deaf governess, my sisters and I went roaming
about the beautiful hills in all weathers. It
goes to my heart now to think how, as often
as our unruly tribe made a descent upon the
quaint dominions of Miss Arabella Dart, the
bachelor farmer's maiden sister, that poor dunny
dozy creature, Croppy, used to be led out on
the turf from his warm stall, caparisoned with a
wonderfully patched and incommodious side-
saddle, and given up to the exacting caprices of
a trio of mischievous imps, who enjoyed nothing
better than teazing and persecuting him, like a
bevy of importunate summer flies, into the
extreme measure of a brief and superannuated
gallop.

But all this time I have not said what was
the peculiar character and stamp of expression
which fixed the likeness of Staddon in my
memory after the indelible fashion which, as I
have mentioned, it is the property of some
houses to possess. It was the marvellous
resemblance between the house and its master; a
resemblance, as it seemed to me, not merely
fanciful, or based on generalities, but tangible,
and, so to speak, physical; a likeness of lines
and colours, which I felt all the more because I
knew I could not make it felt by others. As
often as I saw his weather-dried little visage,
his sharp nose, square chin, and high-pitched
forehead running up into a yellow-grey stubble
of short-cropped hair, there stood before me the
queer time-stained little old house, its low gable
crowned with some fluttering sprays of
wallflower rooted among the stones. The pinched
and napless hat he always wore perched high on
his head, did duty for the dilapidated little
tower where the dovecot was; and the jutting
angles and ragged roofs of the incongruous farm-
buildings were aptly mimicked by his sharp
elbows, and the meagre fluttering skirts of his
high-shouldered swallow-tailed coat. I never
saw the brick and mortar double so strangely
like its fleshy brother, as one day in the late
autumn, when one of our grand wild winds was
abroad, and the sky was full of piles of hurrying
lurid cloud, fitful scuds of rain, and weak
gleams of sunshine. As I came panting before
the wind along the dip between the hills, one
of those gleams was just flushing the face of
the old house dashed with rain and spray, and
touching the sharp once-gilded gnomon of the
sun-dial over the door, while the rows of great
scarlet and crimson and yellow dahlias were
tossing their burning faces, and swaying like
tortured things at every blast. Staddon was
that day looking its best, and as I was more
than twelve years old then—for Croppy, poor
soul, I know had gained his well-earned rest
many a winter before—I was quite capable of
feeling, and did feel, the picturesque charm of
the place. Yet, for all that, nothing could prevent
my recurring to the grotesque likeness
between master and house, as soon as I entered
the low wainscoted kitchen on the left of the
entrance door. For there sat Farmer Dart,
flushed and peevish with the unlooked-for, and
certainly undeserved, visitation of a twinge
of gout in his knee, the firelight glittering
on his sharp red nose and flaring over his
wrinkled russet skin, with the pale pinched
grey hat planted grimly above, and, to complete
the picture, a grand flowered chintz dressing-
gown, crimson and yellow and green, which
Miss Arabella had carefully folded about his
waist and lower limbs, but which waved its
parti-coloured skirts, like the flowers outside, in
the draught of the opening door.

When first I knew Staddon, Farmer Dart and
his sister, with their men-servants and maid-
servants, were its only denizens. In later years,
our worthy little French master, Monsieur
Huillier, and his mother, became lodgers there
for a considerable period. How so strange a thing
should have come to pass as that the master of
Staddon should have admitted a couple of
foreigners to a permanent seat at his hearth-side,
I am quite unable to guess, but there they were
living, and living in excellent good harmony
too: partly owing, no doubt, to the unfeigned
admiration of the French mother and son for
all things English, and partly to the sympathy
between Madame Huillier and Miss Arabella in
the matter of dried simples and medicinal
confections, in the preparation and exhibition of
which to suffering mortals each was a devoted
adept, though I more than half suspect that each
in her secret heart looked down upon many of the
other's nostrums as vain and superstitious. One
strong reason that Madame had for considering
so out-of-the-way an abode desirable, was
her anxiety to remove her son, her dear Victor,
whom she cared for and cosseted and guarded
against designing womankind with a hen-like
fussiness, as though, at near forty, he were still
quite incapable of self-defence or management,
from contact with certain too potent attractions
at South Cove. There was one sea-side house,
called "The Rocks," which she especially hated,
and the very mention of which would set her
grey moustache quivering, and the perky brown
bow on her cap nodding with a suppressed
wrath, which filled us mischievous young people
with delight. "The Rocks" stood at the
extreme end of one of the horns of the crescent-
shaped quay, and in the broad shadow of Stony
Point, where the branches of the garden-bushes
were shorn away and bent landwards on the
side towards the sea, and the spray dashed over
the chimney-pots every time it blew a gale.

I shall have to come back to "The Rocks"
in the course of my rambling old stories, and to
tell what manner of folks were the Crouch
Tolleys, who occupied the house for several
years, and were, in truth, as singular a family as
any of our South Cove notables, but at present
I have only to do with the contraband attraction
which set Madame Huillier's bow a-nodding,
as I have said, and allured her generally
obedient Victor in the direction of Stony Point.
This attraction was Miss Davida Tolley, the
orphan daughter of the long-deceased younger
brother of Mr. Crouch Tolley. Madame Huillier,
so kind and considerate in her demure fashion
towards all the world besides (except when a