Chapter 3

Doctor Grimshawe, after the foregone scene, began a practice of
conversing more with the children than formerly; directing his
discourse chiefly to Ned, although Elsie's vivacity and more outspoken
and demonstrative character made her take quite as large a share in the
conversation as he.

The Doctor's communications referred chiefly to a village, or
neighborhood, or locality in England, which he chose to call Newnham;
although he told the children that this was not the real name, which,
for reasons best known to himself, he wished to conceal. Whatever the
name were, he seemed to know the place so intimately, that the
children, as a matter of course, adopted the conclusion that it was his
birthplace, and the spot where he had spent his schoolboy days, and had
lived until some inscrutable reason had impelled him to quit its ivy-
grown antiquity, and all the aged beauty and strength that he spoke of,
and to cross the sea.

He used to tell of an old church, far unlike the brick and pine-built
meeting-houses with which the children were familiar; a church, the
stones of which were laid, every one of them, before the world knew of
the country in which he was then speaking: and how it had a spire, the
lower part of which was mantled with ivy, and up which, towards its
very spire, the ivy was still creeping; and how there was a tradition,
that, if the ivy ever reached the top, the spire would fall upon the
roof of the old gray church, and crush it all down among its
surrounding tombstones. [Endnote: 1] And so, as this misfortune would be
so heavy a one, there seemed to be a miracle wrought from year to year,
by which the ivy, though always flourishing, could never grow beyond a
certain point; so that the spire and church had stood unharmed for
thirty years; though the wise old people were constantly foretelling
that the passing year must be the very last one that it could stand.

He told, too, of a place that made little Ned blush and cast down his
eyes to hide the tears of anger and shame at he knew not what, which
would irresistibly spring into them; for it reminded him of the
almshouse where, as the cruel Doctor said, Ned himself had had his
earliest home. And yet, after all, it had scarcely a feature of
resemblance; and there was this great point of difference,--that
whereas, in Ned's wretched abode (a large, unsightly brick house),
there were many wretched infants like himself, as well as helpless
people of all ages, widows, decayed drunkards, people of feeble wits,
and all kinds of imbecility; it being a haven for those who could not
contend in the hard, eager, pitiless struggle of life; in the place the
Doctor spoke of, a noble, Gothic, mossy structure, there were none but
aged men, who had