Stray Leaves from a Border Garden 
surviving, who was wont to come and wander, a ghost 
before her time, in the haunts where she had been happy. 
The place was very lonely. No one ever seemed to come 
or go but an ancient gardener in charge, who kept the 
walled garden in a sort of order. Outside, however, he 
made no sort of attempt to stem the tide of neglect. The 
dead branches lay wherever winter’s winds had dropped 
them, and the birds, unmolested, literally swarmed. It was 
a paradise of birds-— Birdland. indeed. In the spring the 
bird concerts were surprising, and every corner hid a nest. 
The starlings crowded the ivy on the old house, and even 
flew inside through the broken windows. Within all was 
desolation. Faded curtains and hangings, the once brightly 
polished tables and chairs dull and dirty, an occasional 
lovely china bowl or plate, recalled that the place had once 
been inhabited by people of taste ; and an old spinet, with 
notes long dumb, testified to some one having loved music. 
In the bedrooms were quaint old worm-eaten, cobwebby 
fourposters, the stairs creaked ominously when one 
ascended them, the pretty old oval mirrors reflected one’s 
face so altered, one might almost fancy one beheld the face 
of some long-departed owner of the old home. There had 
been children there long ago— -a tall old-fashioned fender 
bore witness to that-— and a little quaint pair of tiny black 
wooden elephants looked curiously out of place in that un- 
mistakable English home. I wondered if they had been 
brought from the far mysterious East by the officer whose 
black silhouette still hung in one of the bedrooms, and 
given perchance to the little lady whose small faded white 
satin dancing-shoe lay on a table by a bowl of potpourri 
whose scent had long since departed ! Speculation, all idle 
speculation ; no one to tell, no one who knew ; no one left 
who cared. 
The heir was an officer in India, a Bengal Lancer, who 
probably had never set eyes on his inheritance, such as it 
was, and the only visitors the old place ever had was that 
lonely woman and my unnoted self. But I was only a bird 
of passage, a summer swallow who departed, and the old 
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