membership and for Sunday reading. These were constant,
but there were also mutables--Once a Week, Good Words
for the Young, Blackwood's, and the Cornhill they used
to be; years of back numbers Mrs Murchison had packed
away in the attic, where Advena on rainy days came into
the inheritance of them, and made an early acquaintance
with fiction in Ready Money Mortiboy and Verner's Pride,
while Lorne, flat on his stomach beside her, had glorious
hours on The Back of the North Wind. Their father considered
such publications and their successors essential, like
tobacco and tea. He was also an easy prey to the
subscription agent, for works published in parts and paid
for in instalments, a custom which Mrs Murchison regarded
with abhorrence. So much so that when John put his name
down for Masterpieces of the World's Art, which was to
cost twenty dollars by the time it was complete, he
thought it advisable to let the numbers accumulate at
the store.

Whatever the place represented to their parents, it was
pure joy to the young Murchisons. It offered a margin
and a mystery to life. They saw it far larger than it
was; they invested it, arguing purely by its difference
from other habitations, with a romantic past. "I guess
when the Prince of Wales came to Elgin, Mother, he stayed
here," Lorne remarked, as a little boy. Secretly he and
Advena took up boards in more than one unused room, and
rapped on more than one thick wall to find a hollow
chamber; the house revealed so much that was interesting,
it was apparent to the meanest understanding that it must