And she turned away, and through a gate into the meadow.  Grimes stood still a moment, like a man who had been stunned.  Then he rushed after her, shouting, “You come back.”  But when he got into the meadow, the woman was not there.

Had she hidden away?  There was no place to hide in.  But Grimes looked about, and Tom also, for he was as puzzled as Grimes himself at her disappearing so suddenly; but look where they would, she was not there.

Grimes came back again, as silent as a post, for he was a little frightened; and, getting on his donkey, filled a fresh pipe, and smoked away, leaving Tom in peace.

And now they had gone three miles and more, and came to Sir John’s lodge-gates.

Very grand lodges they were, with very grand iron gates and stone gate-posts, and on the top of each a most dreadful bogy, all teeth, horns, and tail, which was the crest which Sir John’s ancestors wore in the Wars of the Roses; and very prudent men they were to wear it, for all their enemies must have run for their lives at the very first sight of them.

Grimes rang at the gate, and out came a keeper on the spot, and opened.

“I was told to expect thee,” he said.  “Now thou’lt be so good as to keep to the main avenue, and not let me find a hare or a rabbit on thee when thou comest back.  I shall look sharp for one, I tell thee.”

“Not if it’s in the bottom of the soot-bag,” quoth Grimes, and at that he laughed; and the keeper laughed and said:

“If that’s thy sort, I may as well walk up with thee to the hall.”

“I think thou best had.  It’s thy business to see after thy game, man, and not mine.”

So the keeper went with them; and, to Tom’s surprise, he and Grimes chatted together all the way quite pleasantly.  He did not know that a keeper is only a poacher turned outside in, and a poacher a keeper turned inside out.

They walked up a great lime avenue, a full mile long, and between their stems Tom peeped trembling at the horns of the sleeping deer, which stood up among the ferns.  Tom had never seen such enormous trees, and as he looked up he fancied that the blue sky rested on their heads.  But he was puzzled very much by a strange murmuring noise, which followed them all the way.  So much puzzled, that at last he took courage to ask the keeper what it was.

He spoke very civilly, and called him Sir, for he was horribly afraid of him, which pleased the keeper, and he told him that they were the bees about the lime flowers.

“What are bees?” asked Tom.

“What make honey.”

“What is honey?” asked Tom.

“Thou hold thy noise,” said Grimes.

“Let the boy be,” said the keeper.  “He’s a civil young chap now, and that’s more than he’ll be long if he bides with thee.”

Grimes laughed, for he took that for a compliment.

“I wish I were a keeper,” said Tom, “to live in such a beautiful place, and wear green velveteens, and have a real dog-whistle at my button, like you.”

The keeper laughed; he was a kind-hearted fellow enough.

“Let well alone, lad, and ill too at times.  Thy life’s safer than mine at all events, eh, Mr. Grimes?”

And Grimes laughed again, and then the two men began talking, quite low.  Tom could hear, though, that it was about some poaching fight; and at last Grimes said surlily, “Hast thou anything against me?”

“Not now.”

“Then don’t ask me any questions till thou hast, for I am a man of honour.”

And at that they both laughed again, and thought it a very good joke.

And by this time they were come up to the great iron gates in front of the house; and Tom stared through them at the rhododendrons and azaleas, which were all in flower; and then at the house itself, and wondered how many chimneys there were in it, and how long ago it was built, and what was the man’s name that built it, and whether he got much money for his job?

These last were very difficult questions to answer.  For Harthover had been built at ninety different times, and in nineteen different styles, and looked as if somebody had built a whole street of houses of every imaginable shape, and then stirred them together with a spoon.

For the attics were Anglo-Saxon.

The third door Norman.

The second Cinque-cento.

The first-floor Elizabethan.

The right wing Pure Doric.

The centre Early English, with a huge portico copied from the Parthenon.

The left wing pure Boeotian, which the country folk admired most of all, became it was just like the new barracks in the town, only three times as big.

