but years afterward she learned perfectly.

Very slowly Gabriella's knowledge began to extend over the house
and outside it. There were enormous, high-ceiled halls and parlors,
and bedrooms and bedrooms and bedrooms. There were verandas front
and back, so long that it took her breath away to run the length of
one and return. Upstairs, front and back, verandas again,
balustraded so that little girls could not forget themselves and
fall off. The pillars of these verandas at the rear of the house
were connected by a network of wires, and trained up the pillars
and branching over the wires were coiling twisting vines of
wisteria as large as Gabriella's neck. This was the sunny southern
side; and when the wisteria was blooming, Gabriella moved her
establishment of playthings out behind those sunlit cascades of
purple and green, musical sometimes with goldfinches.

The front of the house faced a yard of stately evergreens and great
tubs of flowers, oleander, crepe myrtle, and pomegranate. Beyond
the yard, a gravelled carriage drive wound out of sight behind
cedars, catalpa, and forest trees, shadowing a turfy lawn. At the
end of the lawn was the great entrance gate and the street of the
town, Gabriella long knew this approach only by her drives with her
grandmother. At the rear of the house was enough for her: a large
yard, green grazing lots for the stable of horses, and best of all
a high-fenced garden containing everything the heart could desire:
vegetables, and flowers; summer-houses, and arbors with seats;
pumps of cold water, and hot-houses of plants and grapes, and fruit
trees, and a swing, and gooseberry bushes--everything.

In one corner, the ground was too shaded by an old apple tree to be