no desert, no uninhabited isle in the far ocean, no wild,
barren, pathless tract of unmitigated sterility, which could for one
moment compare in point of loneliness and desolation to a deserted city.

Strip London, mighty and majestic as it is, of the busy swarm of
humanity that throng its streets, its suburbs, its temples, its public
edifices, and its private dwellings, and how awful would be the walk of
one solitary man throughout its noiseless thoroughfares.

[Illustration]

If madness seized not upon him ere he had been long the sole survivor of
a race, it would need be cast in no common mould.

And to descend from great things to smaller--from the huge leviathan
city to one mansion far removed from the noise and bustle of
conventional life, we way imagine the sort of desolation that reigned
through Bannerworth Hall, when, for the first time, after nearly a
hundred and fifty years of occupation, it was deserted by the
representatives of that family, so many members of which had lived and
died beneath its roof. The house, and everything within, without, and
around it, seemed actually to sympathize with its own desolation and
desertion.

It seemed as if twenty years of continued occupation could not have
produced such an effect upon the ancient edifice as had those few hours
of neglect and desertion.

And yet it was not as if it had been stripped of those time-worn and
ancient relics of ornament and furnishing that so long had appertained
to it. No, nothing but the absence of those forms which had been
accustomed quietly to move from room to room, and to be met here upon a
staircase, there upon a corridor, and even in some of the ancient
panelled apartments, which give it an air of dreary repose and
listlessness.

The shutters, too, were all closed, and that circumstance contributed
largely to the production of that gloomy effect which otherwise could
not have ensued.

In fact, what could be done without attracting very special observation
was done to prove to any casual observer that the house was untenanted.

But such was not really the case. In that very room where the much
dreaded Varney the vampyre had made one of his dreaded appearances to
Flora Bannerworth and her mother, sat two men.

It was from that apartment that Flora had discharged the pistol, which
had been left to her by her brother, and the shot from which it was
believed by the whole family had most certainly taken effect upon the
person