led,
together with a little measuring-glass. Without looking further at it,
but with a terrible suspicion growing over me, I asked if that were his
medicine.

"They say there is a skeleton in every cupboard," he said in a low
voice, "and that's mine; it is chloral."

When I reached the room that I was to occupy during the night, I found
it, like Rossetti's bedroom, heavy with hangings, and black with antique
picture panels, with a ceiling (unlike that of the other rooms in the
house), out of all reach or sight, and so dark from various causes, that
the candle seemed only to glimmer in it--indeed to add to the darkness
by making it felt. Mr. Watts, as Rossetti told me, was entirely
indifferent to these eerie surroundings, even if his fine subjective
intellect, more prone to meditate than to observe, was ever for an
instant conscious of them; but on myself I fear they weighed heavily,
and augmented the feeling of closeness and gloom which had been creeping
upon me since I entered the house. Scattered about the room in most
admired disorder were some outlandish and unheard-of books, and all
kinds of antiquarian and Oriental oddities, which books and oddities I
afterwards learnt had been picked up at various times by the occupant in
his ramblings about Chelsea and elsewhere, and never yet taken away by
him, but left there apparently to scare the chambermaid: such as old
carved heads and gargoyles of the most grinning and ghastly expression,
Burmese and Chinese Buddhas in soapstone of every degree of placid
ugliness, together, I am bound by force of truth to admit, with one
piece of carved Italian marble in bas-relief, of great interest and
beauty. Such was my bed-chamber for the night, and little wonder if it
threatened to murder the innocent sleep. But it was later than 4 A.M.,
and wearied nature must needs assert herself, and so I lay down amidst
the odour of bygone ages.

Presently Rossetti came in, for no purpose that I can remember, except
to say that he had enjoyed my visit I replied that I should never forget
it. "If you decide to settle in London," he said, "I trust you 'll come
and live with me, and then many such evenings must remove the memory
of this one." I laughed, for I thought what he hinted at to be of the
remotest likelihood. "I have just taken sixty grains of chloral," he
said, as he was going out; "in four hours I take sixty more, and in four
hours after that yet another sixty."

"Does not the dose