in the two small pictures; also my grandmother, and her father
and mother and grandfather, and one other person, who lived a great
while ago. All of these have been long dead, and the longer they had
been dead the less like substance they looked and the more like shadows,
so that the oldest was like one's breath of a frosty morning, but shaped
like the living figure.

"There was no motion of their breasts, and their lips seemed to be
moving as if they were saying, Breath! Breath! Breath! I thought they
wanted to breathe the air of this world again in my shape, which I
seemed to see as it were empty of myself and of these other selves, like
a sponge that has water pressed out of it.

"Presently it seemed to me that I returned to myself, and then those
others became part of me by being taken up, one by one, and so lost in
my own life.

"My father and mother came up, hand in hand, looking more real than any
of the rest. Their figures vanished, and they seemed to have become a
part of me; for I felt all at once the longing to live over the life
they had led, on the sea and in strange countries.

"Another figure was just like the one we called the Major, who was a
very strong, hearty-looking man, and who is said to have drank hard
sometimes, though there is nothing about it on his tombstone, which I
used to read in the graveyard. It seemed to me that there was something
about his life that I did not want to make a part of mine, but that
there was some right he had in me through my being of his blood, and
so his health and his strength went all through me, and I was always
to have what was left of his life in that shadow-like shape, forming a
portion of mine.

"So in the same way with the shape answering to the portrait of that
famous beauty who was the wife of my great-grandfather, and used to be
called the Pride of the County.

"And so too with another figure which had the face of that portrait
marked on the back, Ruth Bradford, who married one of my ancestors, and
was before the court, as I have heard, in the time of the witchcraft
trials.

"There was with the rest a dark, wild-looking woman, with a head-dress
of feathers. She kept as it were in shadow, but I saw something of my
own features in her face.

"It was on my mind very strongly that the shape of that woman of our
blood who was burned long ago by the Papists came very close to me, and
was in some way made one with mine, and that I feel her presence with