h a chair before it. I had as
yet seen no one in the chair, but I had noted that the table was heavily
covered with papers and books, and judged that the room was a library
and the table that of a busy man engaged in an endless amount of study
and writing.

The Vandykes, whom I had questioned on the matter, were very short in
their replies. Not because the subject was uninteresting, or one they
in any way sought to avoid, but because the invitations to a great party
had just come in, and no other topic was worthy their discussion. But I
learned this much. That the house belonged to one of New York's oldest
families. That its present owner was a widow of great eccentricity of
character, who, with her one child, a daughter, unfortunately blind from
birth, had taken up her abode in some foreign country, where she thought
her child's affliction would attract less attention than in her
native city. The house had been closed to the extent I have mentioned,
immediately upon her departure, but had not been left entirely empty.
Mr. Allison, her man of business, had moved into it, and, being fully
as eccentric as herself, had contented himself for five years with a
solitary life in this dismal mansion, without friends, almost without
acquaintances, though he might have had unlimited society and any amount
of attention, his personal attractions being of a very uncommon
order, and his talent for business so pronounced, that he was already
recognized at thirty-five as one of the men to be afraid of in Wall
Street. Of his birth and connections little was known; he was called
the Hermit of ------ Street, and--well,that is about all they told me at
this time.

After I came to see him (as I did that very evening), I could ask no
further questions concerning him. The beauty of his countenance, the
mystery of his secluded life, the air of melancholy and mental distress
which I imagined myself to detect in his manner--he often used to sit
for minutes together with his eyes fixed on vacancy and his whole face
expressive of the bitterest emotion--had wrought this spell upon my
imagination, and I could no more mingle his name with that of the
ordinary men and women we discussed than I could confound his solitary
and expressive figure with the very proper but conventional forms of the
simpering youths who followed me in parlors or begged to be allowed the
honor of a dance at the balls I attended with the Vandykes. He occupied
an unique place