Indoors it was a dark house. Windows were numerous, but it was undoubtedly dark. This was in part due to comparison with the outer air, where people lived as much as possible, and especially with the sunlit yard. The house had, however, a dark spirit, aided by the folds of heavy curtains, the massive, old, blackened furniture, and the wall-paper of some years before. You wandered as you pleased about it, alone or with Philip, Lewis, or Harry. Most of the rooms were bedrooms, but not conspicuous as such when strewn with cases of butterflies, birds’ eggs and nests, stuffed animals, cages containing foreign birds, several blackbirds, a nest of young thrushes, an adder and some ringed snakes and lizards, a hedgehog, white and piebald rats and mice, fishing-rods and tackle, pistols and guns and toy cannon, tools and half-made articles of many kinds, model steam-engines, a model of the “Victory” and a painting of the “Owen Glendower” under a flock of sail, boxing gloves, foils, odds and ends of wood and metal, curiosities from tree and stone, everything that can be accumulated by curious and unruly minds; and then also the owners themselves and their friends, plotting, arguing, examining their property, tending the living animals or skinning the dead, boxing, fencing, firing cannon, and going to and fro. The kitchen, the Library, and Mrs Morgan’s room were silent rooms. In the kitchen Ann ruled. It smelt of an old Bible and new cakes: its sole sound was Ann’s voice singing in Welsh, which was often stopped abruptly by her duties coming to a head, or by something outside--as when she heard Lewis overtaxing Granfer in teaching it a trick and flitted out, saying: “Don’t use the dog like that. Anyone might think he had no human feelings.” She must have been, in a sense, young in those days, but was unlike any other young woman I have seen, and it never occurred to me then to think of her as one; nor, as certainly, did it seem possible that she would grow old--and she has not grown old. When she left her kitchen it was seldom to go out. Except to do the household shopping, and that was always after dark, she never went beyond the yard. She did not like being laughed at for her looks and accent, and she disliked London so much as to keep out the London air, as far as possible, with closed windows.