When Mrs. Blanton had left me alone, after telling me that supper would be served in half an hour, I made a few hurried preparations, while I tried in vain to get a glimpse of myself in the mirror, where my reflection floated like a leaf in a lily pond. Then, stealing cautiously from the room and across the deserted hall, with its musty smell of old spices, I crept down the staircase and out of the open back door. Here that provocative fragrance, the aroma of vanished springs, seized me again; and running down the worn steps of the porch, I passed the bower of lilacs beside the whitewashed kitchen wall, and followed the flagged walk to the sunken garden. At the end of the walk a primitive wooden stile, like an illustration in _Mother Goose_, led into the garden; and when I passed it, I found myself in a flowery space, which was surrounded by banks of honeysuckle instead of a wall. A few old fruit trees, now well past blooming, stood in the centre; and edging the grassy paths, there were all the shrubs with quaint-sounding names of which I had dreamed in my childhood—guelder rose, bridal wreath, mock orange, flowering quince, and caly-canthus. Over all there hung a mist which had floated up from the low ground by the river; and it seemed to me that this moisture released the scents of a hundred springs. Never until that moment had I known what the rapture of smell could be. And the starry profusion of the narcissi! From bank to bank of honeysuckle the garden looked as if the Milky Way had fallen over it and been caught in the high grass.