ud on it; it was opened just enough to give a
hint of its color. I was very pleased; I snapped it off at once, for I
had heard so many times that it was hard to make roses bloom; and I ran
in through the hall and up the stairs, where I met my grandmother on the
square landing. She sat down in the window-seat, and I showed her
proudly what was crumpled in my warm little fist. I can see it now!--it
had no stem at all, and for many days afterward I was bowed down with a
sense of my guilt and shame, for I was made to understand it was an
awful thing to have blighted and broken a treasured flower like that.

It must have been the very next winter that my grandmother died. She had
a long illness which I do not remember much about; but the night she
died might have been yesterday night, it is all so fresh and clear in
my mind. I did not live with her in the old house then, but in a new
house close by, across the yard. All the family were at the great house,
and I could see that lights were carried hurriedly from one room to
another. A servant came to fetch me, but I would not go with her; my
grandmother was dying, whatever that might be, and she was taking leave
of every one--she was ceremonious even then. I did not dare to go with
the rest; I had an intense curiosity to see what dying might be like,
but I was afraid to be there with her, and I was also afraid to stay at
home alone. I was only five years old. It was in December, and the sky
seemed to grow darker and darker, and I went out at last to sit on a
door-step and cry softly to myself, and while I was there some one came
to another door next the street, and rang the bell loudly again and
again. I suppose I was afraid to answer the summons--indeed, I do not
know that I thought of it; all the world had been still before, and the
bell sounded loud and awful through the empty house. It seemed as if the
messenger from an unknown world had come to the wrong house to call my
poor grandmother away; and that loud ringing is curiously linked in my
mind with the knocking at the gate in "Macbeth." I never can think of
one without the other, though there was no fierce Lady Macbeth to bid me
not be lost so poorly in my thoughts; for when they all came back awed
and tearful, and found me waiting in the cold, alone, and afraid more of
this world than the next, they were very good to me. But as for the
funeral, it gave me vast entertainment; it was the first grand public
occasion in whi