run to seed, with tall, thin, brick pillars,
brandishing long grasses from their heads, and
spotted with a melancholy crust of creeping
moss. I jangled a cracked bell, and an old man
appeared from the thickets within, stared at me,
then admitted me with a rusty key. I breathed
freely on hearing that my friend was well and to
be seen. I presented a letter to the old man,
having a fancy not to avow myself.

I found my friend walking up and down the
alleys of a neglected orchard, with the lichened
branches tangled above his head, and ripe apples
rotting about his feet. His hands were locked
behind his back, and his head was set on one
side, listening to the singing of a bird. I never
had seen him look so well; yet there was a
vacancy about his whole air which I did not
like. He did not seem at all surprised to see
me, asked had he really not written to me,
thought he had; was so comfortable that he
had forgotten everything else. He thought he
had only been there about three days; could
not imagine how the time had passed. He
seemed to talk wildly, and this, coupled with
the unusual happy placidity of his manner,
confounded me. The place knew him, he told me
confidentially; the place belonged to him, or
should; the birds sang him this, the very trees
bent before him as he passed, the air whispered
him that he had been long expected, and should
be poor no more. Wrestling with my judgment
ere it should pronounce him mad, I followed
him in-doors. The Rath was no ordinary
old country-house. The acres around it were
so wildly overgrown that it was hard to decide
which had been pleasure-ground and where the
thickets had begun. The plan of the house was
grand, with mullioned windows, and here and
there a fleck of stained glass flinging back the
challenge of an angry sunset. The vast rooms
were full of a dusky glare from the sky as I
strolled through them in the twilight. The
antique furniture had many a blood-red splatch
on the abrupt notches of its dark carvings; the
dusty mirrors flared back at the windows, while
the faded curtains produced streaks of uncertain
colour from the depths of their sullen foldings.

Dinner was laid for us in the library, a long
wainscoted room, with an enormous fire roaring
up the chimney, sending a dancing light over
the dingy titles of long unopened books. The
old man who had unlocked the gate for me
served us at table, and, after drawing the dusty
curtains, and furnishing us with a plentiful
supply of fuel and wine, left us. His clanking
hobnailed shoes went echoing away in the
distance over the unmatted tiles of the vacant hall
till a door closed with a rescounding clang very
far away, letting us know that we were shut up
together for the night in this vast, mouldy,
oppressive old house.

I felt as if I could scarcely breathe in it. I
could not eat with my usual appetite. The air
of the place seemed heavy and tainted. I grew
sick and restless. The very wine tasted badly,
as if it had been drugged. I had a strange sort
of feeling that I had been in the house before,
and that something evil had happened to me in
it. Yet such could not be the case. What
puzzled me most was, that I should feel
dissatisfied at seeing Frank looking so well, and
eating so heartily. A little time before I should
have been glad to suffer something to see him
as he looked now; and yet not quite as he
looked now. There was a drowsy contentment
about him which I could not understand. He
did not talk of his work, or of any wish to
return to it. He seemed to have no thought of
anything but the delight of hanging about that
old house, which had certainly cast a spell
over him.

About midnight he seized a light, and
proposed retiring to our rooms. " I have such
delightful dreams in this place," he said. He
volunteered, as we issued into the hall, to take
me up-stairs and show me the upper regions of
his paradise. I said, " Not to-night." I felt a
strange creeping, sensation as I looked up the
vast black staircase, wide enough for a coach
to drive down, and at the heavy darkness bending
over it like a curse, while our lamps made
drips of light down the first two or three gloomy
steps. Our bedrooms were on the ground floor,
and stood opposite one another off a passage
which led to a garden. Into mine Frank
conducted me, and left me for his own.

The uneasy feeling which I have described
did not go from me with him, and I felt a
restlessness amounting to pain, when left alone in
my chamber. Efforts had evidently been made
to render the room habitable, but there was a
something antagonistic to sleep in every angle
of its many crooked corners. I kicked chairs
out of their prim order along the wall, and
banged things about here and there; finally,
thinking that a good night's rest was the best
cure for an inexplicably disturbed frame of mind,
I undressed as quickly as possible, and laid my
head on my pillow under a canopy, like the wings
of a gigantic bird of prey wheeling above me
ready to pounce.

But I could not sleep. The wind grumbled
in the chimney, and the boughs swished in the
garden outside; and between these noises I
thought I heard sounds coming from the interior
of the old house, where all should have been
still as the dead down in their vaults. I could
not make out what these sounds were.
Sometimes I thought I heard feet running about,
sometimes I could have sworn there were double
knocks, tremendous tantarararas at the great hall
door. Sometimes I heard the clashing of dishes,
the echo of voices calling, and the dragging
about of furniture. Whilst I sat up in bed
trying to account for these noises, my door
suddenly flew open, a bright light streamed in
from the passage without, and a powdered
servant in an elaborate livery of antique pattern
stood holding the handle of the door in his
hand, and bowing low to me in the bed.

"Her ladyship, my mistress, desires your
presence in the drawing-room, sir."

This was announced in the measured tone of
a well-trained domestic. Then with another bow