The rest of the house was not particularly interesting; it consisted of sitting-rooms and dining-room, and schoolroom and lobbies, the sort of thing that you naturally supposed would be there. But one day my father presented my sisters and me with a room at the top of the stone stairs, with which we were allowed to deal precisely as we wished. We instantly called it “The Museum,” and put in it any unusual objects that we obtained. One day Maggie found a piece of sheep’s wool stuck in a hedge, so that of course was brought home, washed white and carefully combed and put in a cardboard box with a glass lid. Then (to anticipate as regards the Museum) we spent a summer holiday at Torquay, and collected various attractive pebbles, and madrepores, and shells. These were dedicated to the Museum, and a large earthenware bread-bowl was lined with them, and filled up with water to the top, so that they gleamed deliciously through the liquid. Then there came a memorable day when my mother killed a hornet on her window; she gave us the squalid corpse, and after consultation we put it in the water of the bowl, lined with spa and madrepore, in order to preserve it. It floated about there and was supposed to be in process of preservation. An addled swan’s egg joined the collection, which, very prudently, we decided not to blow. But it began to smell so terribly even through the shell that with great reluctance we scrapped it. My father gave us a case of butterflies, collected by his father, in which, without doubt were two “large coppers.” “As rare things will” that case vanished, and I wonder what fortunate dealer eventually got the “large coppers.”... Then on a bookshelf was the great stamp-collection, and I wish I knew what had happened to that. There was all South Australia complete, and complete too was Tasmania, and complete the Cape of Good Hope, the stamps of which for the sake of variety were triangular. Heligoland was there and the Ionian Islands and New Caledonia (black and only one of it). But the stamp-collection was considered rather dull: the hornet disintegrating in the bread-bowl, and the piece of sheep’s wool were far more interesting. They had the timbre of personal acquisition, and rang with first-hand emotion. Personal and precious too were the bits of oxydised glass smouldering into rainbows which we dug up in the garden and displayed here; there too we found bowls and broken stems of tobacco-pipes which I think were Cromwellian. But Cromwell was no good to us, so we said that they were Roman tobacco-pipes. Then there was a collection of fossils, which, with the aid of geological hammers that my father gave us, we rapped out of stones in lime quarries, or from the heaps that lay by the roadside for mendings. Amateur stone-breakers indeed we were, and often bruised fingers were of the party, but they added preciousness to the trophies that we brought back to the Museum.