Thank Heaven, my childhood was passed in a tranquil nook, where the roar of the world's traffic is not so much as heard; among scenery, where there lurks little capital, and no enterprise; where the good people are asleep; and where, therefore, the irreparable improvements that in other places carry on their pitiless work of obliteration are undreamed of. I am looking out on scenes that remain unchanged as heaven itself. The summer comes and goes; the autumn drifts of leaves, and winter snows; and all things here remain as my round childish eyes beheld them in stupid wonder and delight when first the world was opening upon them. The trees, the tower, the stile, the very gravestones, are my earliest friends; I stretch my arms to the mountains, as if I could fold them to my heart. And in the opening through the ancient trees, the great estuary stretches northward, wider and wider, into the grey horizon of the open sea. The sinking sun askance, Spreads a dull glare, Through evening air; And, in a happy trance, Forest and wave, and white cliff stand, Like an enchanted sea and land. The sea-breeze wakens clear and cold, Over the azure wide; Before whose breath, in threads of gold, The ruddy ripples glide, And chasing, break and mingle; While clear as bells, Each wavelet tells, O'er the stones on the hollow shingle. The rising of winds and the fall of the waves! I love the music of shingle and caves. And the billows that travel so far to die, In foam, on the loved shore where they lie. I lean my cold cheek on my hand; And as a child, with open eyes, Listens, in a dim surprise, To some high story Of grief and glory, It cannot understand; So, like that child, To meanings of a music wild, I listen, in a rapture lonely, Not understanding, listening only, To a story not for me; And let my fancies come and go, And fall and flow, With the eternal sea. And so, to leave rhyme, and return to prose, I end my preface, and begin my story here. CHAPTER I. AN ARRIVAL. One of the earliest scenes I can remember with perfect distinctness is this. My sister and I, still denizens of the nursery, had come down to take our tea with good old Rebecca Torkill, the Malory housekeeper, in the room we called the cedar parlour. It is a long and rather sombre room, with two tall windows looking out upon the shadowy court-yard. There are on the wall some dingy portraits, whose pale faces peep out, as it were, through a background of black fog, from the canvas; and there is one, in better order than the others, of a grave man in the stately costume of James the First, which hangs over the mantel-piece. As a child I loved this room; I loved the half-decipherable pictures; it was solemn and even gloomy, but it was with the delightful gloom and solemnity of one of Rebecca Torkill's stories of castles, giants, and goblins.