had torn them rudely away from the objects, few or many, worthy or
unworthy, around which they had twined with a clinging firmness.

The bare, white-washed walls of this strange dormitory brought out in
touching relief the cosy corners of my own little room at home, and
the strict and rigid discipline, to which I felt I never could
conform, made me look back with a hopeless regret upon the wandering,
aimless hours I had spent unfettered, before I became a pupil of this
bleak institution.

I did not know then, as I know now, that it is not the house which
makes the home; that white-washed walls and painted floors may melt
into artistic beauty, where glows the never smouldering fire of
Christian love; and I have searched the world in vain for many a year,
among riches and luxuries and comforts, but I have never had the
smallest glimpse of that same abiding, enduring and self-sacrificing
love which presided over me, waking or sleeping, smiling or weeping,
during my happy, yet transient sojourn, in that distant Abbey of Notre
Dame.

Within its walls my childhood melted into girlhood, and my girlhood
into womanhood, and still, when I look out over the tree-tops, away
beyond the misty mountains in the west, towards the spot where this my
truly happiest home lies nestled, when with one sweeping stroke of my
active pen I cancel twenty years of my life, and am back again a
laughing, careless girl among my school companions, what is time to
me? Only a huge and ugly shadow flitting between me and all that I
have ever loved or cherished! A shadow, however, that flickers and
bounds away, when, with her magic lantern, memory floods the vista of
the past, with the light of "other days."