It was at this time that I began to know the house; as I think of those days, I suffer a sharp return of that feeling which Mr. Andrew Lang has somewhere most touchingly and truly called "the _heimweh_ of childhood." When I was a young lady of eight years or so, they used to pack me into our elderly phaeton and send me out to the country to spend the day playing with Gwynne Peters. I wore my white embroidered pique, with a pink sash; and the brilliant red-and-green plaid stockings in which at that period it was the fashion to encase the legs of little girls. All glorious without was I; the feminine mind recalls these details with a photographic minuteness. Gwynne was a gentle little boy about my own age and not very strong, which was one reason why they asked me, a girl, to play with him. Another, which, with an elegant modesty, I refrained from mentioning first, was that Gwynne was very devoted to me--I was Juliet in my plaid stockings! Romeo wore baggy little trousers that buttoned on a yoke about his manly waist, if I recollect aright. I had in my possession until a short while ago--I gave it to Gwynne's eldest daughter the last time she visited me, finding her screaming with laughter over it and the other contents of an old desk--a solid and rumpled document reciting that: "This is to say that i Gwynne Peters do love you Mary Stanley, and we will be marrid when we grow up in witnes whareoff i have sined this with my bludd yours respektifly Gwynne Peters." It is painfully printed on a leaf of thick cream-coloured paper with a high gloss; we tore it out of an old photograph-album we found in the attic. That was a charming playground, crowded with the most fascinating assortment of rubbish, that a nimble imagination could convert into almost any kind of stage "property." There were broken-down chairs and tables, mildewed old pictures, carpetbags, bandboxes covered with flowered wall-paper, saddle-bags and holsters, a round-topped hair-trunk studded with nails, with mangy bare patches upon its flanks that conferred an air of reality on it when it figured romantically as a horse, camel, or other beast in our dramas. We spurred into Araby on that hair-trunk, we fought with Moslems, we carted off bales of treasure. When fancy flagged we could turn to two chests of mothy, mouse-eaten old books that stood under the eaves; no one ever opened the cases in the great gloomy library downstairs, notwithstanding our pleadings. Gwynne, who has always been of an affectionately reminiscent disposition, said to me not so long ago: "I should like to go back and be eleven years old again, just to read 'Ivanhoe' the first time. Don't you remember?" Indeed I remembered very well two children huddling by the low attic window with the book between them; sometimes it is in the chilly twilight of a winter's afternoon, with eerie shadows hovering in the corners, and a landscape all in sharp blacks and whites like