a little
spectral-looking creature, comes in wheezing and coughing, carrying the
pewter salver with my breakfast in her trembling arms, putting it down
on the table with a curious backward-sliding curtsey, and then making
her exit without a word, sighing, and scuffling along on slippers too
large for her feet, like the beggar wife of Locarno, while the tom-cat
and the pug, eying me with dubious glances, go out after her; how I
then, with a low-spirited parrot scolding at me, and china mandarins
nodding at me with scornful smiles, swallow cup after cup of the
coffee, scarcely daring to desecrate this virginal chamber, where amber
and mastic have been wont to shed their perfumes, with vulgar tobacco
reek,--I say, if you were to see me in these circumstances, you would
say I was under some spell of enchantment; you would regard me as a
species of Merlin. I can assure you that the easy adaptability to
circumstances which you have so often blamed me for was the sole cause
of my having at once taken up my quarters in my aunt's lonely house,
instead of looking out for some other lodging; for the pedantic
scrupulosity of her executor has rendered it an exceedingly uncanny
place to be in. That strange creature of an aunt of mine (whom I
scarcely ever saw) left directions in her will that everything was to
remain till my arrival exactly as she left it at her death. By the side
of the bed, which is resplendent in snow-white linen and sea-green
silk, still stands the little tabouret, on which, as of yore, is laid
out the maidenly night-dress and the much be-ribboned nightcap; under
it are the embroidered slippers,--and a brightly polished silver
mermaid (the handle of some piece of toilet apparatus or other)
glitters as it projects from beneath the quilt, which is all over
many-tinted flowers. The unfinished piece of embroidery, which she
was working at shortly before her death, is still lying in the
sitting-room, with Arndt's 'True Christianity' open beside it; and
(what for me, at all events, fills up the measure of eeriness) in this
same room there is a life-size portrait of her, taken some thirty-five
or forty years ago, in her wedding-dress; in which wedding-dress, as
Mistress Anne tells me with many tears, just as it is shown in the picture,
she was buried.'

"'What a strange idea!' said Marzell.

"'Yet not so very odd, after all,' said Severin; 'those who die maids
are called the brides of Christ, and I trust nobody would