"Incident the first. I see myself, as a very little girl, seated in a shut-up carriage in company with a man and a woman, neither of whose faces I can bring to mind. I am hugging to my breast a gaily-dressed doll as my dearest earthly treasure. It is a gloomy evening, and the rain is falling fast. I seem to have been in the carriage a long time, jolting over the dreary country roads, but as to where I came from and how I happened to be there at all, I can remember nothing whatever. Then I seem to wake up from sleep, roused by the sudden stoppage of the carriage, and, looking out, I see someone open two large iron gates, which swing slowly back on their hinges. But what takes my childish attention more than anything else is the fact that on the top of one of the supporting pillars--I can only see one from where I sit--there is fixed a strange-looking animal carved in stone, as it might be a griffin, or a dragon, holding a shield between its paws. But one half of the shield and one of the creature's paws are broken away and missing, and I remember thinking how strangely forlorn it looked in its maimed condition, and how the rain-drops, trickling from the end of its nose, seemed like tears, so that I felt quite to pity the poor thing. "After that comes a blank. "In the next scene of which I retain anything like a clear recollection--although how long a time elapsed between it and the preceding one I am unable to say--I am in a gloomy panelled room, the two high, narrow windows of which look out upon a small, semi-circular lawn shut in by a tall hedge. A case-clock in one corner ticks slowly and solemnly. Against the wall on one side of the room stands a tall bureau of black oak carved with fruit and quaint figures. There is a large open fireplace, in which a few embers glow faintly red. On two high, straight-backed chairs sit two angular, straight-backed ladies; both elderly, both with long, thin faces, both having the same cold, unsympathetic eyes and the same frozen expression, and so much alike generally, that I can only now conclude they must have been sisters. As I stand before them in my white frock and bronze shoes, with my hands behind my back, I glance timidly from one to the other. They are talking about me in a language I don't understand; but all the same, I am quite aware that I am the subject of their conversation. It is growing dusk, and presently a man--the same, I fancy, that was with me in the carriage--brings in two lighted candles in silver candlesticks on a silver tray, and sets them down on the table between the two ladies. Then one of the ladies takes up the snuffers--also of silver--and solemnly extinguishes one of the candles. Somehow, I have an impression, how or whence derived I am quite at a loss to know, that it is a nightly custom for the manservant to bring in two lighted candles, and for one of them to be at once put out.