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.