t by twelve,
the floor uncarpeted and uneven; the walls were damp, and the
whole place was like a vault. The furniture was very scanty, and
all had an unwholesome moisture about it, and a curious odor, as
if it gathered unhealthy dews by being kept underground. Three
feeble chairs were all the seats, and a table which leaned
against the wall was too ill and rickety to do its intended duty;
many of the books which had once probably covered it, were now
thrown in a promiscuous heap on the floor, where they slowly
mildewed and gave out a graveyard smell. A miniature stove in the
middle of the room, sweated and sweltered, and in its struggles
to warm the unhealthy atmosphere had succeeded in suffusing
itself with a clammy perspiration; it was in the last stages of
debility; old age and abuse had used it sadly, and it now stood
helplessly upon its crippled legs, and supported its nerveless
elbow upon a sturdy whitewash brush. There were a few symptoms of
medical pretensions in the shape of some vials, and bottles of
drugs, and colored liquids on the mantelpiece; a great attempt at
a display of scientific apparatus began and ended with an
insulating stool, and an old-fashioned "cylinder and cushion"
electrical machine; a number of highly-colored prints of animals
pasted on the wall, having evidently been scissored from the
show-bill of a menagerie, had a look towards natural history, and
a jar or two of acids suggested chemical researches. The books
that still remained on the enervated table were an odd volume of
Braithwaite's Retrospect, a treatise on Human Physiology, and
another on Materia Medica; a number of bound volumes of Zadkiel's
Astronomical Ephemeris, Raphael's Prophetic Almanac, Raphael's
Prophetic Messenger, and a file of Robert White's Celestial
Atlas, running back to 1808.

The appearance of the venerable sage of Delancey street was not
so imposing as to strike a stranger with awe--quite the contrary.
He partook of the character of the room, and was a fitting
occupant of such a place; he seemed some kind of unwholesome
vegetable that had found that noisome atmosphere congenial, and
had sprung indigenously from the slimy soil. One looked
instinctively at his feet to see what kind of roots he had, and
then glanced back at his head as if it were a huge bud, and about
to blossom into some unhealthy flower. The traces of its earthy
origin were plainly visible about this mouldy old plant;
quantities of the rank s