ur actions, I cannot
tell, but all at once Robert started to his feet and hurried from the
room. At the foot of the garret stair, between it and the door of the
gable-room already mentioned, stood another door at right angles to
both, of the existence of which the boy was scarcely aware, simply
because he had seen it all his life and had never seen it open. Turning
his back on this last door, which he took for a blind one, he went down
a short broad stair, at the foot of which was a window. He then turned
to the left into a long flagged passage or transe, passed the kitchen
door on the one hand, and the double-leaved street door on the other;
but, instead of going into the parlour, the door of which closed the
transe, he stopped at the passage-window on the right, and there stood
looking out.

What might be seen from this window certainly could not be called a very
pleasant prospect. A broad street with low houses of cold gray stone
is perhaps as uninteresting a form of street as any to be found in the
world, and such was the street Robert looked out upon. Not a single
member of the animal creation was to be seen in it, not a pair of eyes
to be discovered looking out at any of the windows opposite. The sole
motion was the occasional drift of a vapour-like film of white powder,
which the wind would lift like dust from the snowy carpet that covered
the street, and wafting it along for a few yards, drop again to its
repose, till another stronger gust, prelusive of the wind about to
rise at sun-down,--a wind cold and bitter as death--would rush over the
street, and raise a denser cloud of the white water-dust to sting the
face of any improbable person who might meet it in its passage. It was a
keen, knife-edged frost, even in the house, and what Robert saw to make
him stand at the desolate window, I do not know, and I believe he could
not himself have told. There he did stand, however, for the space of
five minutes or so, with nothing better filling his outer eyes at least
than a bald spot on the crown of the street, whence the wind had swept
away the snow, leaving it brown and bare, a spot of March in the middle
of January.

He heard the town drummer in the distance, and let the sound invade his
passive ears, till it crossed the opening of the street, and vanished
'down the town.'

'There's Dooble Sanny,' he said to himself--'wi' siccan cauld han's,
'at he's playin' upo' the drum-heid as gin he was loupin' in a bowie
(