should steal near to me, and reach out their grim arms to snatch me into their horrid shadows. In summer the forest unceasingly hummed with unconjecturable voices of unknown birds and beasts. In winter its deep snows were traced like any paper map, with dotting night-tracks of four-footed creatures, that, even to the sun, were never visible, and never were seen by man at all. In the round open space the dark house stood, without one single green twig or leaf to shelter it; shadeless and shelterless in the heart of shade and shelter. Some of the windows were rudely boarded up, with boards nailed straight up and down; and those rooms were utterly empty, and never were entered, though they were doorless. But often, from the echoing corridor, I gazed into them with fear; for the great fire-places were all in ruins; the lower tier of back-stones were burnt into one white common crumbling; and the black bricks above had fallen upon the hearths, heaped here and there with the still falling soot of long-extinguished fires. Every hearth-stone in that house had one long crack through it; every floor drooped at the corners; and outside, the whole base of the house, where it rested on the low foundation of greenish stones, was strewn with dull, yellow moulderings of the rotting sills. No name; no scrawled or written thing; no book, was in the house; no one memorial speaking of its former occupants. It was dumb as death. No grave-stone, or mound, or any little hillock around the house, betrayed any past burials of man or child. And thus, with no trace then to me of its past history, thus it hath now entirely departed and perished from my slightest knowledge as to where that house so stood, or in what region it so stood. None other house like it have I ever seen. But once I saw plates of the outside of French châteaux which powerfully recalled its dim image to me, especially the two rows of small dormer windows projecting from the inverted
