These pebbles always played an important part every winter evening, for with the greatest regularity the old people would put them into the chimney-place where a wood fire blazed and crackled; afterwards they slipped them into calico bags of a flowered pattern, also brought from the Island, and took them to bed where they served to keep their feet warm during the night.
In our cellar we had wooden props and firkins, and also a number of straight elm poles for holding the washing which had been cut from the choicest young trees in my grandmother's forest.

I had the greatest veneration for all these things.

I knew that my grandmother no longer owned the forests, nor the salt marshes, nor the vineyards; for I had heard them say that she had sold them one at a time to put the money into investments upon the mainland; and that an incompetent notary by his bad investments had greatly reduced her income.
When I went to the Island and the old salt makers and vine dressers, who had at one time worked for our family, still loyal and respectful called me "our little master," I knew they did so out of pure politeness and altogether in deference to our past grandeur.
I regretted that I could not spend my life in tending the vineyards and the harvests, the occupations of several of my ancestors.

Such a life seemed a much more desirable one to me than my own which was passed in a house in town.
The stories of the Island that my grandmother and aunt Claire related to me were generally of the happenings of their own childhood, a childhood that seemed so very far away that to me it had no more reality than a dream.
There were stories of grandfathers, long dead; of great-uncles whom I had never known, dead also for many years.

When my aunt told me their names and described them to me I would abandon myself to reverie.