The second followed. The house I want to tell you about is much smaller and much more specific. I have only seen it once but know about it through my mother who lived there. The first thing you should know is that it overlooks a park with a skating rink in it. The skating rink lies over the road and the house itself is built into a hill-side. It is therefore possible to stand at one of the upper windows, or on the narrow wooden balcony running along the top storey and see through the bare trees of the park directly to the pond which was always frozen over in the winter. From the house the figures on the pond would appear small of course, scarcely distinguishable from each other, but if they knew you were there, watching them (a single figure at a window or on a balcony, especially a figure expected to be there, is much more likely to be identified) they would sometimes turn to you and wave broadly, with exaggerated gestures, maybe because they knew you well or thought well of you, or because they simply wanted to be amusing, to amuse you in particular and their friends in general. Waving from the pond must have been a consciously significant gesture. From the window or balcony you could follow the line of trees leading away from the pond towards the frozen band-stand, lit by a small lamp post (who knows who you might see there, they didn’t wave), and beyond it, past the transverse ditches to the street at the end (hardly visible) where you knew you would find the theatre. So theatre, band-stand and pond would form a triad from the window and this was the park’s attraction. You think of this house as something to look out of rather than live in. Living in it proved uncomfortable, almost disastrous, for the part where the house lay below ground was damper than it first seemed when the house was bought one summer. The smell of damp emerged only slowly in the late autumn, but it persisted and intensified throughout the winter, well into March. Then smell gave way to an aroma, a drift of lilac and honeysuckle but by the summer the only smell remaining was the gentle burning of cushions left too long by open windows in the blistering heat, and perhaps a distant and discreet odour of excrement from heaven knows where. If the house had a peculiar magic it was only because all old houses have it, especially in strongly contrasting or moving light: in summer dark splinters crannied among the bright slabs; in spring and early autumn the thin shifting patterns as clouds are driven across the window or boughs twitch or buck in the wind, and in winter in the movements of gas- and fire-light.