The tall horse-chestnuts throw down their fruit out of the crisp, rusty foliage and it rolls darkly burnished out of the pods white as mushrooms in the rain, and where it falls it lies, and no child gathers it, and the harvest waggons have crushed a thousand under their wheels. The moss is beginning to encrust the gravel for the soft feet of the ghosts, of the old men and the mothers and the maids and the school-boys and tottering babes that have trodden it once. Now that they are all gone, every one, they seem always to have been ghosts, with loud, happy voices and wails of sorrow, with smiles, dark looks, passionate splendours, bright hair, the bright brown hair as of red deer in the men, the long, heavy coils of living odorous gold in the women, but flitting to and fro, footless, unconfined, like the swallows, returning and wandering up and down, as if they had left something behind in their home. When I first entered the house by an accident in passing that way, a great-grandfather, a granddaughter and her son were alone in the house, with two servants. The mother, early widowed, had come with her child to minister to the last days of the ancient man. The house was by then full of the reports of death. In almost every room there had been a deathbed. For it had always been full of life; there was never such a house for calling back its children; the sons of it brought their wives, and the daughters their husbands, and often an excuse was made for one pair to stay on indefinitely; and thus it came to be full also of death. This granddaughter, however, had stayed, as she wished to believe, against her will, because the old man was so fond of his great-grandchild. She was a beautiful, strong woman, with the dark, lustrous skin, gold hair, perfect clear features, proud step and prouder voice, of all the family; she had shone before a thousand eyes; and yet she stayed on and on, obsessed by the multitudinous memories of the house alone under the Downs. Her grandfather would talk of nothing but his father and his grandfather, the lawyers, the captains, the scholars, whose bones were under the churchyard elms, and his sons and their sons, all of them also now dead. He had their childish ways by heart, the childish ways of men who were white-haired at his birth as well as of those who went golden-haired but yesterday into the grave; and all their names, their stately, their out-of-the-way names, and those which recorded the maiden names of their mothers; their nicknames, too, a whole book of them; the legends about the most conspicuous, their memorable speeches and acts, down to the names of their very dolls, and their legends also, which, of course, recurred again and again in the family fantasy. Every tree and field and gate and room was connected with some one of the dear and beauteous or brave dead, with their birth, their deeds, their ends.