the conciliatory letter; but the temptation was too great,
it was altogether irresistible, and in ten minutes I had found
the gate, opened it with some difficulty, and was standing
with a beating heart in the garden of my childhood.

Now I wonder whether I shall ever again feel thrills of
the same potency as those that ran through me at that moment.
First of all I was trespassing, which is in itself thrilling;
but how much more thrilling when you are trespassing on what
might just as well have been your own ground, on what actually
was for years your own ground, and when you are in deadly
peril of seeing the rightful owners, whom you have never met,
but with whom you have quarrelled, appear round the corner,
and of hearing them remark with an inquiring and awful politeness "I
do not think I have the pleasure--?" Then the place was unchanged.
I was standing in the same mysterious tangle of damp little paths
that had always been just there; they curled away on either
side among the shrubs, with the brown tracks of recent footsteps
in the centre of their green stains, just as they did in my day.
The overgrown lilac bushes still met above my head.
The moisture dripped from the same ledge in the wall on
to the sodden leaves beneath, as it had done all through
the afternoons of all those past Novembers. This was the place,
this damp and gloomy tangle, that had specially belonged to me.
Nobody ever came to it, for in winter it was too dreary,
and in summer so full of mosquitoes that only a Backfisch
indifferent to spots could have borne it. But it was a place
where I could play unobserved, and where I could walk up
and down uninterrupted for hours, building castles in the air.
There was an unwholesome little arbour in one dark corner,