AN OLD HOUSE AND A BOOK 239 



recall them, softened as by an echo, and that corner or 

 that gable starts many a fancy that reaches beyond the 

 stars, many a fancy gay or enriched with regrets. It is 

 aware of birth, marriage and death; and who dares say that 

 there is not kneaded into the stones a record more pleas- 

 ing than brass? With what meanings the vesperal beam 

 slips through a staircase window in autumn ! The moon 

 has an expression proper to us alone, nested among our 

 limes, or heaving an ivory shoulder above the neighbour 

 roofs. As we enter a room in our house we are conscious 

 of a fitness in its configuration that defies mathematics. 

 Rightly used, such a space will inspire a stately ordering 

 of our lives; it is, in another respect, the amplest canvas 

 for the art of life. It becomes so much a part of us that 

 we exclaim — 



" This beautiful house is sand and stone : 

 What will it be in heaven ? " 



This beautiful house under the Downs was already 

 more than " sand and stone." It was a giant, very gentle 

 but very powerful, and adding to its power the lore of the 

 family it was irresistible. This young mother had all the 

 lore by heart and loved it, yet had fought against it. She 

 had been happy when her child had grown at first unlike 

 her own family and much like her husband's; but no! his 

 hair grew lighter, his nose was as those of her brothers' 

 in bud, and now that he was five he was not a child so 

 much as an incarnation of the family, a sort of graven 

 image to which the old man bowed down, and with all 

 the more fervour because of that weakness in the boy 

 which others thought imbecility. The old man, too, had 

 been not only a man but a family; now that the child was 



