the only
place in New England where either ivy or traditions will grow; there
were, to be sure, no legends about this house that I could hear of, for
the ghosts in those parts were feeble-minded and retrospective by
reason of age, and perhaps scorned a mansion where nobody had ever
lived; but the ivy clustered round the projecting windows as densely as
if it had the sins of a dozen generations to hide.

The house stood just above what were commonly called (from their slaty
color) the Blue Rocks; it seemed the topmost pebble left by some tide
that had receded,--which perhaps it was. Nurses and children thronged
daily to these rocks, during the visitors' season, and the fishermen
found there a favorite lounging-place; but nobody scaled the wall of
the house save myself, and I went there very often. The gate was
sometimes opened by Paul, the silent Bavarian gardener, who was master
of the keys; and there were also certain great cats that were always
sunning themselves on the steps, and seemed to have grown old and gray
in waiting for mice that had never come. They looked as if they knew
the past and the future. If the owl is the bird of Minerva, the cat
should be her beast; they have the same sleepy air of unfathomable
wisdom. There was such a quiet and potent spell about the place that
one could almost fancy these constant animals to be the transformed
bodies of human visitors who had stayed too long. Who knew what tales
might be told by these tall, slender birches, clustering so closely by
the sombre walls?--birches which were but whispering shrubs when the
first gray stones were laid, and which now reared above the eaves their
white stems and dark boughs, still whispering and waiting till a few
more years should show them, across the roof, the topmost blossoms of
other birches on the other side.

Before the great western doorway spread the outer harbor, whither the
coasting vessels came to drop anchor at any approach of storm. These
silent visitors, which arrived at dusk and went at dawn, and from which
no boat landed, seemed fitting guests before the portals of the silent
house. I was never tired of watching them from the piazza; but
Severance always stayed outside the wall. It was a whim of his, he
said; and once only I got out of him something about the resemblance of
the house to some Portuguese mansion,--at Madeira, perhaps, or at Rio
Janeiro, but he did not say,--with which he had no pleasant
associations. Yet h