The most melancholy part of middle age is this being left behind by our children, the eagerness on their parts to live their own lives and begin their own career. But it should not be sad, as it is only what happened to our parents, after all, and will happen again in the future generation. But all the same, it must be a hardened heart indeed that can contemplate an empty nursery and have no other thoughts than how best to decorate or use the room for a totally different purpose. There is a peculiar _serrement de cœur_, which, once experienced, can never be forgotten, when we enter a room made sacred to us by a thousand dreams and romances--a thousand dreads and fears we have never spoken of to any soul on earth, and have to consider how best we can alter it to another purpose. I remember, years ago, going to see a house in which we had had many, many happy hours, and which had just passed from those we knew and loved to persons in an inferior station of life, with whom we should never have any dealings, and I have never forgotten the feeling of desolation that seized me when I looked up at the erstwhile nursery window, from which the bars were hanging broken, and remembered the faces that used never to be absent from that place--a feeling that was intensified a thousand times when I climbed up to the room itself, and looked for the last time on the walls, papered by ourselves with pictures from the ‘Illustrated News’ (I can remember them all vividly, from the marriage of the Princess Royal in one corner to pictures of the American War in the other), and recollected the boys who were all out in the world, each busy with his own life, with whom I had played, ridden, eaten far too much fruit in the sunny garden below the nursery windows (where I verily believe it was always fine and hot), and with whom I had risen at dawn in many a misty September morning, bent on collecting a great dish of mushrooms for breakfast, to surprise the house-mother with--a surprise that she must have been well accustomed to, but which she never failed to express; she knew we should have been so disappointed had she seemed in the least degree to expect the never-failing dish, though she had a hard struggle to be duly elated and not say one word about the draggled skirts and wringing wet stockings and boots, which she knew were reposing upstairs and would be shown to her in due course and with much wrath by Susan, to whose lot it always fell to remedy our dilapidations, which she used to say were always worse when I was there to rush about with the boys and lead them into mischief and dirt of all kinds.