especial figures. Instantly there arose
before my mind's eye the vision of a brown-stone front with its
vestibule and door. It was, then, the number of a house; but what house?
a _chateau en Espagne_ or a _bona fide_ New York dwelling, which for
some reason had unconsciously impressed itself upon my memory? I could
not answer. There on the page was the number thirty-six, and equally
plain in my mind was the look of the brown-stone front to which that
number belonged--and that was all.

But it was enough to awaken within me the spirit of inquiry. The few
houses thus numbered in that quarter of the city where I had lately
been, were not so hard to find but that a morning given to the business
ought to satisfy me whether the vision in my mind had its basis in
reality. Taking a cab, I rode up town and into that region of streets I
had traversed so carefully a week before. For I was assured that if the
impression had been made by an actual dwelling it had been done at that
time. Following the same course I then took, I consulted the appearance
of the various houses to which that number was assigned. The first was
built of brick; that was not it. The next one had pillars to the
vestibule; and that was not it. The third, to use an Irish bull, was no
house at all, but a stable, while the fourth was an elegant structure of
much more pretension than the plain and simple front I had in my mind or
memory. I was about to utter a curse upon my folly and go home, when I
remembered there was yet a street or two taken in my zig-zag course of
the week before, which I had not yet tested. "Might as well be
thorough," I muttered, and bade my driver proceed down ---- Street.

What was there in its aspect that dimly excited me at the first glance?
A dim remembrance, a certain ghostly assurance that we had reached the
right spot? As we neared the number I sought, I could not suppress an
exclamation of surprise. For there before me to its last detail, stood
the house which involuntarily presented itself to my mind, when my eye
first fell upon that mysterious number scribbled at the foot of the page
I was writing.

It was, then, no chimera of an overwrought brain, this vision of a
house-front which had been haunting me, but a distinct remembrance of an
actual dwelling seen by me in my former journey through this street. But
why this house-front above all others; what was there in it to make such
an impression? Looking at it I could not determi