r a
mile round, like an army of giants seventy feet high, all intent, it
would seem, upon choking the poor old pile, throwing their big arms over
the hollow, swinging them to and fro, and dashing their points against
the panes as the wind listed. It would come by-and-by to be a hard task
for the stone and lime victim to hold its place, with its sinews of run
mortar, against these tyrants of the wood. And then they were as full of
noises as Babel itself--noises a thousand times more
heterogeneous--croaking, chirping, screeching, cawing, whistling,
billing, cooing, cuckooing. "What a place to live in!" I thought, fresh
as I was from town, "where, if there are noises, one knows something of
their meaning--maledictory, yea, devilish as it often is, expressive of
the passions of men which will never sleep. But these! what could one
make of such a _tintamarre_? Nothing but the reflection--that is, if you
happen to be a philosopher, which, thank God, I am not--that not one
note of all this rural oratorio is without its intention; and thus we
always satisfy ourselves. But when we run the matter up a little
further, we find it a very small affair: two responses, one to each of
two chords vibrating for ever and ever throughout all nature--pleasure
and pain, pain and pleasure, turn by turn--the last pain being death!"

"How can you live here, Graeme?" I said, as we stood under the old
porch, looking out, or rather having our look blocked up by the
thickness, and our ears deaved by the eternal screeching and cawing of
five thousand crows overhead.

"There's gloom everywhere where man is," he replied, "and screeching
owls in every brain. You can't get quit." Then, lowering his voice, "I
am haunted, and yet live here in this Moated Grange! The difference is
this: in the town the gaslight and eternal clatter distract a man like
me who is plagued from within; here I find some concord between the
inside and the out, only the owls in the inside are more grotesque and
horrible."

"Well, Graeme," said I, "it is needless to disguise what brought me
here. The secret is out. The choke-damp has got wind. If the idiot had
not blown his brains out, it would have been nothing. You could have
paid him back, and he might now have had both his money and his brains."

"Got wind!" cried he, clutching me by the breast of the coat with the
fury of a highwayman or a spasmodic actor. "Did the villain Ruggieri
tell you?"

"No."

"So far well," he a