water-lilies and carp. A pond needs nothing else except boys like us to make the best of it. Yet we never could fish in it again after the strange girl was drawn out of it dead one morning: nobody knew who she was or why she had climbed over into the Wilderness to drown herself; yet Ann seemed to know, and so perhaps did the tall Roland, but both of them could lock up anything they wished to keep secret and throw away the key. I knew the elms and the one oak of the Wilderness as well as the jackdaws did. For I knew them night and day, and the birds knew nothing of them between half-past five on an October evening and half-past five the next morning. To-day the jackdaws at least, if ever they fly that way, can probably not distinguish Abercorran Street and Wilderness Street from ordinary streets. For the trees are every one of them gone, and with them the jackdaws. The lilies and carp are no longer in the pond, and there is no pond. I can understand people cutting down trees--it is a trade and brings profit--but not draining a pond in such a garden as the Wilderness and taking all its carp home to fry in the same fat as bloaters, all for the sake of building a house that might just as well have been anywhere else or nowhere at all. I think No. 23 Wilderness Street probably has the honour and misfortune to stand in the pond’s place, but they call it LYNDHURST. Ann shares my opinion, and she herself is now living in the house behind, No. 21 Abercorran Street. Ann likes the new houses as well as the old elm-trees, and the hundreds of men, women, and children as well as the jackdaws--which is saying a good deal; for she loved both trees and birds, and I have heard her assert that the birds frequently talked in Welsh as the jackdaws used to do at the castle of Abercorran; but when I asked her why she thought so and what they said, she grew touchy and said: “Well, they did not speak English, whatever, and if it was Welsh, as I think, you cannot expect me to pervert Welsh into English, for I am no scholar.” She is keeping house now for the gentleman at 21 Abercorran Street, a Mr Henry Jones. She would probably have been satisfied with him in any case, since he is the means by which Ann remains alive, free to think her own thoughts and to bake her own bread; to drink tea for breakfast, tea for dinner, tea for tea, tea for supper, and tea in between; to eat also at long intervals a quart of cockles from Abercorran shore, and a baked apple dumpling to follow; and at night to read the Welsh Bible and a Guide to the Antiquities of Abercorran. But Ann is more than satisfied because Mr Jones is Welsh. She admits his claim in spite of her unconcealed opinion that his Dolgelly Welsh, of which she can hardly understand a word, she says, is not Welsh at all. Of his speech as of the jackdaws she can retort: “He does not speak English, whatever.”