The house she took is now, I am sorry to say, pulled down, and replaced
by a hideous red-brick structure. It was very old and rambling,
rose-covered in front, ivy-covered behind; it stood on the top of Harrow
Hill, between the church and the school, and had once been the vicarage
of the parish, but the vicar had left it because it was so far removed
from the part of the village where all his work lay. The drawing-room
opened by an old-fashioned half-window, half-door--which proved a
constant source of grief to me, for whenever I had on a new frock I
always tore it on the bolt as I flew through it--into a large garden
which sloped down one side of the hill, and was filled with the most
delightful old trees, fir and laurel, may, mulberry, hazel, apple, pear,
and damson, not to mention currant and gooseberry bushes innumerable, and
large strawberry beds spreading down the sunny slopes. There was not a
tree there that I did not climb, and one, a widespreading Portugal
laurel, was my private country house. I had there my bedroom and my
sitting-rooms, my study, and my larder. The larder was supplied by the
fruit-trees, from which I was free to pick as I would, and in the study I
would sit for hours with some favorite book--Milton's "Paradise Lost" the
chief favorite of all. The birds must often have felt startled, when from
the small swinging form perching on a branch, came out in childish tones
the "Thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, powers", of Milton's
stately and sonorous verse. I liked to personify Satan, and to declaim
the grand speeches of the hero-rebel, and many a happy hour did I pass in
Milton's heaven and hell, with for companions Satan and "the Son",
Gabriel and Abdiel. Then there was a terrace running by the side of the
churchyard, always dry in the wettest weather, and bordered by an old
wooden fence, over which clambered roses of every shade; never was such a
garden for roses as that of the Old Vicarage. At the end of the terrace
was a little summer-house, and in this a trap-door in the fence, which
swung open and displayed one of the fairest views in England. Sheer from