ad a garret; very nearly such a one as it seems to me one of us
has described in one of his books; but let us look at this one as I
can reproduce it from memory. It has a flooring of laths with ridges
of mortar squeezed up between them, which if you tread on you will go
to--the Lord have mercy on you! where will you go to?--the same being
crossed by narrow bridges of boards, on which you may put your feet, but
with fear and trembling. Above you and around you are beams and joists,
on some of which you may see, when the light is let in, the marks of the
conchoidal clippings of the broadaxe, showing the rude way in which the
timber was shaped as it came, full of sap, from the neighboring forest.
It is a realm of darkness and thick dust, and shroud-like cobwebs
and dead things they wrap in their gray folds. For a garret is like a
seashore, where wrecks are thrown up and slowly go to pieces. There is
the cradle which the old man you just remember was rocked in; there is
the ruin of the bedstead he died on; that ugly slanting contrivance used
to be put under his pillow in the days when his breath came hard; there
is his old chair with both arms gone, symbol of the desolate time when
he had nothing earthly left to lean on; there is the large wooden reel
which the blear-eyed old deacon sent the minister's lady, who thanked
him graciously, and twirled it smilingly, and in fitting season bowed it
out decently to the limbo of troublesome conveniences. And there are old
leather portmanteaus, like stranded porpoises, their mouths gaping in
gaunt hunger for the food with which they used to be gorged to bulging
repletion; and old brass andirons, waiting until time shall revenge them
on their paltry substitutes, and they shall have their own again, and
bring with them the fore-stick and the back-log of ancient days; and
the empty churn, with its idle dasher, which the Nancys and Phoebes, who
have left their comfortable places to the Bridgets and Norahs, used to
handle to good purpose; and the brown, shaky old spinning-wheel, which
was running, it may be, in the days when they were hinging the Salem
witches.

Under the dark and haunted garret were attic chambers which themselves
had histories. On a pane in the northeastern chamber may be read these
names:

"John Tracy," "Robert Roberts," "Thomas Prince;" "Stultus" another hand
had added. When I found these names a few years ago (wrong side up, for
the window had been reversed), I look