* * * * *

------ the aged portress (Dame Wheeler, Susan’s grandmother) had given
us admittance, and we soon stood on the steps in front of the house, in
calm survey of the scene before us.  Hatherden was just the place to like
or not to like, according to the feeling of the hour; a respectable,
comfortable country house, with a lawn before, a paddock on one side, a
shrubbery on the other; offices and a kitchen garden behind, and the
usual ornaments of villas and advertisements, a greenhouse and a
veranda.  Now my thoughts were couleur de rose, and Hatherden was
charming.  Even the beds intended for flowers on the lawn, but which,
under a summer’s neglect, were now dismal receptacles of seeds and
weeds, did not shock my gardening eye so much as my companion evidently
expected.  “We must get my factotum, Clarke, here to-morrow,” so ran my
thoughts, “to clear away that rubbish, and try a little bold
transplanting; late hollyhocks, late dahlias, a few pots of lobellias
and chrysanthemums, a few patches of coreopsis and china-asters, and
plenty of scarlet geraniums, will soon make this desolation flourishing. 
A good gardener can move any thing now-a-days, whether in bloom or not,”
thought I, with much complacency, “and Clarke’s a man to transplant
Windsor forest without withering a leaf.  We’ll have him to-morrow.”

The same good disposition continued after I entered the house.  And when left alone in the echoing empty breakfast-room, with only one shutter opened, whilst Dame Wheeler was guiding the companion of my survey to the stableyard, I amused myself with making in my own mind, comparisons between what had been, and what would be.  There she used to sit, poor Mrs. Norris, in this large airy room, in the midst of its solid handsome furniture, in a great chair at a great table, busily at work for one of her seven small children; the table piled with frocks, trousers, petticoats, shirts, pinafores, hats, bonnets, all sorts of children’s gear, masculine and feminine, together with spelling books, copy books, ivory alphabets, dissected maps, dolls, toys, and gingerbread, for the same small people.  There she sat a careful mother, fretting over their naughtiness and their ailments; always in fear of the sun, or the wind, or the rain, of their running to heat themselves, or their standing still to catch cold:  not a book in the house fit for a person turned of eight years old! not a grown up idea! not a thought beyond the nursery!  One wondered what she could have talked of before she had children.  Good Mrs. Norris, such was she.  Good Mr. Norris was, for all purposes of neighbourhood, worse still.  He was gapy and fidgetty, and prosy and dosy, kept a tool chest and a medicine chest, weighed out manna and magnesia, constructed fishing-flies, and nets for fruit-trees, turned nutmeg-graters, lined his wife’s work-box, and dressed his little daughter’s doll; and had a tone of conversation perfectly in keeping with his tastes and pursuits,