Over each of these was hung a little
contrivance which resembled a section of that extinguisher apparatus
which is still to be found suspended above the pulpit in some
old-fashioned country churches. All the windows of the old house were of
diamond panes, and those of the upper story projected from the roof of
solid and venerable thatch. A pair of doves had their home in a wicker
cage which hung from the wall, and their cooing was like the voice of
the house, so peaceful, homely, and Old-world was its aspect.

Despite the three front doors, the real entrance to the house was at the
rear, to which access was had by a side gate. A path, moss-grown at the
edges, led between shrubs and flowers to a small circle of brickwork,
in the midst of which was a well with rope and windlass above it,
and thence continued to the door, which led to an antique, low-browed
kitchen. A small dark passage led from the kitchen to a front room with
a great fireplace, which rose so high that there was but just enough
room between the mantle-board and the whitewashed ceiling for the squat
brass candlesticks and the big foreign sea-shells which stood there for
ornament.

The diamonded window admitted so little light that on entering here from
the outer sunshine the visitor could only make out the details one by
one. When his eyes became accustomed to the semi-darkness he was sure to
notice a dozen or more green baize bags which hung upon the walls, each
half defining, in the same vague way as all the others, the outline of
the object it contained. Each green baize bag was closely tied at the
neck, and suspended at an equal height with the rest upon a nail. There
was something of a vault-like odor in the room, traceable probably to
the two facts that the carpet was laid upon a brick floor, and that the
chamber was rarely opened to the air.

Ezra Gold, seated upright in an oaken arm-chair, with a hand lightly
grasping the end of either arm, was at home in the close, cool shadow
of the place. The cloistered air, the quiet and the dim shade seemed
to suit him, and he to be in harmony with them. His eyes were open,
and alighted now and again with an air of recognition on some familiar
object, but otherwise he might have seemed asleep. On the central
table was a great pile of music-books, old-fashioned alike in shape and
binding. They exhaled a special cloistral odor of their own, as if they
had been long imprisoned. Ezra's eye dwelt oftener on thes