I must confess I was beginning to get afraid of my guardian.  I expected to find him in manners and appearance something like our school professors, with a tendency to criticise my slender literary acquirements.

However I proceeded with my toilet quite cheerfully, and was rather glad than sorry that I had found him absent from Oaklands; but after I left my room and wandered out into the dim, spacious hall and down the long stairway, the heavy, old-fashioned splendors of the house chilled me.  How could I occupy myself happily through the coming years in this great, gloomy house?  I vaguely wondered, while life stretched out before my imagination, in long and tiresome perspective.

With no school duties to occupy my time, my knowledge of amusements, needlework, or any other of the softer feminine accomplishments, exceedingly limited, I was suddenly confronted with the problem how I was to fill up the days and years with any degree of satisfaction.  Hitherto every thought had been strained eagerly towards this home coming.  After that fancy was a blank.  Now I had got here, what then?  I had been a fairly industrious pupil and graduated with commendable success; but it had been a tradition at our school that once away from its confinement, text-books and the weariness of study were at an end.  I went out on the lawn, and was standing, a trifle homesick for the companionship of the merry crowd of schoolmates, when a side glance revealed to me an immense garden, such as I had often seen, but not near enough to sufficiently enjoy.  I soon forgot my lonely fancies as I strayed admiringly through the well kept walks, amid beds of old-fashioned sweet smelling flowers, which now-a-days are for the most part relegated to the humble cottages; but farther on I discovered the rarer plants of many climes, some of them old acquaintances, but others utter strangers, only so far as I could remember some of them from my lessons in botany.  Still stretching beyond on the hill side I saw the vegetable and fruit gardens.  Huge strawberry beds attracted me, the ripe fruit I found tempting; but feeling still a stranger, the old weakness that comes down to us from Mother Eve to reach forth and pluck, was restrained.  “What a perfect Eden it is!” I could not help exclaiming, though no ears save the birds, and multitudinous insects existences, were within reach of my voice, and probably for the latter, any sound I could make would be as unheard by them as the music of the spheres must be to me until another body, with finer intuitions to catch such harmonies, shall be provided.  Ere the dinner bell rang I found a new wonderland of beauty reaching away beyond me.  To watch from early spring till winter’s icy breath destroyed them, these multiplied varieties of vegetable life gradually passing through all their beautiful changes of bud and blossom, and ripened seed or fruit would be a training in some respects, equalling that of the schools.  What higher lessons in botany I might take, day by day exploring the secrets of plant life!  I went back to the house in a happier mood than I had left it.  At the dinner table I expressed, no doubt with amusing enthusiasm, my gladness at this garden of delight.