is something about one’s first married home that one can never really replace, and that renders our fitting into our new locality only a little less torturing than inhabiting a new skin would be, were we suddenly forced into one. Personally I am not one bit sentimental; I never cried over a faded flower, or lay awake weeping bitter tears over an unhappy love-affair: I never had one, I am thankful to say. Neither have I hoarded first shoes, snippings of baby curls, nor indeed anything save my wedding-dress, which is a most valuable ‘property’ for characters and private theatricals of all kinds; and therefore I am considered absolutely lacking in ‘fine feelings,’ and unhampered by ‘nonsense’; but I have never yet become reconciled to the moves we have had to make after our first twelve years of married life, and I much doubt now if I ever shall; I certainly shall not until I make move number three, and what is perhaps the most curious point in the whole business is that I did not like the house, nor the town, nor indeed anything much about it, and yet I can never see certain looks in the sky, scent certain odours, without being transported to dear dull Dorsetshire, and without longing in a curious home-sick way for the marvellously lovely range of the Purbeck hills, which haunts me like a dream, and for which I am convinced I should positively pine, had I the smallest touch of sentiment in my composition. The house itself was most wretchedly inconvenient, the furniture of over twenty years ago--aye, and some of it over fifty years ago--does not bear thinking about in these æsthetic days. I endured dullness such as only a London girl, plunged suddenly into an atmosphere she could not comprehend, much less assimilate, could experience: we had three years of unspeakable worries; and yet, with it all--with its hideous rooms and its cold and ugly passages, its out-of-the-worldness, and its unpleasant associations--there is something about it that no other house can ever hold, and that causes me often and often to dream I am there again, or that makes me hear sometimes on a quiet night the old sound of the sudden clash of the china closet door, the opening of the door at the top of the kitchen stairs--which, I believe, has been taken away now by desecrating hands, and which had a sound all its own--or that causes me to wake suddenly from sleep to wonder at the late return of phantom waggons and ghostly horses over stones that are hundreds of miles away from our present uncongenial abode, and which caused sounds inseparable from thoughts of those dear dead days--days I would have back this moment if I could, if only to live them over once more in a manner a thousand times better than an inexperienced girl could ever do, and use then the experience one buys at such an enormous cost because one will not listen to words of wisdom from those who have lived so very much longer in the world than we had then, and which is useless now, because