patiently.

Among the yellow pages, pressed flat, and still as fresh as if gathered
yesterday, Amaryllis found bright petals and coloured autumn leaves. For
it was one of the old man's ways to carry home such of these that
pleased him and to place them in his books. This he had done for half a
century, and many of the flower petals and leaves in the grey old works
of bygone authors had been there a generation. It is wonderful how long
they will endure left undisturbed and pressed in this way; the paper
they used in old books seems to have been softer, without the hard
surface of our present paper, more like blotting paper, and so keeps
them better. Before the repulsion between father and son became so
marked, Amaryllis had often been with her grandfather in the garden and
round the meadows at Coombe Oaks, and seen him gather the yellow tulips,
the broad-petalled roses, and in autumn the bright scarlet bramble
leaves. The brown leaves of the Spanish chestnut, too, pleased him;
anything with richness of colour. The old and grey, and withered man
gathered the brightest of petals for his old and grey, and forgotten
books.

Now the sight of these leaves and petals between the yellow pages
softened her heart towards him; he was a tyrant, but he was very, very
old, they were like flowers on a living tomb.

In a little while Grandfather Iden got up, and going to a drawer in one
of the bookcases, took from it some scraps of memoranda; he thrust these
between her face and the book, and told her to read them instead.

"These are your writing."

"Go on," said the old man, smiling, grunting, and coughing, all at once.

"In 1840," read Amaryllis, "there were only two houses in Black Jack
Street." "Only _two_ houses!" she interposed, artfully.

"Two," said the grandfather.

"One in 1802," went on Amaryllis, "while in 1775 the site was covered
with furze." "How it has changed!" she said. He nodded, and coughed, and
smiled; his great grey hat rocked on his head and seemed about to
extinguish him.

"There's a note at the bottom in pencil, grandpa. It says, 'A hundred
voters in this street, 1884.'"

"Ah!" said the old man, an ah! so deep it fetched his very heart up in
coughing. When he finished, Amaryllis read on--

"In 1802 there were only ten voters in the town."

"Ah!" His excitement caused such violent coughing Amaryllis became
alarmed, but it did him no harm. The more he coughed and choked the
livelier he seemed. The