closely at the time of these occurrences; but afterwards, when all
was over, as we went casually about them one Sunday afternoon in the
idleness of that unemployed day, Simson with his stick penetrated an old
window which had been entirely blocked up with fallen soil. He jumped
down into it in great excitement, and called me to follow. There we found
a little hole,--for it was more a hole than a room,--entirely hidden
under the ivy and ruins, in which there was a quantity of straw laid in a
corner, as if some one had made a bed there, and some remains of crusts
about the floor. Some one had lodged there, and not very long before, he
made out; and that this unknown being was the author of all the
mysterious sounds we heard he is convinced. "I told you it was human
agency," he said triumphantly. He forgets, I suppose, how he and I stood
with our lights, seeing nothing, while the space between us was audibly
traversed by something that could speak, and sob, and suffer. There is no
argument with men of this kind. He is ready to get up a laugh against me
on this slender ground. "I was puzzled myself,--I could not make it
out,--but I always felt convinced human agency was at the bottom of it.
And here it is,--and a clever fellow he must have been," the Doctor says.

Bagley left my service as soon as he got well. He assured me it was no
want of respect, but he could not stand "them kind of things;" and the
man was so shaken and ghastly that I was glad to give him a present and
let him go. For my own part, I made a point of staying out the
time--two years--for which I had taken Brentwood; but I did not renew
my tenancy. By that time we had settled, and found for ourselves a
pleasant home of our own.

I must add, that when the Doctor defies me, I can always bring back
gravity to his countenance, and a pause in his railing, when I remind him
of the juniper-bush. To me that was a matter of little importance. I
could believe I was mistaken. I did not care about it one way or other;
but on his mind the effect was different. The miserable voice, the spirit
in pain, he could think of as the result of ventriloquism, or
reverberation, or--anything you please: an elaborate prolonged hoax,
executed somehow by the tramp that had found a lodging in the old tower;
but the juniper-bush staggered him. Things have effects so different on
the minds of different men.

II

THE PORTRAIT

At the period when the following incidents occu