pecially when the day was dark and wet. There was
also a subtler thing we often thought we detected--a very strange thing
which was, however, merely suggestive at most. I refer to a sort of
cloudy whitish pattern on the dirt floor--a vague, shifting deposit of
mold or niter which we sometimes thought we could trace amidst the
sparse fungous growths near the huge fireplace of the basement kitchen.
Once in a while it struck us that this patch bore an uncanny resemblance
to a doubled-up human figure, though generally no such kinship existed,
and often there was no whitish deposit whatever.

On a certain rainy afternoon when this illusion seemed phenomenally
strong, and when, in addition, I had fancied I glimpsed a kind of thin,
yellowish, shimmering exhalation rising from the nitrous pattern toward
the yawning fireplace, I spoke to my uncle about the matter. He smiled
at this odd conceit, but it seemed that his smile was tinged with
reminiscence. Later I heard that a similar notion entered into some of
the wild ancient tales of the common folk--a notion likewise alluding to
ghoulish, wolfish shapes taken by smoke from the great chimney, and
queer contours assumed by certain of the sinuous tree-roots that thrust
their way into the cellar through the loose foundation-stones.

2

Not till my adult years did my uncle set before me the notes and data
which he had collected concerning the shunned house. Doctor Whipple was
a sane, conservative physician of the old school, and for all his
interest in the place was not eager to encourage young thoughts toward
the abnormal. His own view, postulating simply a building and location
of markedly unsanitary qualities, had nothing to do with abnormality;
but he realized that the very picturesqueness which aroused his own
interest would in a boy's fanciful mind take on all manner of gruesome
imaginative associations.

The doctor was a bachelor; a white-haired, clean-shaven, old-fashioned
gentleman, and a local historian of note, who had often broken a lance
with such controversial guardians of tradition as Sidney S. Rider and
Thomas W. Bicknell. He lived with one man-servant in a Georgian
homestead with knocker and iron-railed steps, balanced eerily on the
steep ascent of North Court Street beside the ancient brick court and
colony house where his grandfather--a cousin of that celebrated
privateersman, Captain Whipple, who burnt His Majesty's armed schooner
_Gaspee_ in 1772--had vote