defy you to have found that out when elms and limes alike were in their glory of summer array.