o the garden behind me, and pass through the long
series of echoing south rooms full of shadows and ladders and ghostly
pails of painters' mess, and humming a tune to make myself believe
I liked it, go rather slowly across the brick-floored hall, up the
creaking stairs, down the long whitewashed passage, and with a final
rush of panic whisk into my room and double lock and bolt the door!

There were no bells in the house, and I used to take a great dinner-bell
to bed with me so that at least I might be able to make a noise if
frightened in the night, though what good it would have been I don't
know, as there was no one to hear. The housemaid slept in another little
cell opening out of mine, and we two were the only living creatures in
the great empty west wing. She evidently did not believe in ghosts, for
I could hear how she fell asleep immediately after getting into bed; nor
do I believe in them, "mais je les redoute," as a French lady said, who
from her books appears to have been strongminded.

The dinner-bell was a great solace; it was never rung, but it comforted
me to see it on the chair beside my bed, as my nights were anything but
placid, it was all so strange, and there were such queer creakings and
other noises. I used to lie awake for hours, startled out of a light
sleep by the cracking of some board, and listen to the indifferent
snores of the girl in the next room. In the morning, of course, I was as
brave as a lion and much amused at the cold perspirations of the night
before; but even the nights seem to me now to have been delightful,
and myself like those historic boys who heard a voice in every wind
and snatched a fearful joy. I would gladly shiver through them all
over again for the sake of the beautiful purity of the house, empty of
servants and upholstery.

How pretty the bedrooms looked with nothing in them but their cheerful
new papers! Sometimes I would go into those that were finished and build
all sorts of castles in the air about their future and their past. Would
the nuns who had lived in them know their little white-washed cells
again, all gay with delicate flower papers and clean white paint? And
how astonished they would be to see cell No. 14 turned into a bathroom,
with a bath big enough to insure a cleanliness of body equal to their
purity of soul! They would look upon it as a snare of the tempter; and I
know that in my own case I only began to be shocked at the blackness of
my nails th