lf; and not knowing what else to do, stared down at the
turf at my feet.

A bit of flagging met my eye, protruding from a layer of thick moss.
Farther on I espied another--the second, probably, of many. This, no
doubt, was the path I had been bidden to follow, and without further
thought on the subject, I plunged into the bushes which with difficulty
I made give way before me.

For a moment all further advance looked hopeless. A more tangled,
uninviting approach to a so-called home, I had never seen outside of the
tropics; and the complete neglect thus displayed should have prepared me
for the appearance of the house I unexpectedly came upon, just as, the
way seemed on the point of closing up before me.

But nothing could well prepare one for a first view of Gloom Cottage.
Its location in a hollow which had gradually filled itself up with
trees and some kind of prickly brush, its deeply stained walls, once
picturesque enough in their grouping but too deeply hidden now amid
rotting boughs to produce any other effect than that of shrouded
desolation, the sough of these same boughs as they rapped a devil's
tattoo against each other, and the absence of even the rising column of
smoke which bespeaks domestic life wherever seen--all gave to one who
remembered the cognomen Cottage and forgot the pre-cognomen of Gloom, a
sense of buried life as sepulchral as that which emanates from the mouth
of some freshly opened tomb.

But these impressions, natural enough to my youth, were necessarily
transient, and soon gave way to others more business-like. Perceiving
the curve of an arch rising above the undergrowth still blocking my
approach, I pushed my way resolutely through, and presently found myself
stumbling upon the steps of an unexpectedly spacious domicile, built not
of wood, as its name of Cottage had led me to expect, but of carefully
cut stone which, while showing every mark of time, proclaimed itself
one of those early, carefully erected Colonial residences which it
takes more than a century to destroy, or even to wear to the point of
dilapidation.

Somewhat encouraged, though failing to detect any signs of active life
in the heavily shuttered windows frowning upon me from either side, I
ran up the steps and rang the bell which pulled as hard as if no hand
had touched it in years.

Then I waited.

But not to ring again; for just as my hand was approaching the bell a
second time, the door fell back and I beheld in t