voices, he would sometimes catch the faint sound of far distant
waterfalls, or the whole scene around him would imprint itself with new
force upon his perceptions.--Read the sonnet, if you please;--it is
Wordsworth all over,--trivial in subject, solemn in style, vivid in
description, prolix in detail, true metaphysically, but immensely
suggestive of "imagination," to use a mild term, when related as an
actual fact of a sprightly youngster. All I want of it is to enforce the
principle, that, when the door of the soul is once opened to a guest,
there is no knowing who will come in next.

--Our young girl keeps up her early habit of sketching heads and
characters. Nobody is, I should think, more faithful and exact in the
drawing of the academical figures given her as lessons, but there is a
perpetual arabesque of fancies that runs round the margin of her
drawings, and there is one book which I know she keeps to run riot in,
where, if anywhere, a shrewd eye would be most likely to read her
thoughts. This book of hers I mean to see, if I can get at it honorably.

I have never yet crossed the threshold of the Little Gentleman's chamber.
How he lives, when he once gets within it, I can only guess. His hours
are late, as I have said; often, on waking late in the night, I see the
light through cracks in his window-shutters on the wall of the house
opposite. If the times of witchcraft were not over, I should be afraid
to be so close a neighbor to a place from which there come such strange
noises. Sometimes it is the dragging of something heavy over the floor,
that makes me shiver to hear it,--it sounds so like what people that
kill other people have to do now and then. Occasionally I hear very
sweet strains of music,--whether of a wind or stringed instrument, or a
human voice, strange as it may seem, I have often tried to find out, but
through the partition I could not be quite sure. If I have not heard a
woman cry and moan, and then again laugh as though she would die
laughing, I have heard sounds so like them that--I am a fool to confess
it--I have covered my head with the bedclothes; for I have had a fancy in
my dreams, that I could hardly shake off when I woke up, about that
so-called witch that was his great-grandmother, or whatever it was,--a
sort of fancy that she visited the Little Gentleman,--a young woman in
old-fashioned dress, with a red ring round her white neck,--not a
neck-lace, but a dull-stain.

Of cour