is room. He rested on the landing and faced round toward
me. There was something in his eye which said, Stop there! So we
finished our conversation on the landing. The next day, I mustered
assurance enough to knock at his door, having a pretext ready.--No
answer.--Knock again. A door, as if of a cabinet, was shut softly and
locked, and presently I heard the peculiar dead beat of his thick-soled,
misshapen boots. The bolts and the lock of the inner door were
unfastened,--with unnecessary noise, I thought,--and he came into the
passage. He pulled the inner door after him and opened the outer one at
which I stood. He had on a flowered silk dressing-gown, such as "Mr.
Copley" used to paint his old-fashioned merchant-princes in; and a
quaint-looking key in his hand. Our conversation was short, but long
enough to convince me that the Little Gentleman did not want my company
in his chamber, and did not mean to have it.

I have been making a great fuss about what is no mystery at all,--a
schoolgirl's secrets and a whimsical man's habits. I mean to give up
such nonsense and mind my own business.--Hark! What the deuse is that
odd noise in his chamber?

--I think I am a little superstitious. There were two things, when I was
a boy, that diabolized my imagination,--I mean, that gave me a distinct
apprehension of a formidable bodily shape which prowled round the
neighborhood where I was born and bred. The first was a series of marks
called the "Devil's footsteps." These were patches of sand in the
pastures, where no grass grew, where the low-bush blackberry, the
"dewberry," as our Southern neighbors call it, in prettier and more
Shakspearian language, did not spread its clinging creepers,--where even
the pale, dry, sadly-sweet "everlasting" could not grow, but all was bare
and blasted. The second was a mark in one of the public buildings near
my home,--the college dormitory named after a Colonial Governor. I do
not think many persons are aware of the existence of this mark,--little
having been said about the story in print, as it was considered very
desirable, for the sake of the Institution, to hush it up. In the
northwest corner, and on the level of the third or fourth story, there
are signs of a breach in the walls, mended pretty well, but not to be
mistaken. A considerable portion of that corner must have been carried
away, from within outward. It was an unpleasant affair; and I do not
care to repeat the parti