ind the house lay a little garden,
closely grown up with trees and tall weeds, that ran down to the
stream. In the wall that gave on the water, was a small door that
admitted to an old timbered bridge that crossed the stream, and had a
barred gate on the further side, which was rarely seen open; though if
a man had watched attentively he might sometimes have seen a small
lean person, much bowed and with a halting gait, slip out very quietly
about dusk, and walk, with his eyes cast down, among the shadowy
byways.

The name of the man who thus dwelt in the Slype House, as it appeared
in the roll of burgesses, was Anthony Purvis. He was of an ancient
family, and had inherited wealth. A word must be said of his childhood
and youth. He was a sickly child, an only son, his father a man of
substance, who lived very easily in the country; his mother had died
when he was quite a child, and this sorrow had been borne very heavily
by his father, who had loved her tenderly, and after her death had
become morose and sullen, withdrawing himself from all company and
exercise, and brooding angrily over his loss, as though God had
determined to vex him. He had never cared much for the child, who had
been peevish and fretful; and the boy's presence had done little but
remind him of the wife he had lost; so that the child had lived alone,
nourishing his own fancies, and reading much in a library of curious
books that was in the house. The boy's health had been too tender for
him to go to school; but when he was eighteen, he seemed stronger, and
his father sent him to a university, more for the sake of being
relieved of the boy's presence than for his good. And there, being
unused to the society of his equals, he had been much flouted and
despised for his feeble frame; till a certain bitter ambition sprang
up in his mind, like a poisonous flower, to gain power and make
himself a name; and he had determined that as he could not be loved he
might still be feared; so he bided his time in bitterness, making
great progress in his studies; then, when those days were over, he
departed eagerly, and sought and obtained his father's leave to betake
himself to a university of Italy, where he fell into somewhat evil
hands; for he made a friendship with an old doctor of the college, who
feared not God and thought ill of man, and spent all his time in dark
researches into the evil secrets of nature, the study of poisons that
have enmity to the life of