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  5 little children."
"What does Bessie say I have done?" I asked.
"Jane, I don't like cavillers or questioners; besides, there is something
truly forbidding in a child taking up her elders in that manner. Be
seated somewhere; and until you can speak pleasantly, remain silent."
A breakfast-room adjoined the drawing-room, I slipped in there. It
contained a bookcase: I soon possessed myself of a volume, taking care
that it should be one stored with pictures. I mounted into the window-
seat: gathering up my feet, I sat cross-legged, like a Turk; and, having
drawn the red moreen curtain nearly close, I was shrined in double
retirement.
Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand; to the left
were the clear panes of glass, protecting, but not separating me from the
drear November day. At intervals, while turning over the leaves of my
book, I studied the aspect of that winter afternoon. Afar, it offered a
pale blank of mist and cloud; near a scene of wet lawn and storm-beat
shrub, with ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a long and
lamentable blast.
I returned to my book--Bewick's History of British Birds: the letterpress
thereof I cared little for, generally speaking; and yet there were
certain introductory pages that, child as I was, I could not pass quite
as a blank. They were those which treat of the haunts of sea-fowl; of
"the solitary rocks and promontories" by them only inhabited; of the
coast of Norway, studded with isles from its southern extremity, the
Lindeness, or Naze, to the North Cape--
"Where the Northern Ocean, in vast whirls,
Boils round the naked, melancholy isles
Of farthest Thule; and the Atlantic surge
Pours in among the stormy Hebrides."
Nor could I pass unnoticed the suggestion of the bleak shores of Lapland,
Siberia, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Iceland, Greenland, with "the vast
sweep of the Arctic Zone, and those forlorn regions of dreary space,--that
reservoir of frost and snow, where firm fields of ice, the accumulation
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