and a very moderate supply of household silver. These things, and
things like them, were being carried down surreptitiously, through
a gap between the two gardens, on to the premises of our friend
Colonel Grant. My two sisters, then sixteen and seventeen, and the
Grant girls, who were just younger, were the chief marauders. To
such forces I was happy to add myself for any enterprise, and
between us we cheated the creditors to the extent of our powers,
amidst the anathemas, but good-humoured abstinence from personal
violence, of the men in charge of the property. I still own a few
books that were thus purloined.

For a few days the whole family bivouacked under the Colonel's
hospitable roof, cared for and comforted by that dearest of all women,
his wife. Then we followed my father to Belgium, and established
ourselves in a large house just outside the walls of Bruges. At
this time, and till my father's death, everything was done with
money earned by my mother. She now again furnished the house,--this
being the third that she had put in order since she came back from
America two years and a half ago.

There were six of us went into this new banishment. My brother
Henry had left Cambridge and was ill. My younger sister was ill.
And though as yet we hardly told each other that it was so, we began
to feel that that desolating fiend, consumption, was among us. My
father was broken-hearted as well as ill, but whenever he could
sit at his table he still worked at his ecclesiastical records. My
elder sister and I were in good health, but I was an idle, desolate
hanger-on, that most hopeless of human beings, a hobbledehoy
of nineteen, without any idea of a career, or a profession, or
a trade. As well as I can remember I was fairly happy, for there