The Lock and Key Library The most interesting stories of all

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I remember my childhood very distinctly. I do not think that the
fact argues a good memory, for I have never been clever at learning
words by heart, in prose or rhyme; so that I believe my remembrance
of events depends much more upon the events themselves than upon my
possessing any special facility for recalling them. Perhaps I am
too imaginative, and the earliest impressions I received were of a
kind to stimulate the imagination abnormally. A long series of
little misfortunes, so connected with each other as to suggest a
sort of weird fatality, so worked upon my melancholy temperament
when I was a boy that, before I was of age, I sincerely believed
myself to be under a curse, and not only myself, but my whole
family and every individual who bore my name.

I was born in the old place where my father, and his father, and
all his predecessors had been born, beyond the memory of man. It
is a very old house, and the greater part of it was originally a
castle, strongly fortified, and surrounded by a deep moat supplied
with abundant water from the hills by a hidden aqueduct. Many of
the fortifications have been destroyed, and the moat has been
filled up. The water from the aqueduct supplies great fountains,
and runs down into huge oblong basins in the terraced gardens, one
below the other, each surrounded by a broad pavement of marble
between the water and the flower-beds. The waste surplus finally
escapes through an artificial grotto, some thirty yards long, into
a stream, flowing down through the park to the meadows beyond, and
thence to the distant river. The buildings were extended a little
and greatly altered more than two hundred years ago, in the time of
Charles II., but since then little has been done to improve them,
though they have been kept in fairly good repair, according to our
fortunes.

In the gardens there are terraces and huge hedges of box and
evergreen, some of which used to be clipped into shapes of animals,
in the Italian style. I can remember when I was a lad how I used
to try to make out what the trees were cut to represent, and how I
used to appeal for explanations to Judith, my Welsh nurse. She
dealt in a strange mythology of her own, and peopled the gardens
with griffins, dragons, good genii and bad, and filled my mind with
them at the same time. My nursery window afforded a view of the
great fountains at the head of the upper basin, and on moonlight
nights the Welshwoman would hold me up to the glass and bid me look
at the mist and spray rising into mysterious shapes, moving
mystically in the white light like living things.

"It's the Woman of the Water," she used to say; and sometimes she
would threaten that if I did not go to sleep the Woman of the Water
would steal up to the high window and carry me away in her wet
arms.

The place was gloomy. The broad basins of water and the tall
evergreen hedges gave it a funereal look, and the damp-stained
marble causeways by the pools might have been made of tombstones.
The gray and weather-beaten walls and towers without, the dark and
massively furnished rooms within, the deep, mysterious recesses and
the heavy curtains, all affected my spirits. I was silent and sad
from my childhood. There was a great clock tower above, from which
the hours rang dismally during the day, and tolled like a knell in
the dead of night. There was no light nor life in the house, for
my mother was a helpless invalid, and my father had grown
melancholy in his long task of caring for her. He was a thin, dark
man, with sad eyes; kind, I think, but silent and unhappy. Next to
my mother, I believe he loved me better than anything on earth, for
he took immense pains and trouble in teaching me, and what he

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