walls, and the misanthropic spider withdrew from the
garish day; where the green mould loved to grow, and the long white
potato-shoots went feeling along the floor, if haply they might find the
daylight; it had great brick pillars, always in a cold sweat with holding
up the burden they had been aching under day and night far a century and
more; it had sepulchral arches closed by rough doors that hung on hinges
rotten with rust, behind which doors, if there was not a heap of bones
connected with a mysterious disappearance of long ago, there well might
have been, for it was just the place to look for them. It had a garret;
very nearly such a one as it seems to me one of us has described in one
of his books; but let us look at this one as I can reproduce it from
memory. It has a flooring of laths with ridges of mortar squeezed up
between them, which if you tread on you will go to--the Lord have mercy
on you! where will you go to?--the same being crossed by narrow bridges
of boards, on which you may put your feet, but with fear and trembling.
Above you and around you are beams and joists, on some of which you may
see, when the light is let in, the marks of the conchoidal clippings of
the broadaxe, showing the rude way in which the timber was shaped as it
came, full of sap, from the neighboring forest. It is a realm of
darkness and thick dust, and shroud-like cobwebs and dead things they
wrap in their gray folds. For a garret is like a seashore, where wrecks
are thrown up and slowly go to pieces. There is the cradle which the old
man you just remember was rocked in; there is the ruin of the bedstead he
died on; that ugly slanting contrivance used to be put under his pillow
in the days when his breath came hard; there is his old chair with both
arms gone, symbol of the desolate time when he had nothing earthly left
to lean on; there is the large wooden reel which the blear-eyed old
deacon sent the minister's lady, who thanked him graciously, and twirled
it smilingly, and in fitting season bowed it out decently to the limbo of
troublesome conveniences. And there are old leather portmanteaus, like
stranded porpoises, their mouths gaping in gaunt hunger for the food with
which they used to be gorged to bulging repletion; and old brass
andirons, waiting until time shall revenge them on their paltry
substitutes, and they shall have their own again, and bring with them the
fore-stick and the back-log of ancient days; and the em