the hero was locked in a haunted room and saw a candle at a
chink of the wall. It belonged to the villain, who nightly played
there a ghostly antic to frighten honest folk from a buried treasure.

And in summer the child read on the casement of the dining-room with
the window up. It was the height of a tall man from the ground, and
this gave it a bit of dizziness that enhanced the pleasure. This sill
could be dully reached from inside, but the approach from the outside
was riskiest and best. For an adventuring mood this window was a kind
of postern to the house for innocent deception, beyond the eye of both
the sitting-room and cook. Sometimes it was the bridge of a lofty
ship with a pilot going up and down, or it was a lighthouse to mark a
channel. It was as versatile as the kitchen step-ladder which--on
Thursday afternoons when the cook was out--unbent from its sober
household duties and joined him as an equal. But chiefly on this sill
the child read his books on summer days. His cousins sat inside on
chairs, starched for company, and read safe and dimpled authors, but
his were of a vagrant kind. There was one book, especially, in which a
lad not much bigger than himself ran from home and joined a circus. A
scolding aunt was his excuse. And the child on the sill chafed at his
own happy circumstance which denied him these adventures.

In a dark room in an upper story of the house there was a great box
where old books and periodicals were stored. No place this side of
Cimmeria had deeper shadows. Not even the underground stall of the
neighbor's cow, which showed a gloomy window on the garden, gave quite
the chill. It was only on the brightest days that the child dared to
rummage in this box. The top of it was high and it was blind fumbling
unless he stood upon a chair. Then he bent over, jack-knife fashion,
until the upper part of him--all above the legs--disappeared. In the
obscurity--his head being gone--it must have seemed that Solomon lived
upon the premises and had carried out his ugly threat in that old
affair of the disputed child. Then he lifted out the papers--in
particular a set of _Leslie's Weekly_ with battle pictures of the
Civil War. Once he discovered a tale of Jules Verne--a journey to the
center of the earth--and he spread its chapters before the window in
the dusty light.

But the view was high across the houses of the city to a range of
hills where tall trees grew as a hedge upon the world. And it