I was set down at the great gate of Hilton Hall, in which I was to reside for some indefinite period as tutor to the children of Lord Hilton. I walked up the broad avenue, through the final arch of which, as through a huge Gothic window, I saw the hall in the distance. Everything was rich, lovely, and fairylike about me. Accustomed to the scanty flowers and diminutive wood of my own country, I looked upon all around me with a feeling of majestic plenty, which I can recall at will, but which I have never experienced again. Beyond the trees which formed the avenue, I saw a shrubbery, composed entirely of flowering plants, almost all strange to me. Issuing from the avenue, I found myself amid open, wide, lawny spaces, in which the flower-beds lay like islands of colour. A statue on a pedestal, the only white thing in the surrounding green of the lawn and the avenue, caught my eye. I had seen scarcely any sculpture; and this, attracting my attention by a favourite contrast of colour, retained it by its own beauty. It was a Dryad, or some nymph of the woods, who looked as if she had just glided from the solitude of the trees behind, and had sprung upon the pedestal to look wonderingly around her. A few large brown leaves lay beneath it, left there, no doubt, by the eddying around its base of some wind that had torn them from the trees behind. As I gazed, absorbed in a new pleasure, a drop of rain upon my face made me look up. From a gray fleecy cloud, with sun-whitened border, lo! a light, gracious, plentiful rain was falling. A rainbow sprang across the sky, and the statue stood within the rainbow. At the same moment, from the base of the pedestal, rose a figure in white, graceful as the Dryad above, and neither running, nor appearing to walk with rapid steps, glided swiftly past me at a few paces’ distance, fleet as a ghost; and, keeping in a straight line for the main entrance of the Hall, entered and vanished. All that I saw of her was, that she was young, very pale, and dressed in white.