g away, I mounted to the gallery and began my exploration of
the house.

All morning I went from one door to another, and entered spacious and
faded chambers, some rudely shuttered, some receiving their full charge
of daylight, all empty and unhomely. It was a rich house, on which Time
had breathed its tarnish and dust had scattered disillusion. The spider
swung there; the bloated tarantula scampered on the cornices; ants had
their crowded highways on the floor of halls of audience; the big and
foul fly, that lives on carrion and is often the messenger of death, had
set up his nest in the rotten woodwork, and buzzed heavily about the
rooms. Here and there a stool or two, a couch, a bed, or a great carved
chair remained behind, like islets on the bare floors, to testify of
man's bygone habitation; and everywhere the walls were set with the
portraits of the dead. I could judge, by these decaying effigies, in the
house of what a great and what a handsome race I was then wandering.
Many of the men wore orders on their breasts and had the port of noble
offices; the women were all richly attired; the canvases, most of them,
by famous hands. But it was not so much these evidences of greatness
that took hold upon my mind, even contrasted, as they were, with the
present depopulation and decay of that great house. It was rather the
parable of family life that I read in this succession of fair faces and
shapely bodies. Never before had I so realised the miracle of the
continued race, the creation and re-creation, the weaving and changing
and handing down of fleshly elements. That a child should be born of its
mother, that it should grow and clothe itself (we know not how) with
humanity, and put on inherited looks, and turn its head with the manner
of one ascendant, and offer its hand with the gesture of another, are
wonders dulled for us by repetition. But in the singular unity of look,
in the common features and common bearing, of all these painted
generations on the walls of the residencia, the miracle started out and
looked me in the face. And an ancient mirror falling opportunely in my
way, I stood and read my own features a long while, tracing out on
either hand the filaments of descent and the bonds that knit me with my
family.

At last, in the course of these investigations, I opened the door of a
chamber that bore the marks of habitation. It was of large proportions
and faced to the north, where the mountains were most wi