admit, dear Eustace, than your lamented father."

Eustace, I thought, turned pale, but it might have been the greenish light through the bottle-glass windows of the little church, on whose damp floor we three were standing before the tombs of the Brandlings of former times, quaint pyramids of kneeling figures, sons and daughters tapering downwards from the kneeling father and mother; and recumbent knights, obliterated by centuries in the ruined roofless chapel, so that the dog at their feet, the sword by their side, let alone their poor washed features, were scarce distinguishable....

"They look like drowned people," I said, and indeed the green light through the trees and the bottle glass, and the greenish damp stains all round, made the church seem like a sea cave, with the sea moaning round it.

"Where have you seen drowned people, Penelope?" asked Eustace, and I felt a little reproved for the horridness of my imaginings.

"Nowhere," I hastily answered; "just a fancy that passed through my head. And you said there are so many wrecks on this coast, you know."

"We are all wrecks on the ocean of Time," remarked the Reverend Hubert, "overwhelmed by its flood."

"You are the bishop now," I laughed, "not the pilchard fisher," and we went through the damp churchyard of huddled grassy mounds and crooked gravestones under the big trees of the glen.

"Eustace," I said that evening, "I wish I might not be buried down there," and then, considering that all his ancestors were, I felt sorry.

But he clasped my arm very tenderly, and exclaimed with a look of deep pain, "For God's sake do not speak of such things, my love. Even in jest the words make me feel faint and sick."

Poor Eustace! I fear he is not well; and that what he has found at St. Salvat's is eating into his spirits.

November 15, 1772.

I have been feeling doubtful, for some days past, whether to send my diary regularly to my mother, lest she should be distressed (at that great distance) by my account of this place and our life here. Yet I felt as if something had suddenly happened, a window suddenly closed or a door slammed in my face, when Eustace begged me to-day to be very reserved in anything I wrote in my letters.

"These country postmasters," he said, not without hesitation, "are not to be trusted with any secrets; they are known to amuse their leisure and entertain their gossips with the letters which pass through their hands." He laughed, but not very naturally. "Some day," he said, "I will be sending a special messenger to Cardiff, and then your diary—for I know that you are keeping one—shall go to your mother. But for the present I would not say more than needful about ... about our surroundings, my dear Penelope."

I felt childishly vexed.

"'Tis that hateful Uncle Hubert;" I cried, "that reads our letters, Eustace! I feel sure of it!"

"Nonsense," answered Eustace. "I tell you that it is a well-known habit among postmasters and postmistresses in this country," and he went away a little displeased, as I thought.

My poor journal! And yet I shall continue writing it, and perhaps even more frankly now it will be read only by me; for while I write I seem to be talking to my dearest mother, and to be a little less solitary....

II

December 21, 1772.

Winter has come on: a melancholy, wet and stormy winter, without the glitter of snow and ice; and with the sea moaning or roaring by turns. I think with longing (though I hope poor Eustace does not guess how near I sometimes am to crying for homesickness) of our sledging parties with the dear cheerful neighbours at Grandfey; of the skating on the ponds, and the long walks on the crisp frozen snow, when Eustace and I would snowball or make long slides, laughing like children. At St. Salvat's there are no neighbours; or if there are (but the nearest large house is ten miles off, and belongs to a noble lord who never leaves London) they do not show themselves. I do not even know what there is or is not in the country that lies inland; in fact, since our coming, I have never left the grounds and park of St. Salvat's, nor gone beyond the old fortified walls which encircle them. My very curiosity has gradually faded. I have never pressed Hubert for the saddle horse and the equipage (the coach-house contains only broken-down coaches of the days of King George I.) which he promised rather vaguely to procure for me on our first coming; I have no wish to pass beyond that drawbridge; like a caged bird, I have grown accustomed to my prison. Since the bad weather I have even ceased my rambles in the shrubberies and on the grass-grown terraces: the path to the sea has been slippery with mud; besides I hate that melancholy winter sea, always threatening or complaining.

I stay within doors for days together, without pleasure or profit, reading old plays and novels which I throw aside, or putting a few stitches into useless tambour work; I who could formerly not live a day within doors, nor do whatever I set to do without childish strenuousness!

These two or three days past I have been trying to find diversion in reading the history of these parts, where the Brandlings—kings of this part of Wales in the time of King Arthur, crusaders later, and great barons fighting at Crecy and at Agincourt—once played so great a part, and now they have dwindled into common smugglers, for 'tis my growing persuasion that such is the real trade hidden under the name of pilchard fishing—defrauders of the King's Exchequer, and who knows? for all Hubert's rank as magistrate, no better than thieves and outlawed ruffians.

Hubert has been showing me the family archives. He lays great store by all these deeds and papers, and one is surprised in a house so utterly given over to neglect, to find anything in such good order. He saved the archives himself he tells me, when (as I have always forgotten to note down) the library of the castle was burnt down on the occasion of my late brother-in-law's wake; a barbarous funereal feast habitual in these parts, and during which a drunken guest set fire to the draperies of the coffin. I did not ask whether the body of Sir Thomas, which had been brought by sea from Bristol after his violent end there, had been destroyed in this extraordinary pyre; and I judge that it was from Eustace's silence and Hubert's evident avoidance of the point. Perhaps he is conscious that his efforts were directed to a different object, for it is well nigh miraculous how he should have saved those shelves full of documents and all that number of valuable books bound with the Brandling arms.

"You must have risked your life in the flames!" I exclaimed with admiration at the man's heroism.

He bid me look at his hands, which indeed bear traces of dreadful burning.

"I care about my ancestors," he answered, "perhaps more, to say the truth, than for my living kinsfolk. Besides," he added, "I ought to say that I had taken the precaution to remove the most valuable books before giving over the library to their drunken rites. As it was, they burnt my poor dead nephew to ashes like the phoenix of the Poets, only that he, poor lad, will not arise from them till the day of judgment!"

January 12, 1773.

A horrid circumstance has just happened, and oddly enough in that same library which had been burnt, all but its ancient walls, at my brother-in-law's funeral, I had persuaded Eustace to turn it into a laboratory, for I think a certain melancholy may be due to the restless idleness in which he has been living ever since we came here. In building one of the furnaces the masons had to make a deep cavity in the wall; and there, what should appear, but a number of skeletons, nine or ten, walled up erect in the thickness of the masonry. I was taking the air on the terrace outside, and hearing the men's exclamations, ran to the spot. It was a ghastly sight. But my uncle Simon, who was smoking his pipe in the great empty room, burst