Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice,
That alone should encourage the crew.
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice,
What I tell you three times is true,"--

which kept repeating themselves over and over in my brain with feverish
insistence.

Even the medical students had stopped their chaffing, and were studying
the surroundings gravely.

"There is one thing certain," said Fargeau, "_anything_ might have
happened here without the slightest chance of discovery. Did ever you
see such a perfect place for lawlessness?"

"And _anything_ might happen here now, with the same certainty of
impunity," continued Duchesne, lighting his pipe, the snap of the match
making us all start. "D'Ardeche, your lamented relative was certainly
well fixed; she had full scope here for her traditional experiments in
demonology."

"Curse me if I don't believe that those same traditions were more or
less founded on fact," said Eugene. "I never saw this court under these
conditions before, but I could believe anything now. What's that!"

"Nothing but a door slamming," said Duchesne, loudly.

"Well, I wish doors wouldn't slam in houses that have been empty eleven
months."

"It is irritating," and Duchesne slipped his arm through mine; "but we
must take things as they come. Remember we have to deal not only with
the spectral lumber left here by your scarlet aunt, but as well with the
supererogatory curse of that hell-cat Torrevieja. Come on! let's get
inside before the hour arrives for the sheeted dead to squeak and gibber
in these lonely halls. Light your pipes, your tobacco is a sure
protection against 'your whoreson dead bodies'; light up and move on."

We opened the hall door and entered a vaulted stone vestibule, full of
dust, and cobwebby.

"There is nothing on this floor," said Eugene, "except servants' rooms
and offices, and I don't believe there is anything wrong with them. I
never heard that there was, any way. Let's go up stairs."

So far as we could see, the house was apparently perfectly uninteresting
inside, all eighteenth-century work, the facade of the main building
being, with the vestibule, the only portion of the Francis I. work.

"The place was burned during the Terror," said Eugene, "for my
great-uncle, from whom Mlle. de Tartas inherited it, was a good and true
Royalist; he went to Spain after the Revolution, and did not come back
until the accession of Charles X., when he res