nd over-head cupboards,
too, and pantries, and closets, and passages going off darkly into the
unknown.

We clomb the stairway--to the first floor--to the second. Here was all
pure Jacobean; but the walls were crumbling, the paper peeling, the
windows dim and foul with dirt.

I have never known a place with such echoes. They shook from a footstep
like nuts rattling out of a bag; a mouse behind the skirting led a whole
camp-following of them; to ask a question was, as in that other House, to
awaken the derisive shouts of an Opposition. Yet, in the intervals of
silence, there fell a deadliness of quiet that was quite appalling by
force of contrast.

"Let us go down," I said. "I am feeling creepy."

"Pooh!" said William Tyrwhitt; "I could take up my abode here with a
feather bed."

We descended, nevertheless. Arrived at the ground floor, "I am going to
the back," said William.

I followed him--a little reluctantly, I confess. Gloom and shadow had
fallen upon the town, and this old deserted hulk of an abode was ghostly
to a degree. There was no film of dust on its every shelf or sill that
did not seem to me to bear the impress of some phantom finger feeling its
way along. A glint of stealthy eyes would look from dark uncertain
corners; a thin evil vapour appear to rise through the cracks of the
boards from the unvisited cellars in the basement.

And here, too, we came suddenly upon an eccentricity of out-building that
wrought upon our souls with wonder. For, penetrating to the rear through
what might have been a cloak-closet or butler's pantry, we found a
supplementary wing, or rather tail of rooms, loosely knocked together, to
proceed from the back, forming a sort of skilling to the main building.
These rooms led direct into one another, and, consisting of little more
than timber and plaster, were in a woeful state of dilapidation.
Everywhere the laths grinned through torn gaps in the ceilings and walls;
everywhere the latter were blotched and mildewed with damp, and the
floor-boards rotting in their tracks. Fallen mortar, rusty tins, yellow
teeth of glass, whitened soot--all the decay and rubbish of a generation
of neglect littered the place and filled it with an acrid odour. From one
of the rooms we looked forth through a little discoloured window upon a
patch of forlorn weedy garden, where the very cats glowered in a
depression that no surfeit of mice could assuage.

We went on, our nervous feet apologetic to