mansion, which was built half way up the side of a wooded hill, and an
avenue of beautiful old trees led up to the house. There was a large
conservatory at one side of it, filled with the rarest flowers, and in a
shady corner of the grounds my mother had a kind of grotto, filled with
lovely ferns, through which a clear stream of water was ever flowing. This
fernery was my mother's great delight, and here she spent much of her time.
She was a very worldly woman; she took very little notice of her children;
and when she was not in the garden, she was generally lying on the sofa in
the drawing-room, reading novels, which she procured from a London library.

'My father was a very different man; he was fond of quiet, and fond of his
children; but he was obliged to be often from home, so that we did not see
as much of him as we should otherwise have done.

'I had one brother and one sister. My brother was much older than we were;
there had been several children between us, who had died in their infancy,
so that he was in the sixth form of a large public school whilst we were
children in the nursery.

'My sister Lucy was a year younger than I was. She was such a pretty child,
and had a very sweet disposition. When we were children we got on very well
together, and shared every pleasure and every grief. My father bought us a
little white pony, and on this we used to ride in turns about the park when
we were quite small children, our old nurse following, to see that no harm
came to us.

'She was a very good old woman; she taught us to say our prayers night and
morning, and on Sundays she used to sit with us under a tree in the park,
and show us Scripture pictures, and tell us stories out of the Bible. There
was one picture of a shepherd very like that, Rosalie; it came back to my