So we go to visit some royal oak, and bring away, as a memento, the daisy which blooms at its foot; so we stand, as the reward of toil and fatigue, upon an Alpine glacier, and the trophy and pledge of our visit are the forget-me-not that grew on its margin. Thus youth and beauty ever press on the footsteps of old age, and youth and beauty bear away the palm. My faith in legendary lore is confirmed, when I call to mind the Gothic fortress, with its strong defences against the enemy, its rude suggestions of centuries of hospitality, its tower-lattices, whence generation after generation of high-born maids waved signals to knightly lovers, its stairways, worn slippery with the tread of heavy-mailed warriors, its chapel-vault, where chivalrous lord and noble dame have turned to dust. But there is a faith more precious than the faith in old song and legend; and the golden-haired child, who flourishes so fresh and fair amidst all this ruin and decay, stands forth to my mind as an emblem of that power which renovates earth and defies time. Had she been a pattern child, had her instructors (whoever they were) succeeded in moulding her into a mere machine, she might not so vividly have roused my interest; but there was something in her saucy independence, her wayward freaks, her coquettish airs, her fiery chase after the swallow, which--breaking in, as they did, upon the docility with which she otherwise went through her round of duty--revivified the desolation of the old hall with a sudden outburst of humanity. Everywhere else the fountain of life seemed to have died out, but here it gushed forth a living stream. We gaze down the centuries and see in them ignorance, error, warning, and ruin at last. What hope for the race, then, if this were all? But it is not all. The child's foot treading lightly over the graves is the type of the _time-is_ triumphing over the _time-was_. Full of faults and imperfections, she is still the daughter of Hope and Opportunity. She has the past for her teacher, and the door of knowledge, repentance, and faith stands open before her. Thus childhood is the rainbow of God's providence, and the brightest feature of His covenant with men. Silence, desolation, and decay have set their seal upon old Haddon Hall, but chance has set a child over them all, and the lesson her simple presence teaches is worth more to me than all the Idyls of the King. And thus it is that I treasure up the memory of her among my catalogue of guides; and so she did more for me than she promised, when she undertook to lend me her light through the old Hall.