The shabby old farmyard, small and dingy as it might appear to one more accustomed to the outside world, was a huge and magnificent place to the untravelled. The gates, the doors, the barns, the stables, the cow-sheds, the very puddles and the cart-ruts were tremendous. The swing in the granary took you higher and gave you a more delicious feeling than any other swing could. In fact, you doubted if there could be found another swing in the whole wide world worthy to be called a swing beside it. Then when you went to play at “houses,” couldn’t you just wander off on to the rocky lots and pick and choose just what you liked? That very big rock was the drawing-room, and all the little rocks the chairs and tables. And over there by the flat rock you had your dining-room, and a little further off was the kitchen. But you didn’t reckon much of the kitchen. You saw that every day. But drawing-rooms and dining-rooms! you didn’t often get into these in real life, for in your house there was only a parlour with a glorious thunder-and-lightning carpet. For all that, the parlour had its attractions too. The family never sat in there unless there was “company.” Then, of course, state had to be kept up. On ordinary days you played about the kitchen and listened to the ghost stories of the servant girl. And my! no duchess in the land could have been more interesting to you than that girl. She belonged to the Salvation Army, and could sing hymns that really _were_ interesting, not like those you sang at church, which were so roundabout you couldn’t understand them. This is what she used to sing, and the tune was so catchy and easy you could never forget it:— “The devil and me We can’t agree, I hate him And he-e hates me. He caught me once But he let me go-o From the land o-of si-in and woe.” Then when she got tired of that she would break forth thus:— “We’ll all go to glory when we die (When we die). Oh, we’ll all go to glory when we die (When we die). We’ll all go to glory—We’ll all go to glory We’ll all go to glory when we die.” There was something rousing about that last. When one has been told a thing about six times with much vehemence, one begins to believe it. But her resources did not end with the religious. Bless you, no! When she was peeling the potatoes she gained inspirations for ghost stories. “It was as black as pitch,” she would say, in a low voice. “And as he was passing by the oak tree he saw something ghastly swinging from the branches. It was the body of a woman who had been murdered twenty years ago. And he saw her throat was cut. And all the way home he heard footsteps following him. And when he got there he fell down dead.”