Miss Grizzel gently touched their heads.  Forthwith, to Griselda’s astonishment, they began solemnly to nod.

“Oh, how do you make them do that, Aunt Grizzel?” she exclaimed.

“Never you mind, my dear; it wouldn’t do for you to try to make them nod.  They wouldn’t like it,” replied Miss Grizzel mysteriously.  “Respect to your elders, my dear, always remember that.  The mandarins are many years older than you—­older than I myself, in fact.”

Griselda wondered, if this were so, how it was that Miss Grizzel took such liberties with them herself, but she said nothing.

“Here is my last summer’s pot-pourri,” continued Miss Grizzel, touching a great china jar on a little stand, close beside the cabinet.  “You may smell it, my dear.”

Nothing loth, Griselda buried her round little nose in the fragrant leaves.

“It’s lovely,” she said.  “May I smell it whenever I like, Aunt Grizzel?”

“We shall see,” replied her aunt.  “It isn’t every little girl, you know, that we could trust to come into the great saloon alone.”

“No,” said Griselda meekly.

Miss Grizzel led the way to a door opposite to that by which they had entered.  She opened it and passed through, Griselda following, into a small ante-room.

“It is on the stroke of ten,” said Miss Grizzel, consulting her watch; “now, my dear, you shall make acquaintance with our cuckoo.”

The cuckoo “that lived in a clock!” Griselda gazed round her eagerly.  Where was the clock?  She could see nothing in the least like one, only up on the wall in one corner was what looked like a miniature house, of dark brown carved wood.  It was not so very like a house, but it certainly had a roof—­a roof with deep projecting eaves; and, looking closer, yes, it was a clock, after all, only the figures, which had once been gilt, had grown dim with age, like everything else, and the hands at a little distance were hardly to be distinguished from the face.

Miss Grizzel stood perfectly still, looking up at the clock; Griselda beside her, in breathless expectation.  Presently there came a sort of distant rumbling. Something was going to happen.  Suddenly two little doors above the clock face, which Griselda had not known were there, sprang open with a burst and out flew a cuckoo, flapped his wings, and uttered his pretty cry, “Cuckoo! cuckoo! cuckoo!” Miss Grizzel counted aloud, “Seven, eight, nine, ten.”  “Yes, he never makes a mistake,” she added triumphantly.  “All these long years I have never known him wrong.  There are no such clocks made nowadays, I can assure you, my dear.”

“But is it a clock?  Isn’t he alive?” exclaimed Griselda.  “He looked at me and nodded his head, before he flapped his wings and went in to his house again—­he did indeed, aunt,” she said earnestly; “just like saying, ‘How do you do?’ to me.”