definitely repulsing her demand that he should get himself a new winter overcoat, she declared that it was beyond all endurance.  Mrs Murchison was surrounded, indeed, by more of “that sort of thing” than she could find use or excuse for; since, though books made but a sporadic appearance, current literature, daily, weekly, and monthly, was perpetually under her feet.  The Toronto paper came as a matter of course, as the London daily takes its morning flight into the provinces, the local organ as simply indispensable, the Westminster as the corollary of church membership and for Sunday reading.  These were constant, but there were also mutables—­Once a Week, Good Words for the Young, Blackwood’s, and the Cornhill they used to be; years of back numbers Mrs Murchison had packed away in the attic, where Advena on rainy days came into the inheritance of them, and made an early acquaintance with fiction in Ready Money Mortiboy and Verner’s Pride, while Lorne, flat on his stomach beside her, had glorious hours on The Back of the North Wind.  Their father considered such publications and their successors essential, like tobacco and tea.  He was also an easy prey to the subscription agent, for works published in parts and paid for in instalments, a custom which Mrs Murchison regarded with abhorrence.  So much so that when John put his name down for Masterpieces of the World’s Art, which was to cost twenty dollars by the time it was complete, he thought it advisable to let the numbers accumulate at the store.

Whatever the place represented to their parents, it was pure joy to the young Murchisons.  It offered a margin and a mystery to life.  They saw it far larger than it was; they invested it, arguing purely by its difference from other habitations, with a romantic past.  “I guess when the Prince of Wales came to Elgin, Mother, he stayed here,” Lorne remarked, as a little boy.  Secretly he and Advena took up boards in more than one unused room, and rapped on more than one thick wall to find a hollow chamber; the house revealed so much that was interesting, it was apparent to the meanest understanding that it must hide even more.  It was never half lighted, and there was a passage in which fear dwelt—­wild were the gallopades from attic to cellar in the early nightfall, when every young Murchison tore after every other, possessed, like cats, by a demoniac ecstasy of the gloaming.  And the garden, with the autumn moon coming over the apple trees and the neglected asparagus thick for ambush, and a casual untrimmed boy or two with the delicious recommendation of being utterly without credentials, to join in the rout and be trusted to make for the back fence without further hint at the voice of Mrs Murchison—­these were joys of the very fibre, things to push ideas and envisage life with an attraction that made it worth while to grow up.