"'Those who were quartered on us amused themselves very much at our expense,' said the 'boy,' with a stupid smile. My mother made a sign to him that we would gladly be alone, and while he busied himself with John, I went to see the garden, which also wore the most inconsolable air of ruin. The great trees were partly hacked away, partly felled, and spiteful, sneering parasites rose over the fallen trunks. Here and there one could recognise the way amid the box-bushes growing wildly out of trim. Here and there too stood statues, the most of which had lost their heads or at least their noses. I remember a Diana whose nether limbs were overgrown with dark ivy in a comical fashion, and also of a goddess of plenty from whose cornucopia flowed rank, poisonous weeds. One statue only had been spared—God knows how—from the mischief of man and Time. It had indeed been hurled from its pedestal into the high grass, but it lay there uninjured—a marble goddess, with the most exquisitely pure features, and with a finely chiselled noble breast which gleamed up from the high grass like a Greek Apocalypse. I was almost terrified at the sight; this statue inspired in me a strange, close, feverish terror, and a secret bashfulness kept me from gazing long at its lovely mien.
"When I returned to my mother she stood by
