where tall cupboard doors in the further wall,
brass-latticed and lined with blue, shut in no
end of marvellous dainties and curious
confections in brown glazed pots and squab green
bottles. On the right was a similar chamber,
with a similar cupboard, sacred to godpapa's
cast-off phials, gallipots, and pill-boxes. I suppose
it was my knowledge of the mysteries of
this repository, together with the fact that the
blind of its one window was generally kept
down, and the sash obstinately closed against
the scent of the great good-humoured cabbage-
roses, that made me rather shy of entering its
precincts, especially towards dusk. But over and
above these reasons for hesitation there hung
above the chimney-piece a tall old grimy
oilpainting of the famous race-horse Guilders, held
by an ill-favoured cadaverous jockey in a yellow
jacket (the said jockey quite out of all drawing,
and ridiculously diminutive compared to the
steed), which excited in me something very like
terror, and made me think of all sorts of ghostly
chargers galloping through old ballads and
legends which I had no business ever to have
heard of, till I expected to see the smoke-
blackened horse shake its unnaturally-arched
neck and bony head at me, and the jockey
stretch out those skinny fingers that clutched
his whip, to reach me shivering at the other
side of the dusky room.

Before turning up the small steep staircase,
one caught a glimpse of a dark passage and a
baize door leading to the little court, the cozy
baby-house, kitchen, and the diminutive stable.
Ah! the Apician feasts that issued from that
baize door! What bisques, or ortolans, or
pâtés de foie gras of after days have ever come
up to the crisp fried soles; the fair, portly
boiled fowls; the deep, sugar-sweet, juicy
damson-pies (creamed), which had their birth
in that delicious region! There reigned Keziah
the cook, twice too voluminous for her small
domain, ruddy of skin and pale of hair, which
always reminded me of the tight little tow curls
on wooden poodles. With what a piping voice
out of the bulk of that abounding person she
used to welcome me, generally with the gift of
some delicate cheesecake put by for me from the
day's baking; what time I was conveyed into
her dominions by Tackett, the parlour-maid, for
the ostensible purpose of paying my respects to
surly Bet, the brindled Tom cat, who, by the
same unexplained fiction which gave him his
feminine appellation, was always spoken of in
the family as " she," and who usually resided,
when at home, in the hottest corner of the large
tin-lined plate-warmer. I remember that I
regarded the said Bet with feelings of awe-struck
reserve, owing chiefly to the ruffianly expression
imparted to his bullet head by ears tattered in
many a midnight fray, and one eye scarred and
drawn down in unseemly fashion by some mêlée
on the leads. My acquaintance with Bet never
seemed to progress in all the years I knew him,
and on all occasions of our limited intercourse
Tackett was wont, by Aunt Bella's express
command, to lift him gingerly out of his
warm nest, and hold him, sulkily blinking,
towards me, with his rusty fore-paws carefully
enveloped in the folds of her spotless
white apron. I think I see the good soul
now, performing the presentation ceremony!
Bony and lank she was, with a certain Judy-
like angularity of form and raiment, which
gave me the impression of her being made to
fold up, and never coming quite straight at the
joints.

How plainly I recal her kindly freckled face,
which seemed all the longer for the nose stopping
short midway between the forehead and chin,
her iron-grey strips of hair forming two regular
little festoons above the friendly eyes, and her
invariable lilac and yellow cap-ribbon, bending
over me, small mite as I was, while I timidly
paid my compliments to her muffled burden, and
curiously watched her deposit it again in the
chimney-corner.

On the little landing-place at the top of the
stairs opened the doors of godpapa's study and
Aunt Bella's sitting-room. In this latter
chamber I was almost sure to find her on those
high red-letter days when, leaving my little
brothers and sisters in the detested trammels of
a deaf governess and Goldsmith's Abridgment,
I was promoted to the signal honour of dining
and passing the evening in Meadow-row. Her
seat was beside one of the windows, two of which
looked towards the sea and the shadowy copse
wood of Stony Point, and a third towards the
road leading up to Meadow-row. Her sight was
beginning to fail her even in those early days,
dear soul! and before her death she lost it almost
entirely; but she was always busy when I came
in, sometimes with certain long narrow strips of
snow-white lambswool netting, sometimes over
a little green baize-covered frame witli rattling
bobbins, whereon she manufactured silken
staylaces and braiding of gay colours, while I
stood by, delightedly watching the mysteries
of its confection, as her delicate little brown
hands (a pretty hand and foot were Aunt
Bella's chief beauties) ordered the mazes of
the truant threads with that instinctive skill
and tact which tells so sadly of coming
blindness.

The first hour or two of my visit to Aunt
Bella was sure to be spent in this cheerful
sitting-room. It was rather low-ceiled, rather
misshapen, with an arch somehow cutting it
across the middle where no arch should be,
and a dove-coloured and white paper on the
walls rather the worse for wear, and bearing, as
to its design, a resemblance to sheaves of
monster stinging-nettles. The carpet was dove-
coloured and green, clove-coloured and green
the chintz of the curtains and furniture, and it
was very sunny, very quiet, and pleasantly
fragrant with huge posies of pinks or carnations
all the summer long. There stood the marvel
of art, the bright-rubbed mahogany table, the
middle portion of whose upper surface slid out,
and, being turned over, displayed, to my never
wearied view, the wonders of an inlaid chess-
board and draught-board in beautifully shaded