flowers seem to have gone to sleep, and the birds to be taking a siesta. Passing the school-room window, I see Alan, the solemn-faced, who is apparently not so overcome with heat as the rest of the world, indulging in the rather active recreation of spinning Dolly round and round on the top of the large school-room table. It is evidently a new treat to them, and I have not time to give the warning that painful experience has taught Jack and me, when whirr! whiff! the top of the table flies to the other end of the room, shooting Dolly into the fireplace, and Alan dances up and down, as though the perils his toes have just escaped make him anxious to assure himself of their integrity.
Piteous whimpers and groans from the fireplace announce extensive and painful damages to the poor little maid who was riding aloft so triumphantly a minute ago. Bruises and tears are however alike merged in the all-absorbing question of how the table is to be joined together again. In the middle of the room its legs stand stark and bare, like a thin little man, from whom his ample and overflowing spouse has departed.
All this while they have not been aware of my presence on the scene, but now as I remark, "A very pretty amusement, certainly," with all the gravity and weight my thirteen years entitle me to display, they hail me joyfully, and with my assistance, and much puffing and straining, the divorced parts are put together, and Dolly has time to bewail her misfortunes, and Alan to rub his unharmed shins responsive.
Pursuing my prowl, I wander round the irregularly built, three-sided court, and am shortly awakened from my abstraction by hearing a door bang violently.
Have you ever lived in a house, reader, where the merest chance sound, the bang of a door, the sound of a loud voice, or a distant noise makes you start up, your nerves tingling, your heart beating, your body trembling, while an instantaneous photograph of falling