The grand staircase was copied from the Catacombs at Rome.

The back staircase from the Tajmahal at Agra.  This was built by Sir John’s great-great-great-uncle, who won, in Lord Clive’s Indian Wars, plenty of money, plenty of wounds, and no more taste than his betters.

The cellars were copied from the caves of Elephanta.

The offices from the Pavilion at Brighton.

And the rest from nothing in heaven, or earth, or under the earth.

So that Harthover House was a great puzzle to antiquarians, and a thorough Naboth’s vineyard to critics, and architects, and all persons who like meddling with other men’s business, and spending other men’s money.  So they were all setting upon poor Sir John, year after year, and trying to talk him into spending a hundred thousand pounds or so, in building, to please them and not himself.  But he always put them off, like a canny North-countryman as he was.  One wanted him to build a Gothic house, but he said he was no Goth; and another to build an Elizabethan, but he said he lived under good Queen Victoria, and not good Queen Bess; and another was bold enough to tell him that his house was ugly, but he said he lived inside it, and not outside; and another, that there was no unity in it, but he said that that was just why he liked the old place.  For he liked to see how each Sir John, and Sir Hugh, and Sir Ralph, and Sir Randal, had left his mark upon the place, each after his own taste; and he had no more notion of disturbing his ancestors’ work than of disturbing their graves.  For now the house looked like a real live house, that had a history, and had grown and grown as the world grew; and that it was only an upstart fellow who did not know who his own grandfather was, who would change it for some spick and span new Gothic or Elizabethan thing, which looked as if it bad been all spawned in a night, as mushrooms are.  From which you may collect (if you have wit enough) that Sir John was a very sound-headed, sound-hearted squire, and just the man to keep the country side in order, and show good sport with his hounds.

But Tom and his master did not go in through the great iron gates, as if they had been Dukes or Bishops, but round the back way, and a very long way round it was; and into a little back-door, where the ash-boy let them in, yawning horribly; and then in a passage the housekeeper met them, in such a flowered chintz dressing-gown, that Tom mistook her for My Lady herself, and she gave Grimes solemn orders about “You will take care of this, and take care of that,” as if he was going up the chimneys, and not Tom.  And Grimes listened, and said every now and then, under his voice, “You’ll mind that, you little beggar?” and Tom did mind, all at least that he could.  And then the housekeeper turned them into a grand room, all covered up in sheets of brown paper, and bade them begin, in a lofty and tremendous voice; and so after a whimper or two, and a kick from his master, into the grate Tom went, and up the chimney, while a housemaid stayed in the room to watch the furniture; to whom Mr. Grimes paid many playful and chivalrous compliments, but met with very slight encouragement in return.

How many chimneys Tom swept I cannot say; but he swept so many that he got quite tired, and puzzled too, for they were not like the town flues to which he was accustomed, but such as you would find—if you would only get up them and look, which perhaps you would not like to do—in old country-houses, large and crooked chimneys, which had been altered again and again, till they ran one into another, anastomosing (as Professor Owen would say) considerably.  So Tom fairly lost his way in them; not that he cared much for that, though he was in pitchy darkness, for he was as much at home in a chimney as a mole is underground; but at last, coming down as he thought the right chimney, he came down the wrong one, and found himself standing on the hearthrug in a room the like of which he had never seen before.

Tom had never seen the like.  He had never been in gentlefolks’ rooms but when the carpets were all up, and the curtains down, and the furniture huddled together under a cloth, and the pictures covered with aprons and dusters; and he had often enough wondered what the rooms were like when they were all ready for the quality to sit in.  And now he saw, and he thought the sight very pretty.

