AN OLD HOUSE AND A BOOK 237 



ing up and down, as if they had left something behind in 

 their home. 



When I first entered the house by an accident in pass- 

 ing that way, a great-grandfather, a granddaughter and 

 her son were alone in the house, with two servants. The 

 mother, early widowed, had come with her child to 

 minister to the last days of the ancient man. The house 

 was by then full of the reports of death. In almost every 

 room there had been a deathbed. For it had always been 

 full of life; there was never such a house for calling back 

 its children; the sons of it brought their wives, and the 

 daughters their husbands, and often an excuse was made 

 for one pair to stay on indefinitely; and thus it came to 

 be full also of death. This granddaughter, however, had 

 stayed, as she wished to believe, against her will, because 

 the old man was so fond of his great-grandchild. She 

 was a beautiful, strong woman, with the dark, lustrous 

 skin, gold hair, perfect clear features, proud step and 

 prouder voice, of all the family; she had shone before a 

 thousand eyes; and yet she stayed on and on, obsessed by 

 the multitudinous memories of the house alone under the 

 Downs. 



Her grandfather would talk of nothing but his father 

 and his grandfather, the lawyers, the captains, the scholars, 

 whose bones were under the churchyard elms, and his 

 sons and their sons, all of them also now dead. He had 

 their childish ways by heart, the childish ways of men 

 who were white-haired at his birth as well as of those 

 who went golden-haired but yesterday into the grave; 

 and all their names, their stately, their out-of-the-way 

 names, and those which recorded the maiden names of 

 their mothers; their nicknames, too, a whole book of 



