window-sill, to look at their friends, who love to feed them, and by
their pecking have aroused the bloodhound crouching at Lady Annabel's
feet. And Venetia looks up from her folio with a flushed and smiling
face to catch the sympathy of her mother, who rewards her daughter's
study with a kiss. Ah! there are no such mothers and no such daughters
now!

Thus it will be seen that the life and studies of Venetia tended
rather dangerously, in spite of all the care of her mother, to the
development of her imagination, in case indeed she possessed that
terrible and fatal gift. She passed her days in unbroken solitude, or
broken only by affections which softened her heart, and in a scene
which itself might well promote any predisposition of the kind;
beautiful and picturesque objects surrounded her on all sides; she
wandered, at it were, in an enchanted wilderness, and watched the deer
reposing under the green shadow of stately trees; the old hall
itself was calculated to excite mysterious curiosity; one wing was
uninhabited and shut up; each morning and evening she repaired with
her mother and the household through long galleries to the chapel,
where she knelt to her devotions, illumined by a window blazoned with
the arms of that illustrious family of which she was a member, and
of which she knew nothing. She had an indefinite and painful
consciousness that she had been early checked in the natural inquiries
which occur to every child; she had insensibly been trained to speak
only of what she saw; and when she listened, at night, to the long
ivy rustling about the windows, and the wild owls hooting about the
mansion, with their pining, melancholy voices, she might have been
excused for believing in those spirits, which her mother warned her to
discredit; or she forgot these mournful impressions in dreams, caught
from her romantic volumes, of bright knights and beautiful damsels.