The room was all dressed in white,—white window-curtains, white bed-curtains, white furniture, and white walls, with just a few lines of pink here and there.  The carpet was all over gay little flowers; and the walls were hung with pictures in gilt frames, which amused Tom very much.  There were pictures of ladies and gentlemen, and pictures of horses and dogs.  The horses he liked; but the dogs he did not care for much, for there were no bull-dogs among them, not even a terrier.  But the two pictures which took his fancy most were, one a man in long garments, with little children and their mothers round him, who was laying his hand upon the children’s heads.  That was a very pretty picture, Tom thought, to hang in a lady’s room.  For he could see that it was a lady’s room by the dresses which lay about.

The other picture was that of a man nailed to a cross, which surprised Tom much.  He fancied that he had seen something like it in a shop-window.  But why was it there?  “Poor man,” thought Tom, “and he looks so kind and quiet.  But why should the lady have such a sad picture as that in her room?  Perhaps it was some kinsman of hers, who had been murdered by the savages in foreign parts, and she kept it there for a remembrance.”  And Tom felt sad, and awed, and turned to look at something else.

The next thing he saw, and that too puzzled him, was a washing-stand, with ewers and basins, and soap and brushes, and towels, and a large bath full of clean water—what a heap of things all for washing!  “She must be a very dirty lady,” thought Tom, “by my master’s rule, to want as much scrubbing as all that.  But she must be very cunning to put the dirt out of the way so well afterwards, for I don’t see a speck about the room, not even on the very towels.”

And then, looking toward the bed, he saw that dirty lady, and held his breath with astonishment.

Under the snow-white coverlet, upon the snow-white pillow, lay the most beautiful little girl that Tom had ever seen.  Her cheeks were almost as white as the pillow, and her hair was like threads of gold spread all about over the bed.  She might have been as old as Tom, or maybe a year or two older; but Tom did not think of that.  He thought only of her delicate skin and golden hair, and wondered whether she was a real live person, or one of the wax dolls he had seen in the shops.  But when he saw her breathe, he made up his mind that she was alive, and stood staring at her, as if she had been an angel out of heaven.

No.  She cannot be dirty.  She never could have been dirty, thought Tom to himself.  And then he thought, “And are all people like that when they are washed?”  And he looked at his own wrist, and tried to rub the soot off, and wondered whether it ever would come off.  “Certainly I should look much prettier then, if I grew at all like her.”

And looking round, he suddenly saw, standing close to him, a little ugly, black, ragged figure, with bleared eyes and grinning white teeth.  He turned on it angrily.  What did such a little black ape want in that sweet young lady’s room?  And behold, it was himself, reflected in a great mirror, the like of which Tom had never seen before.

And Tom, for the first time in his life, found out that he was dirty; and burst into tears with shame and anger; and turned to sneak up the chimney again and hide; and upset the fender and threw the fire-irons down, with a noise as of ten thousand tin kettles tied to ten thousand mad dogs’ tails.

Up jumped the little white lady in her bed, and, seeing Tom, screamed as shrill as any peacock.  In rushed a stout old nurse from the next room, and seeing Tom likewise, made up her mind that he had come to rob, plunder, destroy, and burn; and dashed at him, as he lay over the fender, so fast that she caught him by the jacket.

But she did not hold him.  Tom had been in a policeman’s hands many a time, and out of them too, what is more; and he would have been ashamed to face his friends for ever if he had been stupid enough to be caught by an old woman; so he doubled under the good lady’s arm, across the room, and out of the window in a moment.

He did not need to drop out, though he would have done so bravely enough.  Nor even to let himself down a spout, which would have been an old game to him; for once he got up by a spout to the church roof, he said to take jackdaws’ eggs, but the policeman said to steal lead; and, when he was seen on high, sat there till the sun got too hot, and came down by another spout, leaving the policemen to go back to the stationhouse and eat their dinners.

But all under the window spread a tree, with great leaves and sweet white flowers, almost as big as his head.  It was magnolia, I suppose; but Tom knew nothing about that, and cared less; for down the tree he went, like a cat, and across the garden lawn, and over the iron railings and up the park towards the wood, leaving the old nurse to scream murder and fire at the window.