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When Vernon was a very little boy he was the sleepiest of mortals, but in the spring he had seasons of bad dreams, and breakfast became an idle meal. Mrs Ganthony, greatly concerned, sent for Dr Moreton from Axby, and homely¹ remedies were prescribed.

"It is the spring fever," said the old man. "It gives the gout to me and nightmares to this baby; it brings lads and lasses together, and scatters³ young men about the world. An antique complaint, Mrs Ganthony. But it will right itself, never fear. Ver non semper viret." Chuckling⁴ at his ancient joke, the doctor mounted his horse, leaving the nurse only half comforted. "What fidgets me," she told the housekeeper⁵, "is the way his lordship holds his tongue. For usual he'll shout as lusty as a whelp. But now I finds him in the morning with his eyes like moons and[Pg 256] his skin white and shiny, and never a cheep has he given the whole blessed night, with me laying next door, and it open, and a light sleeper⁶ at all times, Mrs Wace, ma'am."

Every year the dreams came, generally—for his springs were spent at Severns—in the big new night-nursery at the top of the west wing, which his parents had built not long before their death. It had three windows looking over the moorish⁷ flats which run up to the Lancashire fells, and from one window, by craning your neck, you could catch a glimpse of the sea. It was all hung, too, with a Chinese paper whereon pink and green parrots squatted⁸ in wonderful blue trees, and there seemed generally to be a wood fire burning. Vernon's recollections of his childish nightmare are hazy⁹. He always found himself in a room different from the nursery and bigger, but with the same smell of wood smoke. People came and went, such as his nurse, the butler, Simon the head-keeper, Uncle Appleby his

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