would be scarcely possible to find a more
lightsome or delicious spot for summer musing than that old English
summer-house.

Thus things went on for weeks, for months, unsuspected--for I always
latched the door, and secured the windows from within, before leaving
my fairy palace for the night; and as all looked just as usual
without, no one so much as dreamed of trying the lock, to ascertain if
a door were still fastened, the threshhold of which, as men believed,
no human foot had crossed since the days of the second James.

I could often, it is true, discover the traces of recent labor in the
immediate neighborhood of my discovery; I could perceive at a glance
where the grass had been newly shorn, the yew hedges clipped, or the
gravel-walks rolled, but never, in the course of several months,
during which I spent every fine evening, either reading, or musing, or
composing my boy verses, in that my enchanted castle--for I began
really to consider it almost my own--did I see any human being on the
premises.

The cause of this, which I did not suspect until it was revealed to
me, after chance had discovered my visits to the place, was simply
this, that my intrusions were confined solely to the evening,
whereas, so great was the awe of the servants and the workmen for that
lonely and terror-haunted spot, that nothing short of absolute
compulsion, or the strongest necessity, would have induced them to go
near the place, after the sun had turned downward from the zenith.

In the meantime, gratified by the complete success of my first inroad,
and the possession of my first discovery, I felt no inclination to
push my advances further, or to make any incursion into the body of
the place.

Every evening, as early as I could escape from the college walls, I
was at my post, and lingered there as late as college hours would
permit. It was a strange fancy in a boy, and stranger yet than would
at first appear in this, that there was a very considerable admixture
of something nearly approaching to fear, and that of a painful kind,
in the feelings which made me so assiduous in my visits to that old
pavilion.

There was, it is true, nothing definite in my fancies. I knew nothing,
I cannot say even that I suspected any thing, concerning the
mysterious closing of the place; and often, since I have been made
acquainted with the tale, I have marveled at my own obtuseness, and
wondered that a secret so transparent should have escaped