evergreen, some of which used to be clipped into shapes of animals,
in the Italian style. I can remember when I was a lad how I used
to try to make out what the trees were cut to represent, and how I
used to appeal for explanations to Judith, my Welsh nurse. She
dealt in a strange mythology of her own, and peopled the gardens
with griffins, dragons, good genii and bad, and filled my mind with
them at the same time. My nursery window afforded a view of the
great fountains at the head of the upper basin, and on moonlight
nights the Welshwoman would hold me up to the glass and bid me look
at the mist and spray rising into mysterious shapes, moving
mystically in the white light like living things.

"It's the Woman of the Water," she used to say; and sometimes she
would threaten that if I did not go to sleep the Woman of the Water
would steal up to the high window and carry me away in her wet
arms.

The place was gloomy. The broad basins of water and the tall
evergreen hedges gave it a funereal look, and the damp-stained
marble causeways by the pools might have been made of tombstones.
The gray and weather-beaten walls and towers without, the dark and
massively furnished rooms within, the deep, mysterious recesses and
the heavy curtains, all affected my spirits. I was silent and sad
from my childhood. There was a great clock tower above, from which
the hours rang dismally during the day, and tolled like a knell in
the dead of night. There was no light nor life in the house, for
my mother was a helpless invalid, and my father had grown
melancholy in his long task of caring for her. He was a thin, dark
man, with sad eyes; kind, I think, but silent and unhappy. Next to
my mother, I believe he loved me better than anything on earth, for