ndering
about the wall in a most extraordinary manner. I asked for a smaller
room, and they told me there was no smaller room.

They could screen me in, however, the landlord said. They brought a
great old japanned screen, with natives (Japanese, I suppose) engaged in
a variety of idiotic pursuits all over it; and left me roasting whole
before an immense fire.

My bedroom was some quarter of a mile off, up a great staircase at the
end of a long gallery; and nobody knows what a misery this is to a
bashful man who would rather not meet people on the stairs. It was the
grimmest room I have ever had the nightmare in; and all the furniture,
from the four posts of the bed to the two old silver candle-sticks, was
tall, high-shouldered, and spindle-waisted. Below, in my sitting-room,
if I looked round my screen, the wind rushed at me like a mad bull; if I
stuck to my arm-chair, the fire scorched me to the colour of a new brick.
The chimney-piece was very high, and there was a bad glass--what I may
call a wavy glass--above it, which, when I stood up, just showed me my
anterior phrenological developments,--and these never look well, in any
subject, cut short off at the eyebrow. If I stood with my back to the
fire, a gloomy vault of darkness above and beyond the screen insisted on
being looked at; and, in its dim remoteness, the drapery of the ten
curtains of the five windows went twisting and creeping about, like a
nest of gigantic worms.

I suppose that what I observe in myself must be observed by some other
men of similar character in _themselves_; therefore I am emboldened to
mention, that, when I travel, I never arrive at a place but I immediately
want to go away from it. Before I had finished my supper of broiled fowl
and mulled port, I had impressed upon the waiter in detail my
arrangements for departure in the morning. Breakfast and bill at eight.
Fly at nine. Two horses, or, if needful, even four.

Tired though I was, the night appeared about a week long. In cases of
nightmare, I thought of Angela, and felt more depressed than ever by the
reflection that I was on the shortest road to Gretna Green. What had _I_
to do with Gretna Green? I was not going _that_ way to the Devil, but by
the American route, I remarked in my bitterness.

In the morning I found that it was snowing still, that it had snowed all
night, and that I was snowed up. Nothing could get out of that spot on
the moor, or could come at it, un