was obliged to pass a
particular house on the eastern side of the street; a dingy, antiquated
structure perched on the abruptly rising side hill, with a great unkempt
yard dating from a time when the region was partly open country. It does
not appear that he ever wrote or spoke of it, nor is there any evidence
that he even noticed it. And yet that house, to the two persons in
possession of certain information, equals or outranks in horror the
wildest fantasy of the genius who so often passed it unknowingly, and
stands starkly leering as a symbol of all that is unutterably hideous.

The house was--and for that matter still is--of a kind to attract the
attention of the curious. Originally a farm or semi-farm building, it
followed the average New England colonial lines of the middle Eighteenth
Century--the prosperous peaked-roof sort, with two stories and
dormerless attic, and with the Georgian doorway and interior panelling
dictated by the progress of taste at that time. It faced south, with one
gable end buried to the lower windows in the eastward rising hill, and
the other exposed to the foundations toward the street. Its
construction, over a century and a half ago, had followed the grading
and straightening of the road in that especial vicinity; for Benefit
Street--at first called Back Street--was laid out as a lane winding
amongst the graveyards of the first settlers, and straightened only when
the removal of the bodies to the North Burial Ground made it decently
possible to cut through the old family plots.

At the start, the western wall had lain some twenty feet up a
precipitous lawn from the roadway; but a widening of the street at about
the time of the Revolution sheared off most of the intervening space,
exposing the foundations so that a brick basement wall had to be made,
giving the deep cellar a street frontage with door and one window above
ground, close to the new line of public travel. When the sidewalk was
laid out a century ago the last of the intervening space was removed;
and Poe in his walks must have seen only a sheer ascent of dull gray
brick flush with the sidewalk and surmounted at a height of ten feet by
the antique shingled bulk of the house proper.

[Illustration: "That awful door in Benefit Street which I had left
ajar."]

The farm-like ground extended back very deeply up the hill, almost to
Wheaton Street. The space south of the house, abutting on Benefit
Street, was of course greatly abo