myself at home? The raven
said I must do something: what could I do here?--And would that make me
somebody? for now, alas, I was nobody!

I took the way Mr. Raven had gone, and went slowly after him. Presently
I saw a wood of tall slender pine-trees, and turned toward it. The odour
of it met me on my way, and I made haste to bury myself in it.

Plunged at length in its twilight glooms, I spied before me something
with a shine, standing between two of the stems. It had no colour,
but was like the translucent trembling of the hot air that rises, in a
radiant summer noon, from the sun-baked ground, vibrant like the smitten
chords of a musical instrument. What it was grew no plainer as I went
nearer, and when I came close up, I ceased to see it, only the form
and colour of the trees beyond seemed strangely uncertain. I would have
passed between the stems, but received a slight shock, stumbled,
and fell. When I rose, I saw before me the wooden wall of the garret
chamber. I turned, and there was the mirror, on whose top the black
eagle seemed but that moment to have perched.

Terror seized me, and I fled. Outside the chamber the wide garret
spaces had an UNCANNY look. They seemed to have long been waiting for
something; it had come, and they were waiting again! A shudder went
through me on the winding stair: the house had grown strange to me!
something was about to leap upon me from behind! I darted down the
spiral, struck against the wall and fell, rose and ran. On the next
floor I lost my way, and had gone through several passages a second time
ere I found the head of the stair. At the top of the great stair I had
come to myself a little, and in a few moments I sat recovering my breath
in the library.

Nothing should ever again make me go up that last terrible stair!
The garret at the top of it pervaded the whole house! It sat upon it,
threatening to crush me out of it! The brooding brain of the building,
it was full of mysterious dwellers, one or other of whom might any
moment appear in the library where I sat! I was nowhere safe! I would
let, I would sell the dreadful place, in which an aerial portal stood
ever open to creatures whose life was other than human! I would purchase
a crag in Switzerland, and thereon build a wooden nest of one story with
never a garret above it, guarded by some grand old peak that would send
down nothing worse than a few tons of whelming rock!

I knew all the time that my thinking was foo