to be very old, even though
I lost all my limbs and faculties. I believed that there was life of
some sort after death, but just as I would hesitate outside a house a
quarter of an hour from terror of meeting new faces so I felt about
another life--I couldn't bear all the introductions and the clumsy
mistakes that I should be sure to make. But it was more personal than
that. I had a horrible old uncle who died when I was a boy. He was a
very ugly old man, bent and whitened and gnarled, a face and hands
twisted with rheumatism. I used to call him Quilp to myself. He always
wore, I remember, an old-fashioned dress. Velvet knee-breeches, a
white stock, black shoes with buckles. I remember that his hands were
damp and hair grew in bushes out of his ears. Well, I saw him once or
twice and he filled me with terror like a figure out of the tapestry
up at the Castle. Then he died.

"Our house was small and badly shaped, full of dark corners, and after
his death he seemed to me to haunt the place. He figured Death to me
and until I was quite old, until I went to Rugby, I fancied that he
was sitting in a dark corner, on a chair, waiting, with his hands on
his lap, until the time came for him to take me. Sometimes I would
fancy that I heard him moving from one room to another, bringing his
chair with him. Then I began to have a dream, a dream that frequently
recurred all the time that I was growing up. It was a dream about a
huge dark house in a huge dark forest. It was early morning, the light
just glimmering between the thick damp trees. A large party of people
gathered together in a high empty room prepared for an expedition. I
was one of them and I was filled with sharp agonising terror.
Sometimes in my dream I drank to give myself courage and the glass
clattered against my lips. Sometimes I talked with one of the company;
the room was very dark and I could see no faces. Then we would start
trooping out into the bitterly cold morning air. There would be many
horses and dogs. We would lead off into the forest and soon (it always
happened) I would find myself alone--alone with the dripping trees
high around me and the light that seemed to grow no lighter and the
intense cold. Then suddenly it would be that I was the hunted, not the
hunter. It was Death whom we were hunting--Death, for me my uncle--and
I would fancy him waiting in the darkness, watching me, smiling,
hearing his hunters draw off the scent, knowing that they would