heart open to both, share and share together.


Imagine the strange old building in which we live to be really
what its name implies--a tower standing in a glen; in past times
the fortress of a fighting Welsh chieftain; in present times a
dreary land-lighthouse, built up in many stories of two rooms
each, with a little modern lean-to of cottage form tacked on
quaintly to one of its sides; the great hill, on whose lowest
slope it stands, rising precipitously behind it; a dark,
swift-flowing stream in the valley below; hills on hills all
round, and no way of approach but by one of the loneliest and
wildest crossroads in all South Wales.

Imagine such a place of abode as this, and such inhabitants of it
as ourselves, and them picture the descent among us--as of a
goddess dropping from the clouds--of a lively, handsome,
fashionable young lady--a bright, gay, butterfly creature, used
to flutter away its existence in the broad sunshine of perpetual
gayety--a child of the new generation, with all the modern ideas
whirling together in her pretty head, and all the modern
accomplishments at the tips of her delicate fingers. Imagine such
a light-hearted daughter of Eve as this, the spoiled darling of
society, the charming spendthrift of Nature's choicest treasures
of beauty and youth, suddenly flashing into the dim life of three
weary old men--suddenly dropped into the place, of all others,
which is least fit for her--suddenly shut out from the world in
the lonely quiet of the loneliest home in England. Realize, if it
be possible, all that is most whimsical and most anomalous in
such a situation as this, and the startling confession contained