I was rapidly attaining the comfortable home feeling at Oaklands, which makes life in castle or hut a rapture. There were so many sources of enjoyment open to me. I had a more than usual love for painting, and had for years prosecuted the art more from love than duty. My last teacher, an old German Professor, exacting and very thorough, had been as particular with my instruction as if my bread depended on my proficiency. I thanked him now in my heart when I found myself shut out from other opportunities for improvement than what, unaided, I could secure. There were special bits of landscape I loved to sketch over and over again; these I would take to Mrs. Flaxman, or Reynolds, the housekeeper, to see if they could recognize the original of my drawing; but even Samuel, the stable-boy, could name the spot at sight. His joy was unbounded, but scarcely excelled my own when I succeeded in making a water-color sketch of himself, the hair a shade or two less flame-colored than was natural, and which even Hubert pronounced a very fair likeness. Then in the large, stately drawing-room, some of whose furnishing dated back a century or more, stood a fine, grand piano. Here I studied over again my school lessons, or tried new ventures from some of the masters. What dreams I had in that dim room in the pauses of my music; peopling that place again with the vanished ones who had loved and suffered there my own dead parents among the rest, whose faces looked down at me, I thought tenderly, from the walls where their portraits hung in heavy carved frames, of a fashion a generation old. There was about my mother's face a haunting expression, as of a well known face which long afterward looked out at me one day from my own reflection in the mirror and then, to my joy, I discovered I was like her in feature and expression. In the library too, whose key Mr. Winthrop had left with Mrs. Flaxman for my use, I found an unexplored wonderland. My literature had chiefly consisted of the text book variety, and if I had possessed wider range, my time was so fully occupied with lessons I could not have availed myself of the privilege; but now, with what relish I went from shelf to shelf, dipping into a book here and another there, taking by turns poetry, history, fiction, and biography, Shakespeare and Milton had so often perplexed me in Grammar and analysis, that I left them for the most part severely alone; but there were others, fresh and new to me as a June morning, and quite as refreshing: Hubert used sometimes to join me, but we generally disagreed. I had little patience with his practical criticisms of my choicest readings, while he assured me my enthusiasm over my favorite authors was a clear waste of sentiment. Mrs. Flaxman was, in addition to all this, adding to my fund of knowledge the very useful one of needlework, and was getting me interested not only in the mysteries of plain sewing, but brought some of her carefully hoarded