d building had always been in my mind.

I had always loved it, always feared to be near it; I had so longed to
know what might be within it. As a little knickerbockered child I would
pick the colored gravel-stones from the mortar, and play with them in
the dust; and if perchance one stone struck the iron door, I would run
away from the echo the blow produced.

In my older days it was again only around this building that I would
mostly play, and would remark that upon its facade were written great
letters, on which the ivy, that so actively clambered up the walls,
scarcely grew. At that time how I longed to know what those letters
could mean!

When the first holiday after I had made the acquaintance of those
letters came, and they took me again to our country-seat, one after
another I spelled out the ancient letters of the inscription on that
mysterious little house, and pieced them together in my mind. But I
could not arrive at their meaning; for they were written in some foreign
tongue.

Many, many times I wrote those words in the dust even before I
understood them:

"NE NOS INDUCAS IN TENTATIONEM."

I strove to reach one year earlier than my school-fellows the so-called
"student class," where Latin was taught.

My most elementary acquaintance with the Latin tongue had always for its
one aim the discovery of the meaning of that saying. Finally I solved
the mystery--

"Lead us not into temptation." It is a sentence of the Lord's Prayer,
which I myself had repeated a thousand times; and now I knew its
meaning still less than before.

And still more began to come to me a kind of mysterious abhorrence of
that building, above whose door was to be found the prayer that God
might guard us against temptations.

Perhaps this was the very dwelling of temptations?

We know what children understand by "temptations."

To-day I saw this door open, and knew that this building was our family
vault.

This door, which hitherto I had only seen covered with ivy, was now
swung open, and through the open porch glittered the light of a lamp.
The two great Virginia creepers which were planted before the crypt hid
the glass so that it was not visible from the garden. The brightness was
only for us.

The four men set the coffin down on the steps; we followed after it.

So this was that house where temptations dwell; and all our prayers were
in vain; "lead us not into temptation." Yet to temptation we were forced
to come. Do