s! A human life, I think, should be
well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of
tender kinship for the face of earth, for the labors men go forth to,
for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that
early home a familiar unmistakable difference amid the future widening
of knowledge: a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be
inwrought with affection, and--kindly acquaintance with all neighbors,
even to the dogs and donkeys, may spread not by sentimental effort and
reflection, but as a sweet habit of the blood. At five years old,
mortals are not prepared to be citizens of the world, to be stimulated
by abstract nouns, to soar above preference into impartiality; and that
prejudice in favor of milk with which we blindly begin, is a type of
the way body and soul must get nourished at least for a time. The best
introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a
little lot of stars belonging to one's own homestead.

But this blessed persistence in which affection can take root had been
wanting in Gwendolen's life. It was only a year before her recall from
Leubronn that Offendene had been chosen as her mamma's home, simply for
its nearness to Pennicote Rectory, and that Mrs. Davilow, Gwendolen,
and her four half-sisters (the governess and the maid following in
another vehicle) had been driven along the avenue for the first time,
on a late October afternoon when the rooks were crawing loudly above
them, and the yellow elm-leaves were whirling.

The season suited the aspect of the old oblong red-brick house, rather
too anxiously ornamented with stone at every line, not excepting the
double row of narrow windows and the large square portico. The stone
encouraged a greenish lichen, the brick a powdery gray, so that though
the building was rigidly rectangular there was no harshness in the
physiognomy which it turned to the three avenues cut east, west and
south in the hundred yards' breadth of old plantation encircling the
immediate grounds. One would have liked the house to have been lifted
on a knoll, so as to look beyond its own little domain to the long
thatched roofs of the distant villages, the church towers, the
scattered homesteads, the gradual rise of surging woods, and the green
breadths of undulating park which made the beautiful face of the earth
in that part of Wessex. But though standing thus behind, a screen amid
flat pastures, it had on one