often had feasted jubilant companies. The walls were only
plastered, and were stained with damp. Against them were fixed a
few mouldering heads of wild animals--the stag and the fox and the
otter--one ancient wolf's-head also, wherever that had been killed.
But it was not into this room the laird led his son. The passage
ended in a stone stair that went up between containing walls. It
was much worn, and had so little head-room that the laird could not
ascend without stooping. Cosmo was short enough as yet to go erect,
but it gave him always a feeling of imprisonment and choking, a
brief agony of the imagination, to pass through the narrow curve,
though he did so at least twice every day. It was the
oldest-looking thing about the place--that staircase.

At the top of it, the laird turned to the right, and lifted the
latch--all the doors were latched--of a dark-looking door. It
screaked dismally as it opened. He entered and undid a shutter,
letting an abiding flash of the ever young light of the summer day
into the ancient room. It was long since Cosmo had been in it
before. The aspect of it affected him like a withered wall-flower.

It was a well-furnished room. A lady with taste must at one time at
least have presided in it--but then withering does so much for
beauty--and that not of stuffs and THINGS only! The furniture of it
was very modern compared with the house, but not much of it was
younger than the last James, or Queen Anne, and it had all a
stately old-maidish look. Such venerable rooms have been described,
and painted, and put on the stage, and dreamed about, tens of
thousands of times, yet they always draw me afresh as if they were
as young as the new children who keep the world from growing old.
They haunt me, and if I miss them in heaven, I shall have one given