I had drawn
the bolt within, as I invariably did while bathing, and with a feeling
of proud security I stood and surveyed the scene beneath and around me.
The angle of vision did not, it is true, embrace objects immediately
below me, owing to the projecting cornices of the flat roof (a mere
excrescence from the original structure, as this was), but beyond this
the eye swept for some distance uninterruptedly.
Bathed in the golden light of that autumn noonday sun, I saw and
recognized a long-familiar scene, and for a moment I reeled on the
slender step as I did so, and all grew dark around me. But, with one of
those energetic impulses that come to us all in time of emergency, I
recovered my balance in time to save myself from falling; and eagerly
and wistfully, as looks the dying wretch on the dear faces he is soon to
see no more, I gazed upon the paradise from which fiends had driven me.
There, indeed, just as I had left it, lay the deep-green grassy lawn,
with its richly-burdened flower-pots, its laburnums, and white and
purple lilacs, and drooping guelder-rose bushes, and its great English
walnut-tree towering, like a Titan, in the centre. There was the
hawthorn-hedge my father's hand had planted, and the fountain-like
weeping-willow my mother had set, in memory of her dead, whose graves
were far away; and there towered the lofty elm-trees, with their long,
low, sweeping branches, meeting in friendly greeting, to two of which a
swing had once been attached as a bond of union--a swing in which it had
once been my childish pleasure to sway and read, while Mabel sat beside
me with her head upon my shoulder, held securely in her place by my
strong, loving, encircling arm.
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